Since at least the early 1980s, there has been a tendency in the construction industry for general contractors to rely more and more on trade contractors. Part of the reason was to reduce risk. If you didn’t have to carry those tradespeople on your books, then, when the economy dipped, you wouldn’t be hurt as much. It gave contractors more flexibility on their labor costs.
The importance of the trades goes well beyond just the skills they bring to the job site
That wasn’t the only reason, of course. Over the last 50 years, building construction has become much more complicated, and we needed people with higher skills to be able to execute it. We needed specialists.
Now, every job site has an army of specialists crawling around trying to do their little bit of the job and stay out of each other’s way. Two major problems have occurred because of this. It is now more essential and, simultaneously, more difficult to schedule a job. Many of those trades bring the materials with them. They are doing what is known as the last mile of the supply chain. Making sure those materials and the people to install them arrive at the right time and stage their materials in the right place and do so without bumping into other trades or having to wait around for another trade to finish its work before they can start requires careful planning. Critical path scheduling has become de rigueur on job sites.
The second major problem that arose because of this increasing reliance on trade contractors is an increased emphasis on communication. Trades need to know in advance when they should be showing up. Job sites often experience delays. Trades need to be kept in the loop about those delays. The modern superintendent’s job seems to be as much about scheduling and communicating as it is about ensuring the quality of the work being done is kept to a high standard.
Fortunately, there are a variety of software packages on the market that help solve these problems and superintendents no longer need to keep wearisome spreadsheets and spend six hours a day calling people to keep them in the loop. We’re lucky.
All of that has made it easier to rely on trade contractors rather than trying to self-perform tasks. That’s a good thing.
But there has always been a hierarchy in the construction industry on the build side with general contractors at the top and trade contractors below. That is, of course, driven by contracts and who is hiring whom. In fact, most people call trade contractors subcontractors, but that’s not a term I prefer. It speaks to their value in a contractual relationship, but does nothing to speak to how important they are to the successful execution of a project. There is nothing “sub” about a metal building erector, or a foundation contractor or a metal wall panel fabricator and installer. In fact, some of those trades may have the largest monetary portion of a contract on some jobs.
There is no turning back to days of yore when general contractors self-performed most of the work on a job site. It’s just impossible, and not just because we want to mitigate risk. We need those trades to bring their expertise to the job.
There is another part of this that needs to be addressed. Not only are we talking about valuing trade contractors, we also need to recognize the value of the trades people working for those companies. They’re not sub either.
