If your looking for work, as a chainman, you might want to find a place that's paying Prevailing Wages:
You will make $65.11 an hour, In Pierce county...
Sign me up, Coach.?ÿ No more headaches after quitting time.
All prevailing Wage job requests get immediately placed in the circular file, for whatever reason they go so low it would be impossible not to lose money.?ÿ
Could you afford to pay your Chainman $65.11 an hour, if most of your work was residential lot surveys??ÿ
Could your clients afford to pay you what you would need to charge for a lot survey?
You might as well go eat popcorn in the rain...
If you are looking for work as a chainman in Pierce County and want to make a family wage working on Public Work projects then joining the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 612 is indeed a good route to go.
Or you can go work for just over minimum wage and listen to your bosses piss and moan on the one hand that they are being undercut and can't keep good people and then throw their hands in the air when laws are put in place to keep lowballers out of tax payer funded projects.?ÿ
😉
I'm not taking that big a pay cut for anybody.
$73.73 an hour here in Los Angeles County, and I'm looking for a part time helper`.
I wasn't saying they weren't; but that is my point. I know people that do both and it's a headache for them. Who do send to the PW job? What if they go to a PW job in the morning and then do a lot survey in the afternoon?
When wages have lagged so far behind such that people can barely pay rent and buy groceries if they are lucky, then when a skilled individual makes a decent wage it seems shockingly high.
I must have misunderstood the thrust of your post.
There are many many tasks in the course of running a business that are a substantial headache, and yet owners and employees alike navigate and troubleshoot the best they can in order to overcome the challenges involved. In the end the companies that are able to best navigate these associated challenges develop expertise enabling them to exploit a niche market.
If done correctly I believe that there is a market for providing survey services with union labor on public works projects in the Pierce County area and beyond.
To speak directly to the challenges of running a non union shop and how to navigate different wage scales, I would not want to touch it with a ten foot pole, talk about an opportunity for petty resentment and backbiting along with accounting headaches and problems with accountability and oversight as a whole. But if you do not like the heat...
The accounting for PW jobs is a pain also, the weekly payroll, overtime rules, it goes on and on. I imagine that some are set-up to do them, I'm not, and if you get audited that is another huge expense. I see that local firms that go after these jobs have faded away, more power to them if they can make it work, but I don't think they usually do.
Add to that they all have the 10% hold-back which means I bid in a 20% surcharge,,,,,,,so I never get them anyway.
Who amongst this great body of surveyors works for a firm where a full-time, year-round chainman actually earns in excess of $130,000 per year for 2080 hours?
I'm not sure I had a thrust to this post; just wanting to start a conversation...
On one hand; it's great to be a chainman, making $65.11 an hour. On the other hand; why would anyone want to spend 2 years, going to school, when they could get on a PW job, now, and make some dang good money.
When this whole thing started, it was extremely unbalanced. L&I used proxy data, created by construction firms; that was inflated, to say the least. It seemed like a good thing, at the time, but the ripple effect took it's toll over time.
When I started, in 1975, I was making $2.65 an hour. It would've been nice to have PW, back then...
Most Union and PW jobs are not year round.
The PW includes the value of benefits, so there are probably more than you think.
The reason PW is so high, is not because if any intentional inflation.?ÿ When DOL does a PW survey they can only use the responses they get, the only firms that routinely respond are union shops. Union benefits cost a lot.
Also Dave is right, it is rare for these jobs to provide 2080 hours of work.?ÿ?ÿ
Most years PW work accounts for 2/3 or more of my business (that's a guesstimate, as I don't specifically track it).?ÿ The reporting requirements *can* be a pain, but most of my PW jobs don't require it.?ÿ As far as making money goes, it's worked out well for me.
Operating engineers local 12 party chief is 55$ hr + 31$ Benefit package. ?ÿI put 20 years in there with most of them well over 2080 hrs ?ÿper year, a few a little slim in the early 90??s.
https://scsurveyjac.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Hourly-Wage-Benefits.pdf
Jp
Sounds like I need to move further west...So can a Professional Land Surveyor work for a Union Shop? I don't believe that in IL the Union Survey positions apply to PLSs.
N10,000, E7,000, Z100.00
PLS - IL, MO, AR, KS, MN, KY