Jim Kollaer's blog

We’ve talked about drones flying over and through construction sites, but what about 30 of them flying in unison to create a light show by “painting” on the night sky? Time Magazine quotes Ars Electronica, a technology and art firm based in Austria, about their LED-equipped drones which they call “Spaxels” and which are designed to create this visual show. [node:read-more:link]

 
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Software Advice, a Gartner company that connects buyers with software vendors in the construction industry, recently released the results of a study they conducted on the Impact of Job Roles on Construction Software Purchasing Decisions.  Software Advice surveyed over 800 owners, project managers and IT professionals about their software buying habits in the face of pressure from the construction market to get it done “faster, cheaper, and with fewer change orders and do-overs.”

The annual survey concludes that your reason for buying software depends on your position in the firm, especially in small and mid-sized construction firms.

According to the results of the survey, 36% of those owners were buying new software to increase accuracy in the systems that they deploy.   [node:read-more:link]

A recent study prepared by NRG Research for the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of British Columbia (ICBA) reveals that 59% of the respondents were unaware of how to get into the trades because of misperceptions of the construction trades.  The study also showed that less than 50% of the respondents saw the construction trades as a long-term career. Most of the respondents (British Columbians aged 18-29 years old) ranked construction jobs and skilled trades at the bottom of the list of possible jobs.  The study concluded that the industry has not done a good job of defining a road map for careers in the skilled trades in construction. [node:read-more:link]

A recent article in Equipment World called Eyes in the Sky: How drones and UAVs are already affecting construction jobsites is very revealing.  For those of us who built and flew model airplanes in our teen years, this new grown-up sophisticated model aircraft can be fun to fly, but more important, it has already proven its value by flying where no man or woman can go with survey crews, inspection teams, flying over toxic sites, pipelines and even nuclear disasters.

The article highlights the various models of drones being experimented with by three different companies.

First, Richard Evans of SpawGlass called the “Tinkerer” by the author, because he grew up building and flying model airplanes.  Today he uses drones to inspect and fly construction sites At SpawGlass in Houston.   [node:read-more:link]

A recent study by the National Women’s Law Center called Women In Construction: Still Breaking Ground examines the current state of women in construction and finds that the industry is sorely lacking in programs to bring women into the industry and that women continue to suffer harassment and bullying on the jobsite.

The study, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, Morningstar Foundation, New Morning Foundation and the Irene B. Wolt Lifetime Trust, states that, “The share of women in construction has remained shockingly low – under 3 percent – for decades due in large part to the discrimination that blocks women from entering and staying in the field.”

This is interesting in that the study compares construction to other fields and finds that women’s roles in the other professions have grown to levels of 50% – far outstripping the approximately 3% of women in our industry.  Currently, the report states that, “There are about 7,615,000 male construction workers in the U.S. and only about 206,000 women.”

The study shares personal stories of women who are in the industry or were in the industry but left due to the conditions that they were subjected to on a daily basis.   [node:read-more:link]

Many contractors and sub contractors don’t pay much attention to the real estate cycle until it impacts their business and then it gets really personal for them, owners and employees.  When we are in the middle of a recovery and our workload consumes our every waking hour and a few of those sleep hours as well, we rarely step back to take a look at the bigger picture and can overlook major opportunities for business.  We thought that it might make a little sense to take a quick look at the overall market and offer an opportunity that you might want to consider. [node:read-more:link]

Workforce shortages have been predicted for decades.  I recall a sociology professor talking about the “snake eating a pig” theory of demographics and how that would be a problem in the workforce in the early 21st century.  That talk took place 50 years ago and today those predictions are a reality.  Despite the early warnings and the facts pointing to potential shortages, many firms in the construction industry are still ill-prepared to deal with issues surrounding the possibility that they would experience shortages in skilled workers until recently. [node:read-more:link]

In a September 2014 study entitled Sinking Underground: The Growing Informal Economy in California Construction, misclassification of more than 39,800 construction workers is a key reason that the underground economy in construction is contributing to the low wages, difficulty in recruiting qualified craft workers and loss of wages and taxes in the State of California.

According to the study, released by the Economic Roundtable, a non profit research organization based in Los Angeles, in 2011 more than 143,900 construction jobs in the state were “informal” – code for off the books, misclassified as independent contractors or unreported by employers.

The study looked at wages and construction jobs from 1972 to 2012 and found that the number of construction workers that were unreported or misclassified increased by 400% during that period.   [node:read-more:link]

On September 11, OSHA released new reporting rules for workers injured on projects that fall (no pun intended) under federal OSHA jurisdiction.  The new record keeping rules will go into effect on January 1, 2015.  This rule will likely impact a number of contractors and subs that were operating under the old rules or skirting the rules entirely.

The new reporting rules require that employers notify OSHA when an employee is killed on the job or suffers a work-related hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye.  The American Subcontractors Association newsletter said that “The rule tightens the reporting rules significantly.  The current rules required employers to report work related fatalities or in-patient hospitalizations for three or more employees.”  Reporting of single person hospitalizations, amputations or loss of an eye were not required under the existing rules, but that has changed.

Now any single severe injury, illness or death requires the employer to notify OSHA.   [node:read-more:link]