Reshaping the Construction Industry

We have reported on the emergence of 3D printing in the construction industry several times.  Mostly the printers are being used to develop modeling for potential structures.  Sourceable, an Australian site, reported recently that a Chinese firm Yingchuang New Materials has begun to use industrial grade 3D printers to produce up to 10 single-room office buildings per day.According to Marc Howe, a contributor to Sourceable:“Yingchuang, which is headquartered in the Jiangsu-province city of Suhou, employed four giant 3D printers to create 10 one-room office buildings in just 24 hours, at a cost of only $5,000 per structure.“The building materials were first printed and allowed to harden at the company’s own premises before being delivered to a Shanghai industrial park and assembled into offices on site.  

Amid the chaos in Congress and the humanitarian crisis on the Texas-Mexico border, construction executives from the Lone Star State traveled to the White House this past week to urge President Barack Obama to be smart about any executive action he might take to address longstanding challenges in immigration policy.Their message to top administration officials was that it would be preferable for Congress to pass legislation on the issue.  But in the absence of that – and seeing no evidence that the US House will act – the Republican businessmen from Texas would be okay with an executive order from the Democratic president allowing for millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States as long as they can pass a background check, are identified, and taxed.  As envisioned, this would amount to an expansion of the president’s controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.  That executive action, as you may be aware, puts deportations on hold for two years for young immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.  Those waivers are renewable.Houston construction executives Stan Marek and Gregg Reyes, along with immigration attorney Beto Cardenas, met late Friday with Obama senior advisers Cecilia Munoz and Valerie Jarrett to talk about what might happen next as the administration grapples with immigration policy.  

The following is excerpted from an article by Ulf Wolf which was originally published in Construction Dimensions, a monthly publication by the Association of the Wall and Ceiling Industry.  Reprinted with permission.You find yourself underbid by 30 percent.The contractor in question swears on a stack of Bibles that all of his labor is legal and documented and that he, as required by law, pays payroll tax and workers’ comp for all of his crew just like everybody else (all the while his nose grows faster and longer than Pinocchio’s ever did).Meanwhile, the general contractor has a complicated job to get done and may be unaware of any violations on his job site (or he may look the other way) while the owner – well, the owner doesn’t really want to be bothered with “details.”  

As we've written numerous times, a primary way to deter cheating in the labor market in construction is for the hammer to be dropped on companies that don't follow the law.  All too often, ethical contractors that properly classify their workers as employees are bidding against companies that can offer customers a lower price because they're paying people as “independent contractors” or, in an interesting twist, as “member/owners.”  This misclassification gives cheaters a competitive advantage that they should be punished for, plain and simple.That was the case with an Arizona company that was on the hook earlier this year for $600,000.  The National Roofing Contractors Association reported the case on the group's website: