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Comment by spaced-out | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sold on labor unions being the primary factor in this, though they may contribute, because construction costs in the US are so much higher than countries like France, which has even stronger labor unions and stricter regulation. I find it hard to believe that US labor unions are able to extract so much more value than their French counterparts.

I think a bigger culprit is excessive local control and zoning restrictions, wielded to benefit property owners or to bleed developers and generate revenue for city governments. The shocking part, IMO, is that these costs far outweigh the cost added by notoriously strong French labor unions and EU regulation.

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Unions in the US work different from France.

In France unions wouldn't attempt to get their people $200/hour that the sandhogs in NYC get. We should bring the high priced unions to a realistic wage. However most union wages are not that far out of line.

Also in France the union is more relaxed about letting go of jobs that are automated away. There is no reason a TBM needs twice as many people to operate it in NYC as in France. There is no reason for any trains to have a conductor anymore, and train drivers are something that should be all but dead as well (though France is way behind the automation curve here as well)

That said, union labor is only a small part of the problem. Even if all of the most anti-union propaganda is taken as 100% true, union labor is still only a small fraction of the total cost of any build in the US. As such we need to look hard at what is going on in the other parts of construction.

Thanks to the EU construction companies in France have access to Eastern European labourers. And they don't do unions.

From family in the industry, my understanding is it’s not union benefits/wages/etc per se, but more the work rules that haven’t changed with the times driving over staffing, inability to fire bad performers, and overtime issues.

There’s a lot of on-the-clock non-work built into the work rules. My relatives in the industry described the typical day as involving on-the-clock time built in for cleanup&changing into/out of work clothes, briefing on tasks for the day, safety briefing (AM and again after lunch for legal reasons), smoke/coffee breaks, etc. The longest stretch of uninterrupted construction is about a 2 hour sprint into the end of the day.

On the staffing front, the only lever a project manager has is to give the 2-3 hardworking guys out of 12 a boatload of overtime hours to get the actual work done. This is one reason that on most every job site around the city you see some pretty sick cars. Those 2-3 guys are getting 50% of the work done out of the 12, and getting paid Google engineering money for it.

NYT article years back talked about 2nd avenue subway covered examples of work rules. Tunnel boring machine in NY requires 3-4x the staffing of Paris, because thats the contract negotiated in the 70s when it was seen to be reducing jobs.. and no one has revisited it. This is no small figure as we have a handful of these digging tunnels the last few years, at the rate of 50ft/day... for months. Similarly there is a mandatory on-site oiler who basically sits in the break room all day because the machines do not need constant oiling anymore the way they did when the rule was written half a century ago.

One example from my relative - on a large NYC project he worked, they couldn’t take deliveries from suppliers on Saturday because it required the job site to be opened. Per union rules this would have required some inane number of staff to be on-site getting overtime rather than just say the guy to open the gate & staff (if any) required to empty the truck.

A lot of this is because public sector unions are treated as a voting constituent rather than a vendor by the government, and no politician ever wants to cross them.

I have some family in the industry as well and they report the same thing happens with every crew, a few of the workers are what you would call "ninjas/rockstars" in software and the rest are just there to do the minimum. Unfortunately it's hard to tell when hiring because everyone acts motivated for the job and their real work ethic doesn't show up until a few weeks later and you're stuck with them.

Right on a normal project you’d weed out the poor performers but in this case its basically not possible. The workers knowing this is the case leads to a class of workers who show up and do the minimum. As long as they don’t do anything overtly that would trigger firing for cause, they can coast from project to project.

Therefore the only way project managers can get anything done is to give 25% of the team the opportunity to work 2x the hours for 2.5-3x the pay.

So instead of paying just for your 12 guys, you are paying for equivalent of 9+(3x3) = 18 guys when its really like 6-9 guys worth of work getting done.

I will also add that there is essentially a ton of overhead built in by construction firms dealing with the city/MTA/PA. The industry generally sees them as being difficult customers who change their mind, plan poorly, and have a lot of change requests. This results in a fairly small pool of firms bidding on projects, the costs being padded, plus overruns and change requests being tacked on as they go for even more cost.

I read a paper on tunneling costs. One of their explanations why costs were higher in the US was the government shifts the risk onto the contractor. And then tries to save money by not employing enough oversight.

The result low numbers of heavily padded bids on contracts. And then execution tends to be inflexible and prone to bogging down.

Another factor I have other family members who dealt with the city on the technology side rather than construction side is certifications / qualifications.

There are only certain qualified bidders for projects that have attained a level of certification from the city. This reduces the pool of bidders, but it also just adds cost layers.

I have a relative that worked (briefly) at a firm that bids on city tech projects and then delegates all development implementation to tech subcontractors who then sub out most of it to offshore, with a few onshore dev&management.

The subcontractor can't bid because they don't have the scale to get the certifications, so the city pays a 40% margin to the certified contractor who is doing glorified project management.

I would be shocked if the same thing wasn't happening on the construction contracting/bidding process side of city/state/etc work.

> 40% margin to the certified contractor who is doing glorified project management.

This makes sense. My dad was an engineer working for the Feds. Really the job is technical project management and oversight. In the US there is a fetish for keeping the government workforce small. Which then results in outsourcing things at great expense.

Example I've heard that part of the reason there were delays and and cost overruns with the eastern span of the bay bridge was because CALTRANS didn't have enough engineers to do effective and timely oversight. Nor engineers with the proper experience.

Why exactly should construction workers clean up, change, and get briefed for free? How are those not work? Do you attend work meetings for free? Why don't construction workers deserve breaks? Do you ever take breaks at work? If so, why do you deserve to be paid for these things when construction workers don't? Be explicit.

The idea that US politicians never cross the public sector unions isn't compatible with the facts. The Taft-Hartley Act is law, and PATCO was destroyed.

Everyone deserves breaks and for some level of setup/cleanup to be on the clock. Some amount of what is enshrined in the work rules is just excessively cushy. However there is a big difference between stuff built into these work rules vs what happens in private industry.

The basic question is - do the work rules restrict employers from adapting to productivity enhancing technology changes over time? The goods&services in the US which go up in cost much faster than inflation are the areas where we are unable to harness labor saving productivity - education, medicine, and it would seem municipal capital construction projects.

Does your employer retain Fortran programmers on-staff in the break room because they signed a contract when Fortran was important? If your employer moved all your compute to the cloud, would you keep 100% of your now redundant datacenter staff onboard? Does your employer keep the underperforming 25% of the team perpetually and just grant paid overtime in the $100k+ to the superstars to cover the gap? Does your office building maintain an elevator operator in each cab despite having automated the elevator 50 years ago?

This is the difference between private firms and the public sector union stuff you deal with in places like NYC.

I mean yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice work environment and I'd love if my (easier/safer) office job had all that paid time, rules and work limits built in. However.. I get why it seems nothing gets done in NYC construction because of it?

A fun example - there was a 6 month project to replace a set of 2-story staircase at my subway station. The demolition work was rather swift. I assumed they were building on-site if it was going to take 6 months. Lo and behold, it was actually a pre-fab staircase they trucked in. However not only did it take 6 months to simply install that pre-fab staircase, but they ran over by a few months! They actually had to come back and re-close it and do some repairs afterwards too. Meanwhile at the corner below that train station there was a McDonalds. I laughed as I watched them gut renovate it over the course of a weekend so they could be back in business by Monday selling food to riders.

If you haven't seen NYC municipal construction up close, its hard to fathom just how screwed up it is.

I'm glad you admit everyone deserves breaks; it seems to have been remarkably easy to convince you. I'm also glad to see your position on paying for the rest shift from outright opposition to unspecified contracts being excessive.

None of the rest of your reply is actually a response to what I said, though some of it is interesting. You also notably didn't respond to what I said about politicians.

Regarding Fortran programmers' contracts being honored, I would certainly hope any business would meet its contractual obligations (when they are moral and legal). Surely you aren't actually suggesting they shouldn't? Whether signing such a contract was a good idea or not, the very concept of a contract is founded on actually executing the terms of the agreement afterward.

I have never encountered a business that consistently swiftly dropped the underperforming parts of the team. I know that stack ranking firms supposedly exist, but they are far from typical. Even if your employment history is atypical, surely you've encountered less than efficient employees at clients, at vendors, and just out in the world in retail or restaurants; have you never happened to observe some of them staying in those positions at length? If you have seen private enterprise up close, it's hard to fathom the idea that it runs lean operations without waste.

Furthermore, many businesses have employees, sometimes many of them, who don't have the kind of clear work products that would make "the underperforming 25% of the team" potentially conceptually coherent. Plenty have employees with as little to do as a TBM oiler or an elevator operator. The market isn't just taking its time in pushing them to be more efficient, either. Actual markets and actual managers don't work like in an entry-level economics class.

In New York City unions are essentially a subsidiary of the political system, funneling money into reelection champagnes. In return politicians return their support by requiring that any government contract must be awarded to contractors that use union labor. It is all a racket. I have heard stories from people who have done civil work in NYC and the level of corruption and waste is staggering. Like $5000 billed labor hours to drive to a site to plug in a cable. Firms will bit a 50% surcharge on any projects in NYC to compensate with the red tape and union labor costs.

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