Why use a union contractor?

BY SCOTT VAUGHN, Building Trades Council Director

This past summer I had some work done on my house to prepare it for sale.

As most home owners would find, I had reservations about whether a union contractor would do a job as small as working on a single-family home. After all, in this position and being a member of the Board of Public Works, I was used to dealing with union contracts that might be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Being a union representative I naturally had to explore the issue, and I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome.

Most union subcontractors will do residential work. The fact of the matter is that most of them do residential work at a reduced rate to match the skills required for the job.

The net result was a superior job at a value price.

The term value comes into place.

To me value comes with a number of factors:

Price • Experience • Quality • Training • Warranty • Social Responsibility

Let me explore each point, one at a time:

Price – don’t kid yourself; the non-union contractor knows exactly what the appropriate price for a job is; he just doesn’t pass along a fair share of the profits to his employees.

Experience – a lot of people think that owning a pickup and a ladder qualifies them to be a contractor. Not true. All of the union contractors that worked on my house had at least 30 years in the business.

Quality – a union contractor will not walk away from a job until the customer is happy with the results.

Training – all union craftsmen and women go through an apprenticeship of 3-5 years. This fact speaks for itself. Most of them have been drug- and background-checked before they go onto the job. Do you really want someone hired at Labor Ready that morning walking around in your house?

Warranty – a union contractor will return to your house if there is a problem with his work. Try getting someone who you picked out of the yellow pages to do that. Some crafts even have 5 year warranties to guarantee their work.

Social responsibility – the saying goes “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” Health care, pensions – you know the answer.

My father taught me that “five dollars is not a lot of money unless you are hungry and don’t have it.”

Even if you only have a little bit of work to be done, hiring a union contractor can make a significant difference in getting another union sister or brother through these hard times.

A list of quality union contractors can be found at www.btrades.com.

– Scott Vaughn is Executive Director for the Building and Construction Trades Council of South Central Wisconsin which represents 4000 members in 9 counties belonging to 19 individual local unions.