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Chapter 1
Contracting and subcontracting
The build, its builders and their ethnic communities
In this chapter I describe the details of the âKeyworker Houseâ building project, outlining its organizational and administrative structure with reference to the projectâs building contractor, âTopbuildâ, and the various trade-based subcontractors and their employees that Topbuild engaged to undertake the work. I describe the emergence and contemporary situation of building contracting and subcontracting in the UK and the legal and financial situations of subcontracted builders. I also introduce the main groups and individuals involved in my field-work, emphasizing the ethnic composition and division of the various trade and labour groups. In doing this, I demonstrate the building subcontractorsâ central role as recruiters and organizers of building work and workers, and describe how they recruited workers predominately though informal social networks bound into their local ethnic communities. These processes facilitated the stark ethnic trade-clustering present at the site, which provided a key starting point for understanding the buildersâ cultures, activities and work patterns.
Keyworker House and its delapidation
The build that I was a participant observer on included three separate, but organizationally interrelated, repair and refurbishment projects of three buildings that I call Keyworker House I, II and III. Fully functional these accommodated 776 National Health Service (NHS) workers, mostly nurses, and a small number of government services and their staff. Keyworker House I also contained a crèche, counselling services, a library, and leisure facilities â a gym, swimming pool, squash courts, bar and night-club. Each key worker resided in Keyworker House in a room or, less commonly, a flat, and they shared a number of kitchens, communal areas, and bath and shower rooms. During the refurbishment, many key workers and staff remained in and continued using the buildings. Additionally, Keyworker House II also accommodated hospital catering facilities and a hospital treatment unit, most of which remained in use throughout the build.
Each of the Keyworker House building projects was organized and undertaken by the same group of building consultants, site managers, quantity surveyors, subcontractors, and building tradesmen and labourers. Although the three buildings were situated in separate geographical spaces and were of varied sizes and internal layouts, the refurbishment processes generally followed the same pattern for each edifice because they were of similar ages and structures and had experienced similar âlivesâ and environmental circumstances.
Keyworker House I was approximately 100 years old. Years of inadequate maintenance, intensive use, the onslaught of weather and gravity, and the growth of flora and fauna had pushed the building into a state of dilapidation. Water leaked through its rotten, detritus-coated and corroded roofs and seeped into the top floor rooms, saturating the internal plaster and pulling it from the walls and ceilings. Roof gutters and external piping had become loose, blocked and rusted, exacerbating the water damage. Where water had seeped into the brickwork, it had rusted the internal steel skeleton of the building, causing it to expand and force large cracks down the external masonry. The wood in the exterior windows had also expanded and crumbled, making the windows difficult to open and shut, and permitting rain, wind and dirt to enter the building through its sides as well as its roofs. The archaic heating and plumbing system was impaired and unreliable, and there were frequent floods; sinks and toilets often blocked, and the flow of hot and cold water to taps, toilets and radiators was irregular. Carpets, vinyl flooring, interior walls and internal woodwork were damaged and worn by use and leaks, making the rooms and communal areas look drab, outdated and unappealing. In addition, fire doors, alarms and water purification systems had become outmoded in terms of new health and safety regulation and required updating.
Under a government-led private finance initiative (PFI), charitable housing associations were invited to tender for a 30-year contract to repair, maintain
Figure 1.1 Representation of the front view of Keyworker House 1.
and administer Keyworker House.1 In 2001, a housing association, âOpportune Housingâ, won the contract from the NHS, and they contracted Topbuild to organize the repair, modernization and refurbishment of the building. Opportune Housing would re-generate their initial capital outlay by running and renting the rooms and services for the following 30 years. In the meantime, they employed a building consultancy firm, âAssured Consultantsâ, to oversee the work of Topbuild and their subcontractors on a daily basis.
The actual specifications and costs of the works undertaken by Topbuild on Keyworker House I are outlined in Appendix A, although, as I demonstrate in the following chapter, the original costs and specifications were initial guides to the price and planning of the work rather than absolute stipulations â largely because they were subject to emerging knowledge, extra works, and ongoing negotiation as the build progressed. For example, the original works to Keyworker House I were estimated at ÂŁ3.75 million, but eventually totalled ÂŁ4.6 million. Some works stipulated in the initial specifications were never undertaken, but many additional works, or âextrasâ, were added throughout the build (see Chapter 2), forcing the final cost upwards.
General contracting and building site management
General building contractors were an invention of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Evidence from 1807, for example, reveals the British stateâs concerns about inefficiencies in building processes which led to enactment of legislation to place each building project under the jurisdiction of a single
Figure 1.2 Representation of the parties involved in the build.
responsible building contractor (Cooney, 1955). Prior to this, large building works were overseen and organized by government and church clerks in consultation with master masons and carpenters who simultaneously designed, organized and undertook building work (see Higgin and Jessop, 1965; Knoop and Jones, 1967 [1933]; Woodwood, 1995; and Chapter 4). As I describe in more detail in Chapter 4, the rise of the building professions of architect and surveyor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had initiated a process whereby building knowledge, and power, was gradually wrested out of the hands of medieval building trade guildsmen, opening the way for the development of large scale general contractors, and aligning building work organization with the dictates of mature capitalism. Consequently, by the 1850s, with building professionals and entrepreneurs firmly established (see Clarke, 1992), massive building contractors employing huge numbers of building tradesmen had become common place, such as William Cubitt in âCubitt townâ on the Isle of Dogs in East London (see Satoh, 1995).
Large-scale contemporary general contracting companies like Topbuild organize building projects through localized, âparcelled-outâ, site management teams that work on-site at the location of the build (see Bresnen, 1990). Localized site management is necessary because construction projects cannot be adequately managed from a distance as a result of the non-standard and âone-offâ structure of most buildings. As buildings serve to form a protective layer between humans and their external natural environments, natureâs forces work upon buildings in unpredictable ways. Large built structures interact with the dynamics of gravity, weather and geology, and this commonly throws prospective building plans into some disarray. For repair and refurbishment projects â which constituted between 40 and 45 per cent of all UK building work between 1997 and 20072 â natureâs forces produce multiple âunforeseensâ, making the details of âold workâ, like that at Keyworker House, almost impossible to effectively plan in advance or manage at a distance.
Building work is also characterized by interdependent âsequentialismâ whereby building tasks succeed one another in an interconnected sequence. For example, bricklayers must build walls before carpenters can build the roof frame, before roofers can affix tiles on top. Each trade builds on the previous one so that, for instance, carpenters are not required while the bricklayers erect walls, and roofers are not required until carpenters have built the roof frame. This increases organizational complexity and further impedes prospective work organization by producing unpredictable knock-on effects between the interdependent trades. If, for example, the digging-out of foundations is held up by inclement weather for two weeks, steel erectors will not be able to do their job at the time originally specified. They may then go onto another job and not return to erect the steel for many weeks, holding up the concrete pour, which may result in knock-on effects to all the following trades almost ad infinitum. In case studies of large engineering projects, for instance, tiny problems unnoticed in the early phases of a build were found to accumulate to produce amplified knock-on effects that created bigger problems further down the line (Graves et al., 2000; see also Rock, 1996). Building site management thus need to be localized and flexible in order to negotiate and adapt their organizational plans to the continual âunforeseensâ, knock-on effects and alterations in building process that always arise during the course of construction.
At the Keyworker House build, one site manager was situated at each of the three Keyworker Houses, assisted by the two general foremen, Jamin and Pete. The on-site project manager, Steve, oversaw the site mangers and general foremen, working in conjunction with Kevin, Topbuildâs on-site quantity surveyor, and a trainee quantity surveyor, Bobby, all of whom were based predominantly at Keyworker House I. The two building consultants, Mr Jaggers and Herbert, were also on site at Keyworker House I, occupying an office across the corridor from the Topbuild site office. The consultants acted in the interest of the client and oversaw the work of Topbuild and their subcontractors. I describe the roles and relationships between the consultants and the site managers and surveyors in the next chapter.
Topbuild was, in common with the vast majority of UK building contractors, a âhollowed outâ contracting company (Harvey, 2003). Rather than directly employing building tradesmen or owning any means of production, Topbuild and its site officers brokered knowledge, orchestrated the build process, and negotiated with the client, their representatives and the users of the building. Topbuild directly employed their site managers and quantity surveyors, but all tradesmen, labourers and machinery were contracted-in from trade-specific subcontractors.
Figure 1.3 Managing: the main characters.
Subcontracting and self-employment
The more complex a building project is, the more likely that building contractors rely on subcontracting (Eccles 1981a). As a result of the complex, non-standardized and sequential character of building, and the capricious nature of the building marketplace, building contractors employ the flexibility that subcontracting can provide (cf. Silver, 1986). Building work also tends to be hit early and hard by fluctuations in economic markets because âConstruction slows in a recession and stops in a depressionâ (Cherry 1974: 77) and âIn most cases, when the economy gets a cold, construction gets the fluâ (Bosch and Philips, 2003: 5). When demand is low, buildings are not produced, and contractors and builders find themselves with no work. If a contractor is unable to procure new projects, subcontracting enables them to instantly âdown-sizeâ because they possess little machinery, industrial space or directly employed workers. Alternatively, if building contractors wish to âup-sizeâ, subcontracting provides large numbers of skilled labourers at short notice. Furthermore, due to the sequential nature of building, contractors require some skills and equipment only sporadically and they consequently employ subcontractors to supply these solely at the times they are required on the build.
At Keyworker House there were 29 different subcontractors employed on various parts of the build. Topbuild employed specialist subcontractors for every conceivable aspect of the project: drilling, brick cleaning, pest prevention, roofing, tree cutting, vinyl-floor and carpet laying, mastic application, fire alarm installation, water purification, drainage and lift maintenance. They also subcontracted the more traditional specializations: tiling, plumbing, electrics, carpentry, joinery, masonry, ground-work, labouring, painting, plastering, scaffolding, ironmongery, welding and glazing. A different subcontractor represented each separate specialization and, in some cases, there were long chains of subcontractors linking the tradesman and the organizing contractor. For example, one of the workers employed to sandblast the external face of Keyworker House (âthe Blaster blokeâ) told me how he was subcontracted by his boss/workmate, who in turn subcontracted to a steam-cleaning company, that subcontracted to the main masonry subcontractor, that subcontracted to Topbuild, that was contracted to Opportune Housing. Only two men did the brick cleaning, but five layers of middlemen organized their employment.
Subcontracting is, then, a type of organizational system suitable for the manufacture of variable and uncertain products in a variable and uncertain market, but it is not the only appropriate system. In the past, the building guilds and the countless other artisan groups throughout the medieval period, produced âoneoffâ complex products for hundreds of years. More recently, those that built and maintained much of the physical infrastructure of the British post-war welfare state were permanently and directly employed by local councils, and, up until the late 1960s, directly employed builders were seen to produce higher quality and more cost-effective products than general contractors (Direct Labour Collective, 1978; Langford, 1982). The rates of building subcontracting also vary between countries. The use of building subcontracting in the UK is, for example, two or three times higher than in mainland Europe and the USA (Harvey and Behling, 2008; see also Bosch and Phillips, 2003). Subcontracting is not, therefore, simply a result of the specificities of building product markets, but is tied up with national political economies.
The dominance of building subcontracting in the UK intensified with the rise of the market-led employment policy that pervaded the building industry from the late 1960s. This deregulated labour protection and substantially impeded the capacities of building unions (Austrin, 1980; Harvey and Behling, 2008). By the 1980s, Margaret Thatcherâs neo-liberal policies further deregulated building employment through a concerted attempt to outlaw unionization, partly as a result of the marketization of state services that reached its apogee under the Private Finance Initiative (see Evans and Lewis, 1989). Although difficult to calculate, from 1997 to 2007, approximately one third of all the building work in England and Wales was linked the public sector (calculated from Office for National Statistics, 2008). Consequently, the marketization of state services had a massive impact on building workers by signalling the near end of their unionized direct employment in local councils, replacing it with the competitive tendering and subcontracting practices of private sector building.
Technically, subcontracted builders are self-employed, owning their own businesses and em...
