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Construction industry can’t shake jobless doldrums
U.S. construction employment fell to from 20.1 percent to 17.3 percent between June and July 2010 – but despite that seemingly good news, the number of workers in the industry actually decreased by 11,000, according to an Aug. 6 analysis by the Associated General Contractors of America. The third month of construction employment declines, despite the stimulus, reflects overall weak demand for private, local and state funded construction, association officials noted.
“The fact that this industry continues to suffer from unemployment rates nearly double the national average is a reflection of how much demand for construction has cratered in little more than two years,” said Stephen E. Sandherr, the association's chief executive officer. “Worse yet, there's every indication that as the benefits of the stimulus fade the industry's employment picture will get even worse.”
Sandherr noted that since July 2008, U.S. construction employment has declined by a total of 1,591,000 jobs, a 22 percent drop. “The sad fact is that construction workers have been forced to endure depression-like conditions for far too long.”
The overall July 2010 employment report for all industries released Aug. 6 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics “captured a labor market bogged down in a very painful situation,” reports the Economic Policy Institute. The private sector added 71,000 jobs, but the unemployment rate didn’t improve, it held steady at 9.5 percent. That’s because the overall labor force shrank by 181,000 workers, who either stopped looking for work or never entered the pool of people officially seeking employment.
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Fresh terra cotta faces to adorn Detroit library
By Marty Mulcahy
Managing Editor
DETROIT – One of Detroit’s architectural jewels is getting a facelift – actually, a bunch of facelifts – as well as a number of other mechanical and cosmetic improvements that will keep it looking good and operating properly well into the future.
“A beautiful piece of civic architecture,” says AIA Detroit: the American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture, about the Detroit Public Library’s main building. The original building was completed in 1921 in the Italian Renaissance Revival Style, clad in white Vermont marble and ringed with terra cotta busts and figures that decorate the cornice on all four sides of the building. A less-ornate addition to the library was built in the 1960s.
The City of Detroit is hardly awash in money, but it fortunately found funds to maintain its main repository of books and historic documents.
General contractor Jenkins Construction is managing several improvements and maintenance projects on the original library building. Work began last August and includes selected window replacement, duct work, painting, roof drain replacement, and a new roof.
“It’s mainly a maintenance project,” said Lethon Lee, who is managing the project for Jenkins. “A lot of what we’re doing is way overdue, probably by about 10 years. But it’s work that most people will never see. For the most part, you can’t see what we’re doing from the street, even the employees in the building don’t know we’re here.”
Grunwell-Cashero and its masons from Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 1 and laborers from Local 1191 are working on the most high-profile portion of the project, and even their work won’t ever be particularly evident.
On the roofline around all four sides of the building, they’re tearing out and replacing about 400 original terra cotta figures and filler pieces – which amounts to about 65 percent of the entire collection. Many of the figures had been defaced and discolored by the weather and freeze and thaw cycles, but they haven’t dislodged from the building.
Joe Dapkus Jr., superintendent for masonry contractor Grunwell-Cashero, said the original steel straps that help keep the figures attached to the building have been found intact. On many buildings, the rusting of steel straps holding masonry panels to a building’s façade are the primary causes of failure.
“I think what caused the original pieces to fail is that they were filled with grout, which might have absorbed or trapped moisture,” said Dapkus. “The new pieces are hollow and have open webs on the back to allow water to flow through.” New stainless steel straps will help affix the new terra cotta fixtures to the building.
Molds taken of the old pieces are allowing Boston Valley Terra Cotta to replicate the pieces taken off the cornice. Dapkus said the facial figures have Greek and Aztec features, and there’s also a Fleur de-lis (which is a symbol associated with French monarchy). “I wish I know what the faces represented,” Dapkus said. The pieces are all removed by hand and lowered to the ground. None of the old pieces will be reused, he said.
The masonry portion of the project also involves the replacement of about 50,000 brick, the vast majority of which are in out-of-the way places like interior courtyards and light wells.
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ONE OF THE REPLACEMENT terra-cotta figures on the cornice of the Detroit Public Library’s main building on Woodward Avenue. Looks like this one represents a stern Aztec chieftain. Grunwell-Cashero, Local 1 masons and Local 1191 laborers are performing the “faceoffs” and attaching the new figures to the building.
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MOVING A fleur-de-lis terra cotta figure for placement on the north cornice of the Detroit Public Library is Ryan Harding of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 1, working for Grunwell-Cashero.
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Labor Day already? Here’s what’s happening…
The dog days of August are here, days are getting shorter, and (feel free to cringe) summer is fading fast. But that means that Labor Day is right around the corner.
Celebrations of the American worker are held in various communities in Michigan, and building trades workers and their families are urged to participate in a parade or picnic near you.
Following are worker-related events in various locales in Michigan taking place on Labor Day weekend.
Detroit: For the building trades, a line of march on Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 6, will proceed as usual east along Michigan Avenue towards Campus Martius downtown. The building trades will line up before the parade, as usual, along Trumbull Avenue south of Michigan Avenue. The parade will start at 9 a.m.
Participants will march in the following order this year, with the Boilermakers (115-year anniversary) taking the lead on Trumbull, closest to Michigan Avenue:
- Boilermakers
- Sheet Metal Workers
- Painters
- Cement Masons/Plasterers
- Carpenters
- Elevator Constructors
- Iron Workers
- Laborers
- United Association of Pipe Trades
- IBEW
- Roofers
- Asbestos Workers
- Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers
Other unions will march down Woodward from the Cultural Center to Campus Martius.
Grand Rapids: For the second year the Grand Rapids Labor Fest will be held at Ah-Nab-Awen Park near the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum, off of Pearl Street, one block east of U.S. 131. The day’s events will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Labor Day around the “Spirit of Solidarity” monument in the park.
Activities include free admission to the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum, live music, food vendors and a beer tent, kids’ activities, labor displays and an antique American-made car and motorcycle show. Last year 6,000 people were in attendance.
Ishpeming: The 20th annual Labor Day festival will be held on Sept. 6, with a parade starting at 11 a.m. The parade starts and ends at the Cliff’s Shaft Museum and goes from Euclid to Main to Division and then comes back to the museum via Lakeshore Drive. A picnic will be held and speakers will be heard from noon to 4 p.m. Events are sponsored by the Marquette County Labor Council, AFL-CIO
Muskegon: The Muskegon Labor Day Parade will be in downtown Muskegon starting at 11 a.m. on Labor Day. Participants should meet at Heritage Landing at 9 am, to catch the Pioneer Resources Shuttle buses to the staging area, which will be at the end of Clay Avenue. The parade will start there and will end at Seventh Street and Western Avenue. Following the parade will be a solidarity tent with food and refreshments.
St. Ignace: The annual five-mile walk over the Mackinac Bridge begins at 7 a.m. on Labor Day. Walkers are allowed to start until 11 a.m. The walk starts in St. Ignace, and shuttle buses ($5) are available for the return trip from Mackinaw City. The Labor Day Bridge walk brings more than 70,000 people to the area.
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Big top is well placed on Marathon coker drums
By Marty Mulcahy
Managing Editor
DETROIT – The topping-out of the 360-foot-tall coker drum tower at the Marathon Petroleum Co. on Aug. 6 wasn’t your typical ceremony with an evergreen tree and an American flag lashed to a final, single steel beam.
No, the final section was more of a structure – called the drill tower, the 45-foot-high piece weighed 198,000 lbs. and it took the good part of the afternoon to raise, adjust the crane and finally bolt into place.
“Everybody out here would say this was one of the more unique picks they’ve worked with,” said Mike Arban, Iron Workers Local 25 general foreman for Flour Constructors. “All the prep work made it a long day, but no one got hurt and everything came together really well.”
The installation of the final section of the coker drum tower is another milestone for the four-year, $2.2 billion Heavy Oil Upgrade Project at Marathon’s Detroit refinery. The pair of coker drums, each a million pounds, were made in Spain and floated across the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway and other waterways to Southwest Detroit. They were off-loaded from barges, placed onto multi-wheeled flatbeds and were lifted into place back in November 2008.
According to Marathon, the new hardware is part of their “delayed coker” processing system at the plant, which will convert asphalt-like material into liquid petroleum fuel blend components and petroleum coke (a coal-like substance). It also will allow Michigan’s only refinery to thermally convert and upgrade heavy Canadian crude oil into higher quality products such as gasoline, diesel and petroleum coke.
Arban said the crane only had three feet of headroom to move the final piece into position. And while it was a fairly calm day, there were small gusts that swayed the structure, which made the installation “interesting,” he said. Iron workers on the ground helped guide the structure by pulling on ropes tied to two bottom corners of the structure.
“The crane had to be crept forward so it would be able to swing it into place, and that’s when the wind started,” Arban said. “The guys on the ground worked really hard to hold it. And they really battled it at the top. The operator did a great job; he did a great job on the whole structure. It was a top-notch crew all the way around.”
At the controls of the Manitowac 18,000 crane was John Peffer, a 13-year member of Operating Engineers Local 324. He said the crane’s anemometer showed the wind’s top gust was 21 miles per hour during the pick. Both he and Arban agreed that attaching the large U.S. flag to the structure wasn’t a good idea, since it acted as a sail. But all’s well that ends well.
“There was a lot of structure to it, for sure,” Peffer said. “I really wasn’t nervous, but you get all that weight up in the air, you don’t want anything to go wrong. With a job like this, it’s all about the set-up. It was a big piece, but it was well engineered, and the iron workers who built it believed in what they built, and they were the ones exposed out there. It was a good example of the trades working together.”
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A 45-FOOT TALL “drill tower” was slowly lifted and moved into place to top out the coker drum structure at Marathon Petroleum Co.’s Detroit refinery. The 198,000-lb. lift was done by a Manitowac 18,000 crane.
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Can’t say PLAs increase or decrease costs, study says
The anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors “strongly oppose” project labor agreements in the construction industry, because they “prevent taxpayers from getting the best possible product at the best possible price,” according to their national website.
Moreover, any time the ABC sees fit to bring up their anti-PLA rhetoric in Michigan when a city council, school board or county-level government considers adopting a PLA on a local construction project – and they can be prolific when it comes to writing op-eds and letters to the editor – the ABC claims that studies show such agreements inflate costs to the government of between 10-20 percent.
But a new government study released last month by the Congressional Research Service – the nonpartisan research arm of the Congress – begs to differ with any cost claims related to project labor agreements.
“Much of the research on the effect of PLAs on construction costs is inconclusive,” the report said. “In part, it can be difficult to find and compare similar projects where some use a PLA and others do not. If similar projects can be found, it can be difficult to control for factors that affect the costs and quality of construction. Studies of the effects of PLAs may not include variables that account for the quality of work performed or whether the projects were finished on time.”
Project labor agreements can vary from job to job. The agreements generally standardize work hours, wage scales and overtime rules, as well as jobsite safety standards. They also generally guarantee no-strikes or lockouts and provide alternative dispute resolution.
Last fall, at a PLA conference sponsored by Michigan State University, contractors who utilize PLAs said they were an effective business tool that standardized various major factors for their businesses, and allowed them to more effectively bid and administer projects.
The ABC cites several academic studies that claim PLAs add unnecessary costs to taxpayers on publicly funded projects. Building trades unions cite their own studies that downplay cost savings. Union-cited studies tend to show PLAs as mostly cost-neutral. Unions have been more focused on promoting project labor agreements as instruments available to contractors and owners that offers multiple benefits. A Cornell University study called PLAs a “very useful construction management tool.”
Neutralizing the arguments of cost advantage/disadvantage to taxpayers puts the focus of PLAs back where unions have said it belongs all along: as a simple business decision, not a political or union vs. nonunion decision.
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NEWS BRIEFS
Jobless benefits flowing again
Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency has restored federal unemployment benefits to some 69,500 jobless workers in the state who had their benefits cutoff in July when the federal extension programs expired.
“We have issued approximately $38 million in retroactive payments through the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Extended Benefit programs over the past week and half,” Stephen Geskey, director of Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA), reported Aug. 5. “In fact, we began making some of the federal unemployment benefit payments on Friday, July 23, the day after President Obama signed legislation reactivating the two federal programs,” he added.
UIA had been encouraging the unemployed to continue to claim their federal benefits by calling or going online to its MARVIN system, even after their benefits had been cut off. Thus, the agency was able to resume benefit payments quickly to those who had been contacting MARVIN.
However, there were others that the agency needed to contact as they had exhausted their state unemployment benefits and could not apply to the EUC or EB programs, or they had exhausted the last of their EUC benefits and could not apply in time for the EB program.
Unemployed workers should have received their benefit payments two to three business days following their most recent contact with UIA's MARVIN system. The average weekly benefit is about $300. Payments could include three or four weeks of retroactive benefits back to the week ending July 10.
“Before workers call the Unemployment Insurance Agency to say they haven't received their benefits," Geskey urged, "they should first check to see if a payment has been added to their UI debit card or to their bank account, if they use direct deposit."
Those who have not yet received their extended federal jobless benefits should call the agency at 1-866-500-0017 from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.
Lower pay raises in U.S. construction
Collective bargaining data for the U.S. construction industry collected by the Bureau of National Affairs shows that through July 26, the average first-year wage increase in 2010 was 1.5 percent. That compares to 2.6 percent for the comparable period in 2009.
Excluding construction, the report found that non-manufacturing saw an average first-year contractual increase of 2.3 percent, compared to 3.2 percent in 2009.
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