The job
Plumbers work in New York
New York runs on old pipe. The five boroughs hold a large share of the city's pre war housing stock, and much of it still carries the galvanised steel and cast iron lines that were installed when it was built. That stock is spread across co ops, brownstones, walk ups and rent regulated buildings, and each one has a board, a managing agent or a landlord who needs a licensed plumber on call. Demand splits between emergency work, which is steady all year, and planned work such as riser replacement, boiler swaps and bathroom renovations, which moves with building budgets and the co op calendar. Franchises hold some of the emergency search space, and owner operators hold most of the rest, often through the buildings they already serve. The searches are local and specific: a street, a building type, a borough, a kind of pipe.