Ben Whelan is not the kind of carpenter to wax poetic about the joys of framing a wall or redoing a roof. Like a lot of men he knows, he started working in residential construction as a teenager because it was a reliable way to earn money. But he has a craftsman’s pride in knowing the details that go into great work: where to place the nails on a shingle, how to seal a house against drafts. His own home in Connecticut is built so tightly that he can heat the entire place through a whole New England winter using only a cast-iron stove and three cords of wood.
At 47, Whelan knows that he is part of a meaningful tradition. He owns books about home building that were published in the early 1900s. “Framing a roof hasn’t changed,” he said. “Sheathing a wall, even though the products have changed, the basics haven’t changed. Flooring hasn’t changed.” The fundamental skills have been passed from one tradesman to another for more than 100 years.
When Whelan was growing up in Guilford, Conn., in the 1980s and 1990s, the shoreline region east of New Haven had lots of contractors who began their careers by swinging a hammer while they were still in school. Most of what he knows about building, renovating and repairing houses he learned working alongside older carpenters. These tradesmen could take apart a roof, identify the source of a leak and redo the weatherproofing, flashing and shingles with the ease and care of watchmakers. Back then, he says, seasoned carpenters, electricians and plumbers commanded respect. They often lived near doctors and lawyers, in wooded neighborhoods filled with well-made homes. That was the history Whelan stepped into when he became a general contractor and started his own business, BTW Construction, in the early 2000s.
The work itself was never easy — he was often on the job 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, in all kinds of weather. But tradesmen like Whelan could earn a good living: enough to buy their own homes, send their kids to college, maybe even buy a boat. And the early 2000s were boom times.
“We were very busy — to a point where you’re going to bed and going to work,” he recalls. He could see a future where his business kept growing. He dreamed of becoming the kind of contractor who developed a neighborhood of beautiful single-family homes that working people could afford.
1But all that changed with the Great Recession. Between May 2007 and May 2009, national spending on residential construction dropped by 56 percent. Homeowners began asking as many as six contractors to give them bids, even for small jobs like bathroom renovations.
“It was alarming to start seeing that kind of activity on these jobs,” Whelan says. Everyone he knew in the business was struggling to find work, and the bidding wars drove the profits to new lows. Sometimes, when he learned the winning bid, he was stunned — he would have lost money at that price. The price of roofing work, in particular, plunged. BTW Construction used to work on a few roofs a year in the down time among their bigger jobs. But they could barely compete in the market after 2009. A job that he priced at $18,000 might be given to a company that charged only $10,000.
How could contractors turn a profit while bidding that low? One factor has been the use of unauthorized immigrants. In 2021, the Center for American Progress estimated that 23 percent of constructor workers — and 32 percent of roofers — were undocumented.
But the industry’s reliance on this work force was preceded by a broader shift in how contractors use labor, one underscored in interviews with multiple industry experts: Beginning in the 1980s, but accelerating since the Great Recession, builders slashed costs by subcontracting out almost every facet of their projects. Subcontractors, in turn, were favored for delivering the work at a lower price, which they often accomplished by illegally misclassifying full-time employees as independent contractors or simply paying them off the books. These maneuvers allowed employers to dodge mandatory expenses, like payroll taxes and workers’ compensation insurance, and to evade liability for on-the-job injuries.
Across the country, workers fled construction after the industry adopted employment practices that eroded wages and working conditions. In Connecticut, this process happened during the lean years of the Great Recession; the state’s Department of Labor confirmed that the problem of misclassifying construction workers has been increasing since 2008. Many tradesmen whom Whelan had known for years left the industry, and when residential building recovered in the 2010s, few of them returned. The financial incentive just wasn’t there anymore. In 2014, the Economic Policy Institute found that the real hourly wages of residential building workers remained 4.2 percent below their 2009 levels — even though wages in the rest of the private sector had largely recovered.
Whelan didn’t fault the contractors who switched to the new model during the recession — “I don’t blame anybody, because you got to survive”— but he didn’t take that road himself. He felt lucky to be working on big renovations with good clients during the winter and spring of 2009. He kept his overhead low, avoided bidding wars and worked on a wide variety of jobs to keep income flowing. At times, he survived only by doing all the company’s work himself with just one employee. Even today, his ability to stay profitable in the transformed market depends on his taking on as many tasks as possible: picking up supplies, climbing roofs, measuring decks, paying permits and scheduling inspections, as well as constantly meeting with potential clients.
Recently, Whelan drove inland to meet with a pair of young parents in Chester. They had visions of a better layout for entertaining, a more functional entryway, a larger primary bedroom. Like a lot of homeowners, they had learned about architectural styles and construction materials. They had studied heat pumps and assembled digital boards of pretty photographs.
“I’ll tell you a little piece about the company,” Whelan said to them about half an hour into the meeting. “We do the frame to finish in-house. It’s our employees. It’s not subbed out.”
He was standing in their kitchen in his usual winter uniform: carpenter pants and a hooded sweatshirt. They smiled and nodded affably, then moved on to discussing the option of building a detached garage. Like most Americans, they had little idea of how rare, and how difficult, Whelan’s way of working had become.
Early one morning, Whelan crouched on the roof of a house in Guilford, searching for the source of a water leak. His most experienced employee was out sick, so Whelan needed to be on site to show his two younger employees how he wanted the repair done. They watched as he lay down sideways and examined the underside of an eave.
The two men had already peeled off the vinyl siding and cut out the foam board in that area, revealing evidence of animal chewing. But that didn’t explain the leak inside the house, which had probably been going for years before it appeared as drywall damage in the addition below. To locate the source of the problem, they would need to remove the coil stock and the old wooden clapboards nail by nail, then slice out the ancient black paper they would find underneath.
But Whelan couldn’t stay on the roof all day — he had to buy supplies and obtain permits. He was already running late for a client meeting.
“This one’s going to be difficult, guys,” he said sympathetically. “Getting back in here is going to be a chore. If you get worried about something, that you’re going to destroy it, leave it alone.” He demonstrated how to extract the nails without denting the coil stock, then told them he would swing back to check on their progress as soon as he could.
It was a relief that he could leave even for a couple of hours. Over the last decade, it has become increasingly difficult for Whelan to find and retain high-quality employees. Some men committed to the job after negotiating wages, then never showed up for work. Many who presented themselves as experienced actually didn’t know the basics of framing a wall. They didn’t know how to work with new materials like PVC trim boards. Quality was the hallmark of Whelan’s business, and he needed to be on site more than he liked to make sure everything was done right. “If you went for material, you had to go fast, you had to go at night,” he said.
The two carpenters he had on the roof were the smartest, most reliable employees he’d hired in a long time. “If you tell them something once, they understand,” he said. He found them last summer, after he signed a contract with a local chapter of the North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters.
For Whelan, turning BTW Construction into a union shop was an act of desperation, and he struggled for months with the decision. Signing the contract meant putting up a $10,000 bond, reorganizing the timing of his payroll and letting the union comb through his books at random once every three years. But Whelan didn’t see another way to ensure the survival of his business. He was aging; he couldn’t do as much of the hammering himself anymore. Yet he needed to maintain quality. He could not compete on price while so many rivals reduced operating costs by hiring subcontractors who used illegal practices.
Tom Juravich, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied the construction industry, told me that residential builders in Massachusetts and nearby states could lower their labor costs by about 30 percent by using subcontractors who evaded mandatory payroll taxes and workers’ compensation insurance premiums. “There’s always been subcontracting in the construction industry, but it was largely done to licensed trades,” Juravich says. “The general contractor hired most of the workers directly, and the only things that weren’t done by the G.C. were electrical, plumbing and so on. But as this new model emerged, what they began to do was spin off much of the work.”
In 2021, some 1.1 million to 2.1 million construction workers — 10 to 19 percent of the industry’s entire work force — were illegally misclassified as independent contractors or paid off the books, according to the Century Foundation. A survey of more than 1,400 construction workers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas in 2017 found that a third of them were misclassified as independent contractors, and fewer than half had employers who carried workers’ compensation coverage. Among those who worked in residential construction, 63 percent reported earning less than $15 an hour. Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago who oversaw the survey, told me that surveys conducted in Texas and Florida last year suggest that not much has changed since 2017. Wages, for example, have risen only about a dollar an hour when adjusted for inflation.
“This is an industry that says that it can’t recruit the workers it needs,” Theodore notes. “At the same time, wages have been so stubbornly low.”
In Connecticut, the entrenched popularity of this model means that Whelan rarely competes on a level playing field. One afternoon, we went to his home and sat at the old-fashioned wood desk where he keeps most of his business files. There he ran me through some numbers. A journeyman carpenter at his company, he explained while holding the union rate sheet, earned at least $26 an hour. Whelan’s minimum cost for that worker, however, was closer to $50 an hour, because his payments also covered union health care, pension and annuity contributions as well as mandatory Social Security, Medicare and income taxes. He was also required to pay for workers’ compensation insurance. Subcontractors in Connecticut who illegally misclassified workers, or simply paid them off the books, also often paid carpenters $20 to $25 an hour, but they escaped all the extra expenses — which made it easier for the contractors who used them to beat him on bids.
Whelan has wrestled for years with the temptation to give up and join their ranks.
One afternoon, Whelan checked in on a house where BTW Construction had been working for almost a year. Wide lawns skirted the structure, which had several gables arranged cheerfully around a river-stone chimney. It was warm for late February, but the roof was still covered in snow. When Whelan walked in, he glanced up at the mottled paint on the edge of soffit.
“Did you get more water infiltration?” he asked Stephanie Kacik.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “One of the kids, they’re like, ‘Hey, mom, it’s started dripping.’ And he grabbed the bowl and had it all set up.”
The Kacik family has gotten used to leaks. They began about two years after they moved into the house, when a second-floor tub started leaking into the room below. Originally, they hired Whelan to renovate the bathroom and fix the tub. Before he could get started on it, however, the gable above the kitchen began dripping water onto a counter.
When Whelan’s crew took off the gable’s siding, they discovered that whoever added it years earlier neglected to seal it properly with a weatherproofing barrier. Rain and snow melt had been seeping under the metal flashing and onto the wood sheathing, which consequently rotted. The entire gable was leaning dangerously inward and had to be rebuilt.
When that disaster was fixed, Whelan’s crew returned to the bathroom renovation. But more leaks sprang up throughout the house. Ultimately, the Kaciks concluded that, bit by bit, they needed to repair the roof, all the gables and many of the windows.
“I expect to send Ben’s children to college,” Ed Kacik joked. The Kaciks saw the repairs as a smart investment, because they planned to stay in the house for decades. Nevertheless, they were a homeowner’s nightmare.
Fixing the problems that crop up in the wake of substandard construction has become a key part of Whelan’s business. They’re also the primary reason he has never adopted the fully subcontracted business model. BTW’s reputation rests on building things that last: waterfront decks secured with stainless steel screws, roofs fitted with hand-forged dampers. Subcontracting for profit would require Whelan to give up control over quality — and potentially erode the foundation of his word-of-mouth-based business.
It would also require him to turn a blind eye to the treatment of workers operating under his company’s legal umbrella.
A study that Juravich and two coauthors published in 2021 argues that the widespread shift to subcontracting and misclassification preceded the residential construction industry’s reliance on an unauthorized work force. “The entrance of immigrants did not result in the deterioration of jobs in residential construction,” they write, “rather, working conditions and pay became so bad that subcontractors faced continual labor shortages.” Contractors then turned to unauthorized immigrants to fill their jobs — a pattern that accelerated with the entrance of labor brokers who, the authors write, often pay wages in cash and facilitate the “hyper-exploitation” of workers who endure both wage theft and preventable on-the-job injuries.
Many of these workers are put on residential construction jobs with little or no training and with no experienced tradesman supervising their work. No one teaches them how to run the weatherproofing paper over the metal flashing to prevent water from seeping into a gable’s frame. Homeowners depend on carpenters and roofers to know the details of their work, but unlike plumbers and electricians, they rarely have to pass licensing tests to prove their knowledge or skills. In Connecticut, as in most of the country, neither do the contractors or subcontractors who place undertrained workers on jobs.
Late one afternoon as the sun slid behind the bare trees, Whelan drove me into an old subdivision in Guilford where he used to hang out as a teenager. This was the “affordable housing” of the 1980s, he explained: raised ranch homes set on generous lots with their second floors slightly cantilevered in the front to eke out more floor space without raising the cost of the foundation.
“God, people could afford these houses,” Whelan said. “You could work on all these houses and charge an honest day’s living.”
