Owners Tackle Work Force and Process Transformation
Bold cooperative action to alleviate the industry’s shortfall in craft workers “must begin today because tomorrow will be too late,” said veteran labor relations analyst Peter A. Cockshaw in a fire and brimstone message to owners at the Construction Users Roundtable national conference in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 13-15.
“The time for talking these issues to death is over,” Cockshaw said. Unions must be able to deliver a “coordinated work force to do productive tasks for a full shift,” he added. And confronting the nonunion sector, he quoted leader Ted Kennedy, one of the founders of Birmingham, Ala.-based BE&K, who says the sector may have “killed the golden goose” by not raising wages when it should have—driving qualified people away from construction.