3 ms·

From family in the industry, my understanding is it’s not union benefits/wages/etc per se, but more the work rules that haven’t changed with the times driving o

From family in the industry, my understanding is it’s not union benefits/wages/etc per se, but more the work rules that haven’t changed with the times driving over staffing, inability to fire bad performers, and overtime issues. There’s a lot of on-the-clock non-work built into the work rules. My relatives in the industry described the typical day as involving on-the-clock time built in for cleanup&changing into/out of work clothes, briefing on tasks for the day, safety briefing (AM and again after lunch for legal reasons), smoke/coffee breaks, etc. The longest stretch of uninterrupted construction is about a 2 hour sprint into the end of the day. On the staffing front, the only lever a project manager has is to give the 2-3 hardworking guys out of 12 a boatload of overtime hours to get the actual work done. This is one reason that on most every job site around the city you see some pretty sick cars. Those 2-3 guys are getting 50% of the work done out of the 12, and getting paid Google engineering money for it. NYT article years back talked about 2nd avenue subway covered examples of work rules. Tunnel boring machine in NY requires 3-4x the staffing of Paris, because thats the contract negotiated in the 70s when it was seen to be reducing jobs.. and no one has revisited it. This is no small figure as we have a handful of these digging tunnels the last few years, at the rate of 50ft/day... for months. Similarly there is a mandatory on-site oiler who basically sits in the break room all day because the machines do not need constant oiling anymore the way they did when the rule was written half a century ago. One example from my relative - on a large NYC project he worked, they couldn’t take deliveries from suppliers on Saturday because it required the job site to be opened. Per union rules this would have required some inane number of staff to be on-site getting overtime rather than just say the guy to open the gate & staff (if any) required to empty the truck. A lot of this is because public sector unions are treated as a voting constituent rather than a vendor by the government, and no politician ever wants to cross them.

neither_color 6y ago
I have some family in the industry as well and they report the same thing happens with every crew, a few of the workers are what you would call "ninjas/rockstars" in software and the rest are just there to do the minimum. Unfortunately it's hard to tell when hiring because everyone acts motivated for the job and their real work ethic doesn't show up until a few weeks later and you're stuck with them.
- steveBK123 6y ago
  Right on a normal project you’d weed out the poor performers but in this case its basically not possible. The workers knowing this is the case leads to a class of workers who show up and do the minimum. As long as they don’t do anything overtly that would trigger firing for cause, they can coast from project to project. Therefore the only way project managers can get anything done is to give 25% of the team the opportunity to work 2x the hours for 2.5-3x the pay. So instead of paying just for your 12 guys, you are paying for equivalent of 9+(3x3) = 18 guys when its really like 6-9 guys worth of work getting done.
steveBK123 6y ago
I will also add that there is essentially a ton of overhead built in by construction firms dealing with the city/MTA/PA. The industry generally sees them as being difficult customers who change their mind, plan poorly, and have a lot of change requests. This results in a fairly small pool of firms bidding on projects, the costs being padded, plus overruns and change requests being tacked on as they go for even more cost.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I read a paper on tunneling costs. One of their explanations why costs were higher in the US was the government shifts the risk onto the contractor. And then tries to save money by not employing enough oversight. The result low numbers of heavily padded bids on contracts. And then execution tends to be inflexible and prone to bogging down.
  - steveBK123 6y ago
    Another factor I have other family members who dealt with the city on the technology side rather than construction side is certifications / qualifications. There are only certain qualified bidders for projects that have attained a level of certification from the city. This reduces the pool of bidders, but it also just adds cost layers. I have a relative that worked (briefly) at a firm that bids on city tech projects and then delegates all development implementation to tech subcontractors who then sub out most of it to offshore, with a few onshore dev&management. The subcontractor can't bid because they don't have the scale to get the certifications, so the city pays a 40% margin to the certified contractor who is doing glorified project management. I would be shocked if the same thing wasn't happening on the construction contracting/bidding process side of city/state/etc work.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      > 40% margin to the certified contractor who is doing glorified project management. This makes sense. My dad was an engineer working for the Feds. Really the job is technical project management and oversight. In the US there is a fetish for keeping the government workforce small. Which then results in outsourcing things at great expense. Example I've heard that part of the reason there were delays and and cost overruns with the eastern span of the bay bridge was because CALTRANS didn't have enough engineers to do effective and timely oversight. Nor engineers with the proper experience.
judemelancon 6y ago
Why exactly should construction workers clean up, change, and get briefed for free? How are those not work? Do you attend work meetings for free? Why don't construction workers deserve breaks? Do you ever take breaks at work? If so, why do you deserve to be paid for these things when construction workers don't? Be explicit. The idea that US politicians never cross the public sector unions isn't compatible with the facts. The Taft-Hartley Act is law, and PATCO was destroyed.
- steveBK123 6y ago
  Everyone deserves breaks and for some level of setup/cleanup to be on the clock. Some amount of what is enshrined in the work rules is just excessively cushy. However there is a big difference between stuff built into these work rules vs what happens in private industry. The basic question is - do the work rules restrict employers from adapting to productivity enhancing technology changes over time? The goods&services in the US which go up in cost much faster than inflation are the areas where we are unable to harness labor saving productivity - education, medicine, and it would seem municipal capital construction projects. Does your employer retain Fortran programmers on-staff in the break room because they signed a contract when Fortran was important? If your employer moved all your compute to the cloud, would you keep 100% of your now redundant datacenter staff onboard? Does your employer keep the underperforming 25% of the team perpetually and just grant paid overtime in the $100k+ to the superstars to cover the gap? Does your office building maintain an elevator operator in each cab despite having automated the elevator 50 years ago? This is the difference between private firms and the public sector union stuff you deal with in places like NYC. I mean yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice work environment and I'd love if my (easier/safer) office job had all that paid time, rules and work limits built in. However.. I get why it seems nothing gets done in NYC construction because of it? A fun example - there was a 6 month project to replace a set of 2-story staircase at my subway station. The demolition work was rather swift. I assumed they were building on-site if it was going to take 6 months. Lo and behold, it was actually a pre-fab staircase they trucked in. However not only did it take 6 months to simply install that pre-fab staircase, but they ran over by a few months! They actually had to come back and re-close it and do some repairs afterwards too. Meanwhile at the corner below that train station there was a McDonalds. I laughed as I watched them gut renovate it over the course of a weekend so they could be back in business by Monday selling food to riders. If you haven't seen NYC municipal construction up close, its hard to fathom just how screwed up it is.

neither_color 6y ago

I have some family in the industry as well and they report the same thing happens with every crew, a few of the workers are what you would call "ninjas/rockstars" in software and the rest are just there to do the minimum. Unfortunately it's hard to tell when hiring because everyone acts motivated for the job and their real work ethic doesn't show up until a few weeks later and you're stuck with them.

steveBK123 6y ago
Right on a normal project you’d weed out the poor performers but in this case its basically not possible. The workers knowing this is the case leads to a class of workers who show up and do the minimum. As long as they don’t do anything overtly that would trigger firing for cause, they can coast from project to project. Therefore the only way project managers can get anything done is to give 25% of the team the opportunity to work 2x the hours for 2.5-3x the pay. So instead of paying just for your 12 guys, you are paying for equivalent of 9+(3x3) = 18 guys when its really like 6-9 guys worth of work getting done.

steveBK123 6y ago

I will also add that there is essentially a ton of overhead built in by construction firms dealing with the city/MTA/PA. The industry generally sees them as being difficult customers who change their mind, plan poorly, and have a lot of change requests. This results in a fairly small pool of firms bidding on projects, the costs being padded, plus overruns and change requests being tacked on as they go for even more cost.

Gibbon1 6y ago
I read a paper on tunneling costs. One of their explanations why costs were higher in the US was the government shifts the risk onto the contractor. And then tries to save money by not employing enough oversight. The result low numbers of heavily padded bids on contracts. And then execution tends to be inflexible and prone to bogging down.
- steveBK123 6y ago
  Another factor I have other family members who dealt with the city on the technology side rather than construction side is certifications / qualifications. There are only certain qualified bidders for projects that have attained a level of certification from the city. This reduces the pool of bidders, but it also just adds cost layers. I have a relative that worked (briefly) at a firm that bids on city tech projects and then delegates all development implementation to tech subcontractors who then sub out most of it to offshore, with a few onshore dev&management. The subcontractor can't bid because they don't have the scale to get the certifications, so the city pays a 40% margin to the certified contractor who is doing glorified project management. I would be shocked if the same thing wasn't happening on the construction contracting/bidding process side of city/state/etc work.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    > 40% margin to the certified contractor who is doing glorified project management. This makes sense. My dad was an engineer working for the Feds. Really the job is technical project management and oversight. In the US there is a fetish for keeping the government workforce small. Which then results in outsourcing things at great expense. Example I've heard that part of the reason there were delays and and cost overruns with the eastern span of the bay bridge was because CALTRANS didn't have enough engineers to do effective and timely oversight. Nor engineers with the proper experience.

judemelancon 6y ago

Why exactly should construction workers clean up, change, and get briefed for free? How are those not work? Do you attend work meetings for free? Why don't construction workers deserve breaks? Do you ever take breaks at work? If so, why do you deserve to be paid for these things when construction workers don't? Be explicit. The idea that US politicians never cross the public sector unions isn't compatible with the facts. The Taft-Hartley Act is law, and PATCO was destroyed.

steveBK123 6y ago
Everyone deserves breaks and for some level of setup/cleanup to be on the clock. Some amount of what is enshrined in the work rules is just excessively cushy. However there is a big difference between stuff built into these work rules vs what happens in private industry. The basic question is - do the work rules restrict employers from adapting to productivity enhancing technology changes over time? The goods&services in the US which go up in cost much faster than inflation are the areas where we are unable to harness labor saving productivity - education, medicine, and it would seem municipal capital construction projects. Does your employer retain Fortran programmers on-staff in the break room because they signed a contract when Fortran was important? If your employer moved all your compute to the cloud, would you keep 100% of your now redundant datacenter staff onboard? Does your employer keep the underperforming 25% of the team perpetually and just grant paid overtime in the $100k+ to the superstars to cover the gap? Does your office building maintain an elevator operator in each cab despite having automated the elevator 50 years ago? This is the difference between private firms and the public sector union stuff you deal with in places like NYC. I mean yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice work environment and I'd love if my (easier/safer) office job had all that paid time, rules and work limits built in. However.. I get why it seems nothing gets done in NYC construction because of it? A fun example - there was a 6 month project to replace a set of 2-story staircase at my subway station. The demolition work was rather swift. I assumed they were building on-site if it was going to take 6 months. Lo and behold, it was actually a pre-fab staircase they trucked in. However not only did it take 6 months to simply install that pre-fab staircase, but they ran over by a few months! They actually had to come back and re-close it and do some repairs afterwards too. Meanwhile at the corner below that train station there was a McDonalds. I laughed as I watched them gut renovate it over the course of a weekend so they could be back in business by Monday selling food to riders. If you haven't seen NYC municipal construction up close, its hard to fathom just how screwed up it is.