Teamwork On The Job


Sunday, April 5, 1998 - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Section F
By Michele Dfrus

David Rodrigues, owner of David & Goliath Builders Inc., is surrounded by some of the carpenters and masons he keeps on staff. Rodrigues has been able to avoid some of the problems associated with today's tight labor market.

In these labor-tight days, when seasoned carpenters can pretty much name their price and place, Sean Kevin has shed the itinerant life for a staff job.

Kevin, 31, is a rough carpenter, a skilled tradesman riding the crest of popularity in the third year of national shortage of motivated, skilled construction tradesman.

"A lot of people want you. I've had people flash cash at me," he said. "But that kind of thing comes back to haunt you. I'm sticking where I am. I'm in a win-win situation."

His situation, after 15 years as a non-union rough carpenter for various metro Milwaukee builders, some as foreman, is now that of an on-staff rough carpentry foreman at David & Goliath Builders Inc. in Pewaukee.

"I was always busy" as an independent subcontractor, Kevin said, "but now I'm on salary. I'm on the job, working for the same company, overseeing a crew of three, and I work alongside the same guys every day. It's a team effort and we all communicate with each other."

When workers are more attuned, they work more efficiently, benefiting the contractor and customer, Kevin said.

The company he works for, launched by David Rodrigues as a college student and named for himself and his black Labrador retriever, Goliath, celebrates its 14th anniversary this May.

"When I started, it was just my dog and I. Now Goliath is gone, but we have 14 employees on staff. We're the only company in the metro area that has its own rough carpenters, finished carpenters and masons on staff," Rodrigues said.

David & Goliath Builders erected 11 homes last year in metro Milwaukee, ranging from $112,000 to $350,000, excluding lot price, reported Amerifax Data Corp. in Brookfield. "There's probably more money in doing houses how other contractors do them," the builder said. "But we are prosperous."

Several builders have staff carpenters, noted Mike Fabishak, executive director of the Metropolitan Builders Association of Great Milwaukee, "but I don't know of any that have mason's of staff. That's not the kind of thing we track," he said.

"I've been a mason 33 years," declared John Kovnesky, mason foreman at David & Goliath, "and I always worked for masonry contractors before."

It's rare all right, said John Brukbacher, training director at Southeast Wisconsin Carpentry Joint Apprenticeship and Training Commission in Milwaukee.

"Sounds pretty close to a union situation - guaranteed work, steady pay. But these days, the most skilled and motivated will work the most. The non-union companies are having a hard time keeping them," Brukbacher said.

Rodrigues, a carpenter who hanged his surname from Rodrigues but traces his family line to 15th-century Portuguese ship builders, "pays a little more" than most builders, though neither he nor Kevin would say how much.

Kevin pegged "the going rate" for non-union carpenters at about $18 hourly.

"You have to pay them well and give them benefits, vacation pay and have a 401(k) plan," Rodrigues said. "And my guys have never been laid off. We work right through the year, because there's no time you can't be building."

Rodrigues believes that by controlling the flow of masonry and carpentry work - "the most important parts of house construction" - the customer gets a better house with a shorter wait.

Kevin agreed: "If you have them on board, you don't have wasted time."

It was workplace atmosphere, as much as pay and benefits, that convinced Kevin to leave the independent life behind.

"Guys like me are happier when there's better communication. You work with a sub, something always gets lost in the shuffle on communication. The sub is usually the last one to know when the builder is setting up the job, getting the permits, when it's time to start working. And if there's a change on the job, you've got to go through four, five channels to get the message across," he said."

"It's like night and day, working here and what I did before," Kevin said. "I wish more builders would do things this way."

So does Kovnesky.

"I've been here 8 years and what I like is, he's got things lined up so we're always working, whereas years ago, I had a lot of down time in the winter," he said.

"There's no doubt you get along better when you're always working with the same people," Kovnesky said. "Used to be, you do the job the way you think best and the carpenter comes after you and maybe he likes it, maybe he doesn't. Now, we see how they view things, they see how we view them, and you make adjustments."

Rodrigues worked his way through college on construction jobs while studying political science and philosophy.

It was then he concluded that home-building is, by nature, unpredictable, but it needn't be as teeth-clenching a process as it often is.

"It's typically pretty fractionalized, building a house. There's a lot of components that make up the house, a lot of individual trades involved," he said. Those trades are sometimes at odds - somebody's late, somebody doesn't like the way the tradesman before him handled the work."

As soon as Rodrigues could afford it - in 1988 for carpenters and 1990 for masons - he put tradesman of staff.

"Having these guys on staff guarantees us that our quality is consistent and our build time is consistent. We put up a house in 110 working days on average," or 4.5 months.