I saw at a construction site “Wood Frame = Wage Theft”. What does this mean and why?
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Without knowing more details – (my source is I work in national construction management)
For a variety of reasons you generally see two types of building construction – “wood framing” is mostly found in residential and small (height wise), quick/cheap buildings like nursing homes, multifamily row-homes, office buildings, etc. It’s all wood 2×4’s and plywood to build the building. Kind of Europeans think *all of America* is built out of when laugh about how flimsy our structures are. “concrete deck/metal” buildings are steel beams and columns with concrete ‘floors’. Obviously you have hybrids of these structures, etc.
Anywho, since of the two “wood framed” structures have the reputation for being cheap, think McMansion. You don’t have 30 year union master electricians on McMansions, you have *maybe* a handful of people who have licenses and 50 guys who don’t speak English they picked up that morning from a Home Depot parking lot, today they’re a carpenter, tomorrow a plumber, day after a landscaper kind of thing.
If you google “wood frame wage theft” you see all sorts of lawsuits from poor actors taking advantage of the kind of people who’d work on these jobs – and most recently they are getting on the “oh, no, these aren’t *employees* these are *independent contractors,* we’re like Uber!” bandwagon to dodge taxes. Really shady stuff to make the cheapest of the cheap things and maximize profit.
EDIT – To defend some of my wood-framed trades friends, *not all wood framed construction* is crap. Much of it, and the people who work on it are grade A. But it’s like Nigerian Prince Scamming, if you’re going to scam someone you target the easiest targets AND wood framing construction is where you are going to find the most desperate / easiest to cheat workers in the industry.
Not 100% certain, but I would guess it has to do with the pool of contractors that developers use when employing different building techniques.
At least in strong union markets (US midwest / northeast), it’s more likely that steel and concrete workers will be unionized / highly skilled / highly paid as compared to carpenters doing residential type wood framing.
If a developer wants to cheap out on construction of light commercial buildings, one way is to use wood framing. The wood framing is cheaper because of materials, but also because it’s easy to find non-union / low skill / low paid framing crews to do the framing.
I assume that the sign is claiming that construction workers who build wood frame houses are underpaid, or not paid what they were promised. Wage theft often takes the form of unpaid overtime.
But I’m not sure why that type of construction would be any more prone to wage theft than any other kind of construction method.
In America, lumber/timber is relatively cheap, so most single-family residential homes have historically been made using simple wood framing techniques. This form of construction is relatively simple, and so it is/was very common for many small family-business sized contractors to offer this kind of work rather than a few massive construction companies. (Which meant this work has historically been largely non-Union.)
As is always the case, customers wanting the job done cheaper and employers wanting to pay less for the same output lead to some “innovations” over the years. One of these was the use of illegal immigrants to supplement/replace their workforce; this “innovation” meant that contractors would be paying their workers “under the table” which made ideas like “not paying for taxes/benefits/insurance/work-comp/etc.” and “paying less than minimum wage” follow soon thereafter. Another “innovation” was the switch to using “subcontractors” rather than “employees”; in practice the workers were still treated as employees but now without a number of legal protections that would apply to them. The combination of these shady practices made things ripe for abuse like “wage theft”, especially because it meant employers didn’t have to worry about their shady behaviors being reported to government authorities or small-claims court (because few if any of these illegal immigrants would risk deportation by making the report/claim).
Meanwhile, large apartment complexes and high-rise buildings were historically not allowed to be made with basic wood frame techniques on account of the fire hazard, which meant that less simple construction methods (like steel framing and concrete/masonry work) were needed. The scale of these projects also meant that they were largely the purview of medium-to-large construction companies which meant that Union membership was much more prevalent than in the kind of mom-and-pop wood frame construction firms. This all didn’t entirely negate the “innovations” of illegal immigrant workers and subcontractor status abuses, but things were relatively less rampant than in the worst small-business cases.
More recently, some architecture firms discovered a bit of a legal “loophole” with regards to wood framing; if they use wood materials of a certain fire-retardant specification in conjunction with adding fire sprinkler systems, then they are allowed to build buildings up to five wooden stories tall using wood framing techniques without breaking fire code. This has lead to the massive boom of “five-on-one” style apartment buildings as developers can now get higher multi-story densities at the lower wood-frame construction costs. However, it also means that more large-scale work is being done using a historically non-Union wood-framing workforce, and that has allowed ever more of those shady practices to creep onto these larger construction sites. (Either by large companies subcontracting to shady subcontractors, or shady small-companies growing to take on medium-sized jobs, or by large companies simply adopting the shady practices themselves for their wood-frame workforce.)
The sign you see is probably put up in reference to something of that effect.
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