What happened to construction productivity? Part 1: Measurement

I'd be curious to see these productivity dips and gains plotted against the average age/time in service of the workforce.

In my experience (highway/heavy industrial construction) both industry and institution is suffering greatly from the loss of more experienced hands without a proper training/mentoring pipeline to bring new folks up to speed. Not only in the glut of middle managers in industry who serve more to obstruct the flow of work than assist it, but also the loss of institutional knowledge embodied by employees with decades of experience. I've seen projects grind to a standstill, or take that much longer to start, as technical questions get bounced around state/federal agencies forever with the general tune of "I don't know anything about that, XXX in dept Y was our guy for that but he retired 9 years ago. I don't want to be responsible for this so let's ask another dept." Each bounce adding weeks to the timeline.

I started working in '07, and got one good summer construction season under my belt before everything crashed and burned. I watched first hand as belt-tightening took its effect across industry, those more junior were shown the door and those with seniority were kept and cherished, or they chose to retire. The effects of this are showing even now, those with seniority who chose to stay then have been retiring since. In union terms there is a big gap in the journeymen level folks between the 20-30+ year guys and the fresh faced apprentices.

Decades of pushing kids towards STEM and collegiate programs while fostering some form of disdain for blue collar work may also play into this, but those are societal questions way outside my realm.

One of the things that comes to mind about why it is so hard to measure things in this industry is that almost nothing is commodified, and the commodities and specifications are all at the component level, which vary wildly over time.

If you want to measure the productivity of steel production over time, you can get a reliable measure of what the prices were in 1979 and what they are today.

A "house" or a "building" is not a commodity, though. There are prefab structures which are more commodity-like, but they are the exception, not the rule.

And then to top it all off, the costs of acquisition differ wildly depending upon where you are. Land values are hard to filter out in the reported data. Labor issues are different based on where you are. Etc.

In the recreational vehicle industry, there are different classes of vehicles. Things are pretty standardized. You can get a rough sense of improvements or regressions over time, in terms of both price and quality. A class A vehicle is not the same as a class C vehicle. You can track fuel efficiency over time. And the factories are fixed in location, and there is no locational value to filter out.

There is no such official classification system for homes. We have informal names for the various styles of homes, but they have no formalized meanings or reliable reporting.

But in a world where prefab construction became commonplace, this may be another matter. And if construction took on this form, arguably the quality over time could improve.

Why is automotive glass so much better than the glass we use in residential windows? Why is the attention to detail so much better in cars than in homes? I'm sure the annual tax penalty on buildings doesn't help... something vehicle owners don't have to deal with. And I'm sure the rampant speculation in land doesn't help either. Both could be improved by shifting taxes off of buildings and onto land.

But of course, prefab construction is outright illegal in much of the US.

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of total dollar value by type of construction. For example where I live there seem to be mostly (by total number of units) large multi-family buildings, and then a smaller number of new custom homes and additions/large remodels.

My experience goes against what the article says about hours for the custom/remodeling jobs. It seems that here GCs give an estimate for a project, but based on an estimate of hours, and the final bill will come in based on the hours. Similarly, subcontractors will give an estimate of the total, but then will have labor in their invoices to the GCs, which then get passed on to the customer.

If anything, there seems to be a tendency of being very generous to say the least with what counts as a work hour. Especially GCs dropping people off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon and "project managing" the rest of the day, but in some cases stuff like commutes, lunch, breaks, etc seems to make it into the count.

That said, it might be specific to my area, or this type of construction is minimal in total dollar value compared to the industry, so I'm not arguing against the main point of the article. Even if we halve the real hours, construction's productivity gains are nowhere near the gains of agriculture or manufacturing, probably just enough to get back to the peak of the late 60s. And in any case, as a customer I pay for the final project so the inflated hours still count for my view of productivity.

I worked at PlanGrid for five or so years, and these sad looking graphs are really what inspired a lot of my colleagues. Even if the data is fuzzy, the directionality says a lot.

Construction is hard, and it's getting harder. New code and regulation is hard. The contractor/subcontractor relationship is hard, and it produces a lot of bad anti-patterns in "cover your ass," or doing things that are just plain wrong, but are what was written down.

Perhaps worst is that the tools have only marginally improved. A hammer is still a hammer, and a nailgun is still a nailgun. Hanging drywall doesn't go faster than it did 30 years ago really. Though, as homes/buildings get more complicated, it only serves to need more specialists, more cooks in the kitchen, and slower results.

Heck, just look at the cost to build a mile of highway. And that's a relatively simple construction. Yet when you look at what goes into it, all of the people involved, all of the engineering that goes into it, and all of the fixtures that are required to "finish," a road to a modern standard, it's expensive.

Construction is one area where there just really is little replacement for hard work.

I do not find it surprising that when you stop teaching new generations how to make things, manufacturing productivity gets worse. In the Texas school district I attended, all the vocational and shop classes were eliminated in the mid-90s to make budget for the creation of Cisco networking certification classes that were canned less than 10 years later. This re-budgeting was going on in school districts across America. High school shop after high school shop sold machine tools that they had taught kids on since the 60s and 70s at pennies on the dollar. 10-20 years later when parents started demanding vocational classes back, the school districts realized that modern machine tools are too expensive to get back into schools unless they can pass multi-million dollar bonds. Generally, only the best funded schools in the best run districts have had good enough organization and motivation to make these bonds happen since. As a result, you get one or two specialty shop classes at a single magnet high school in well-funded school districts, but they are few and far between.

This was just my n=1 experience and perspective in my particular corner of the world. I would love to hear if other students or faculty from those eras had similar or dissimilar experiences.

The first plot(general productivity vs US construction productivity) looks startingly similar to this one(productivity vs minimum wage):

https://www.thecommonwealthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/...

100 years ago the majority of workers were unskilled or semi skilled bodies desperate to do anything. People died or were maimed.

Now 70% of Americans go to college, no one wants to work outside in those conditions and the wages are so low you can't afford to raise a family.