Carpenters’ jobs hit hard

By Alexandra Berzon

Saturday, Aug. 23, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Dear union leaders,

Please stop sending your workers to Las Vegas. We can’t take any more.

That was the gist of a letter Marc Furman, president of the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, recently sent to Carpenters union locals across the country.

Until very recently, union work on commercial and public works projects in Las Vegas continued to boom even as residential construction faded. Out-of-towners steadily trekked to town, lured by the high times of Strip construction.

But suddenly the amount of work shrank to a point where it no longer can support newcomers, Furman told the union officials.

“There’s no point in encouraging more people to come in here,” Furman said in an interview this week.

Even finding enough work for the more than 15,000 union carpenters who are in Las Vegas, including more than a thousand recently arrived from out of town, will be tough. Inevitably, many will leave.

Outside the union hall Friday, Furman surveyed the parking lot, motioned to the dozen or so cars with out-of-state plates, and said in a resigned voice: “It’s good if they get out of here.”

That’s what David Schoenherr will probably do. He left his wife and kids behind in Detroit when work there dried up three years ago and headed to Las Vegas on the advice of friends.

The $9.2 billion MGM Mirage CityCenter site was revving up, and word was out that high-wage jobs were abundant, with plenty of overtime.

Nine months ago Schoenherr started work at Boyd Gaming’s $4.8 billion Echelon project, which he thought would employ him for at least another year.

“I thought I was set,” Schoenherr said.

The schedule worked out nicely for contractors and workers: Just as each trade job on CityCenter wound down, workers would move to Echelon to help construct that megaproject.

That’s how it appeared, anyway.

But when Boyd Gaming announced three weeks ago it was pausing work at Echelon at least until spring, the outlook for union carpenters and members of other building trades unions changed suddenly. Five hundred carpenters at Echelon were laid off. Before the change in plans, 2,000 were to have been added at the site.

“They just pulled the rug out from under us,” Schoenherr said.

It wasn’t long after that Furman sent his plea to unions across the country to halt traffic to Las Vegas. He also decided to close enrollment in the union’s apprenticeship program, capping it at 1,800.

The news has gotten only worse since then. Last week, for example, the airport announced it is delaying $348 million in construction.

At the union hall Friday morning, Schoenherr and John Bawman of Montana picked up applications for an oil refinery job in Canada. That promises up to seven years of steady work. All the men have to do is get their necessary documents in order.

“It’s going to get worse here before it gets better,” said Steve Holloway, vice president of the Las Vegas Associated General Contractors. Holloway’s trade organization predicts the nonunion residential construction sector will rebound before higher-paying commercial work.

The list of carpenters and drywall workers looking for work in Las Vegas has swelled to unsustainable levels, Furman said — from 1,500 just a few weeks ago to 2,200 now. Carpenters who once could find work immediately or within a few weeks now face months without jobs. The state announced this week that 7.4 percent of construction workers were unemployed in July, with jobs dropping from 103,800 last year to 94,600.

Carpenters often spend idle time sneaking onto job sites up and down the Strip as well as downtown and at highway projects to inquire about work. Carpenters are one of the few tradesmen allowed to solicit their own work rather than wait at union halls for their numbers to be called.

Although job sites are officially closed to people not working on them, if you are able to don a hard hat and sneak in, you can approach contractors to ask directly whether they’ll hire you. But even that approach isn’t working very well right now.

“Before, they would tell us to come back in two weeks, but now they say it’s full,” carpenter Jaime Vergara said, scanning lists of active job sites posted on walls inside the union hall. He’ll try to get on some of those sites later in the day.

“They don’t give you any hope.”

Even so, union and contractor officials insist the change is far from dire.

“It was so superheated it was almost surreal,” said Dan McQuade, president of Tishman Construction Corp. of Nevada, a contractor supervising construction at both CityCenter and Echelon. “We forget that this is more normal. People aren’t getting paid big premiums and guys aren’t coming from across the country. It’s clear it’s cooling down, but so are the other big markets we’re in. There’s still an awful lot of construction. Long-term it’s still a great market.”

Furman agreed. “Normal” is when workers make some good money for a while, then spend time out of work. For a while, Vegas was an anomaly.

“It’s the business we’re in,” Furman said. “If you want to work all the time, become a public employee.”