ADVERTISEMENT
  • 主页
  • 关于我们
  • 广告
  • 隐私政策
No Result
View All Result
Ktromedia.com
  • 主页
  • 比特币
  • 区块链
  • 商业
  • 游戏
  • 以太坊
  • NFT
  • 活动
  • 先锋者
  • 项目列表
  • 提交发布
Ktromedia.com
  • 主页
  • 比特币
  • 区块链
  • 商业
  • 游戏
  • 以太坊
  • NFT
  • 活动
  • 先锋者
  • 项目列表
  • 提交发布
No Result
View All Result
Ktromedia.com
No Result
View All Result
家 商业

How Contracting Work Became a Race to the Bottom

KTRO TEAM 经过 KTRO TEAM
April 7, 2025
in 商业
0
How Contracting Work Became a Race to the Bottom
156
分享
2k
观点
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

KTRO TEAM

KTRO TEAM

KTRO MEDIA 是一家全球性的华文WEB3媒体公司。我们致力于为区块链和金融科技领域提供最新的新闻、见解和趋势分析。我们的宗旨是为全球用户提供高质量、全面的资讯服务,让他们更好地了解区块链和金融科技行业的最新动态。我们也希望能帮到更多优秀的WEB3产品找到更多更好的资源好让这领域变得更成熟。 我们的报道范围涵盖了区块链、加密货币、智能合约、DeFi、NFT 和 Web3 生态系统等领域。我们的报道不仅来自行业内的专家,先锋者也包括了我们自己的分析和观点。我们在各个国家和地区都设有团队,为读者提供本地化的报道和分析。 除了新闻报道,我们还提供市场研究和咨询服务。我们的专业团队可以为您提供有关区块链和金融科技行业的深入分析和市场趋势,帮助您做出更明智的投资决策。 我们的使命是成为全球华文区块链和金融科技行业最受信赖的信息来源之一。我们将继续不断努力,为读者提供最新、最全面、最可靠的信息服务。

有关的 帖子

市场缓解贸易紧张局势的提示上升
商业

市场缓解贸易紧张局势的提示上升

April 25, 2025
著名的短卖家安德鲁·韦斯特(Andrew Left)未能结束美国SEC欺诈案
商业

著名的短卖家安德鲁·韦斯特(Andrew Left)未能结束美国SEC欺诈案

April 25, 2025
洛杉矶港口的交通已经在关税中丢弃
商业

洛杉矶港口的交通已经在关税中丢弃

April 25, 2025
USPS的工人对特朗普为拆除服务的努力感到震惊:“猎犬在门口|美国邮政服务
商业

USPS的工人对特朗普为拆除服务的努力感到震惊:“猎犬在门口|美国邮政服务

April 25, 2025
美国敦促日本和韩国致力于阿拉斯加液化天然气项目
商业

美国敦促日本和韩国致力于阿拉斯加液化天然气项目

April 25, 2025
货运行业的需求下降
商业

货运行业的需求下降

April 25, 2025
  • 热门
  • 注释
  • 最新的
Larry fink bitcoin

贝莱德首席执行官拉里·芬克 (Larry Fink) 预计比特币将达到 70 万美元

January 24, 2025
黑客通过合作伙伴违规从巴西中央银行储备帐户中窃取1.4亿美元

黑客通过合作伙伴违规从巴西中央银行储备帐户中窃取1.4亿美元

July 5, 2025
据报道,SEC在波纹和解谈判中权衡XRP的商品状态

据报道,SEC在波纹和解谈判中权衡XRP的商品状态

March 13, 2025
中国概述了面对特朗普关税的计划,以增强消费

中国概述了面对特朗普关税的计划,以增强消费

March 16, 2025
以太坊将钥匙阻力变成支持 – 动量构建范围突破

以太坊将钥匙阻力变成支持 – 动量构建范围突破

July 11, 2025
以太坊价格七月

以太坊在7月份已经超过比特币了,这里的altcoin季节在这里吗?

July 11, 2025
Robinhood为美国用户推出ETH,SOL Stoting Services,最低1美元

Robinhood为美国用户推出ETH,SOL Stoting Services,最低1美元

July 11, 2025
BTC睡觉和ETH移动

BTC睡觉和ETH移动

July 10, 2025
ADVERTISEMENT
Facebook LinkedIn Youtube Telegram Instagram

ktromedia.com 是您的比特币、以太坊、监管、市场、区块链、商业和加密指南网站。 我们为您提供直接来自加密新闻行业的最新突发新闻和视频。

类别

  • Nft
  • 以太坊
  • 先锋者
  • 其它
  • 区块链
  • 商业
  • 比特币
  • 活动
  • 游戏

网站导航

  • 主页
  • 关于我们
  • 广告
  • 隐私政策
Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Copyright © 2022 ktromedia.com. All Rights Reserved

No Result
View All Result
  • 主页
  • 比特币
  • 区块链
  • 商业
  • 游戏
  • 以太坊
  • NFT
  • 活动
  • 先锋者
  • 项目列表
  • 提交发布

Copyright © 2022 ktromedia.com. All Rights Reserved

Translate »