The crisis of qualified personnel in Spanish construction worsens year after year. According to the Hays 2025 Labor Market Guide, 94% of construction companies have difficulties finding suitable profiles, in a context where more than 55% of workers are over 45 years old and the number of young people under 30 years of age employed in the sector has been reduced from 25.2% in 2008 to 9.2% in 2022, according to the Construction Labor Foundation.
Despite the demand, fewer and fewer young people want to dedicate themselves to masonry. Eduardo Roldán, a 46-year-old bricklayer with 30 years of experience in the sector, explains it to the Sector Oficios podcast saying that “the physical effort required by the job does not compensate for the disproportionate salary demands of those who do not have experience or training.”
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In addition, he adds that “the people out there want to earn more than you earn without knowing how to do anything.” And he adds forcefully: “They think that because they know how to lay four bricks they are already a first-class officer.”
For him, the paradox is devastating when compared with other sectors. “This summer my son has been earning 1,400 euros as a lifeguard at a pool, sitting in a chair with his little umbrella. So, tell a kid with 1,400 bucks to do that, tell him to go to work in the sun,” he says.
“Try me for a month and pay me what you think is appropriate”
Eduardo’s work life is a reflection of how the family sector has evolved. At just 16 years old, after finishing second in EGB, which he repeated, he signed up for the general regime in the company where his father worked as a manager. The following year, at the age of 17, they set up their own family business with their two brothers. “Whatever my father told me, we started a company,” he remembers.
Now, after years of experience in the sector, they have a company which, it must be said, managed to survive the 2008 crisis, when they had to make an ERE and be left with just two or three workers, and which even worked in Equatorial Guinea installing windows when work was scarce here. “We have been very lucky that to this day they have never owed us money nor do they owe us or owe us,” he says proudly.
But his proposal for young people who come asking for high salaries is clear: “I am not in favor of coming and saying ‘I want to earn so much’. Try me for a month and pay me what you think is appropriate, then I will decide if I stay or leave.” And he adds: “I am very clear: try me for a month, give me a piece of work, give me a tool and then evaluate what you have to give me. I have no problem paying you 2,500 or 3,000 euros, but show it to me.”
With bruised knees, knackered kidneys and three workers on sick leave
Beyond the money, Eduardo is happy to know how happy building makes him. “Arrive at a piece of land and find it all made of dirt and after 10 months there will be a house there that you have made with your hands,” he narrates. “I leave, I go to the opposite sidewalk, I see the house and I’m thinking about when I was on the roof, when I was on the facade. That’s gratifying,” he adds with emotion.
But the physical takes its toll. “I am 46 years old and my knees are crushed, my kidneys are ruined, my hands are wrinkled, full of calluses. The construction is physically crushing,” he explains. In fact, he adds, that of the four workers he has, three are on sick leave; one, 63 years old, has had a knee replacement for 18 months, another with two broken ribs and knee problems, and a third, 62 years old, who underwent carpal tunnel and elbow surgery. “I don’t see them coming back because they’re already older, but even if they did come back, where would I lift a 63-year-old guy up four levels of scaffolding?” he asks.
It also denounces how the public pension system is made, more specifically with regard to the retirement age. “I would lower the retirement. It should be demonstrable that you have been in construction for 30 years and that whoever is going to work knows that they will not have to stay until they are 65, that at least they will retire at 55,” he maintains as a proposal for a structural incentive.
Eduardo is also concerned about the lack of young people willing to learn from below. “There are no people, and the people who are there want to earn more than you earn without knowing,” he insists. While other trades seem to attract something more, masonry barely awakens vocations. “65% of bricklayers were over 45 years old in 2024. In 10 years there is not much more left,” he warns.
For this bricklayer it is clear that money is important, but there is another thing that worries him more, and that is working conditions. “Now I would tell my son to study, not to get involved in this. But then you see the house that you have made with your hands and it is rewarding. The problem is that the kids don’t find the rewarding with the hard work,” he concludes.