Dive Brief:

• Officials say 30,000 construction jobs went unfilled in British Columbia last year.
• Ireland has unemployed labor because of the recession, and tradesmen there are looking for new opportunities.
• The connection is job fairs that the contractors' trade group, the BC Construction Association has held in Ireland before and that it plans in Dublin and Belfast, Northern Ireland, to find 600 skilled workers to bring west.

Dive Insight:

Contractors like the arrangement because they get workers who have been trained through an apprenticeship system in Ireland and who, of course, speak English. Canadian unions are hardly as enthusiastic, saying union workers could fill the vacancies, but it appears that crossing a continent and an ocean is preferable for the employers.