07-Str-B2 · May 2014
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Examinations — May 2014 — 07-Str-B2 Management of Construction. Three hours, closed book; candidates may use one of the two approved calculators (Casio or Sharp). The paper prints six questions of equal value (20 marks each) and states that any five questions constitute a complete paper, only the first five appearing in the answer book being marked. Candidates are urged to submit a clear statement of any interpretive assumptions with their answers. All six questions are worked below, because this set is intended as a study resource rather than as a single exam sitting.
Reference texts: RSMeans, Building Construction Cost Data — the "How to Use the Cost Data" front matter, which defines daily output, labour-hours, bare costs and the Total Incl. O&P column used in Question 1; Halpin, D.W. & Senior, B.A., Construction Management (4th ed., Wiley) — unit-price estimating, crew balancing, labour relations and construction safety; Hegazy, T., Computer-Based Construction Project Management (Prentice Hall) — precedence networks with SS/FS/FF relationships and lags, which is exactly the notation of Question 2; Hendrickson, C. & Au, T., Project Management for Construction (2nd ed., Carnegie Mellon) — scheduling and cost control; Sullivan, W.G., Wicks, E.M. & Koelling, C.P., Engineering Economy (17th ed., Pearson) — present-worth analysis and the maximum-justified-investment problem of Question 4; Canadian Construction Documents Committee, CCDC 2 — Stipulated Price Contract (2020), General Conditions 6.5 (delays) and 6.6 (claims for a change in Contract Price); Goldsmith, I. & Heintzman, T.G., Goldsmith on Canadian Building Contracts (5th ed., Thomson Reuters) — delay and notice law in Canada; AACE International, Recommended Practice 29R-03: Forensic Schedule Analysis — the but-for and windows methods named in Question 5; British Columbia Labour Relations Code, RSBC 1996 c. 244 — certification, bargaining units and the construction-industry provisions behind Question 3; WorkSafeBC, Occupational Health and Safety Regulation (Parts 4, 8, 11, 18 and 20) and the BC Workers Compensation Act — the prime-contractor duty and the traffic-control, fall-protection and hazardous-substance rules behind Question 6.
Check — two readings taken from the printed page. The RS Means extract in Question 1 prints two cells as question marks; both are recovered below from the crew table, and the recovered labour-hour figure is checked against the printed $27 labour column before it is used. Two arrows leave the right-hand edge of activity D and turn vertically to reach E and C; they are read here as ordinary finish-to-start links, which is the only reading consistent with the drawing and with the fact that every unlabelled arrow on the sheet carries no lag.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
The choice between a unionized and an open-shop workforce is a commercial and risk decision taken before a bid is priced, not an ideological one, and in Canada it is taken inside a legal framework that varies by province. Labour relations in construction fall under provincial jurisdiction for all but federal works, so the governing statute is the provincial code — in British Columbia the Labour Relations Code, in Ontario the Labour Relations Act with its distinct construction-industry provisions. A contractor that is party to a collective agreement, usually through a bargaining agency such as the Construction Labour Relations Association of BC, is bound by that agreement for the trades it covers and cannot simply hire outside it for work within the bargaining unit. A contractor that is not party to one is free to hire directly, but is exposed to certification: a union that signs up the requisite proportion of employees in an appropriate unit can be certified and the contractor becomes bound. Neither status is permanent, and the cost of switching is real, so the decision is usually made at the level of the firm and then applied to projects rather than the other way round.
The case for unionized labour rests on supply, skill and administrative simplicity. The building-trades unions operate hiring halls, which means a contractor mobilizing a large crew on short notice can draw certified journeypersons from a dispatch list rather than recruiting, screening and testing individually — a decisive advantage on a project such as the gym-floor and fit-out work of Question 1 if it had to be manned in a week. Union training is institutionalized: the trades fund and run apprenticeship programmes jointly with employers, so the certification level of the workforce is predictable and the contractor does not carry the whole cost of developing it. Wage rates, benefit contributions, travel and subsistence, overtime multipliers and premium calendars are all fixed for the term of the agreement, which removes wage escalation from the estimator's risk register and makes a hard-dollar bid genuinely hard. Health, welfare and pension obligations are discharged by a cents-per-hour remittance to jointly trusteed funds rather than by administering a benefit plan in-house. Safety performance is typically stronger, both because certified workers are more experienced and because the agreement gives the joint health and safety committee real standing. Finally, on Canadian public work an increasing number of owners require it: British Columbia's Community Benefits Agreement model on major provincial infrastructure, and project labour agreements elsewhere, make union affiliation a condition of participating at all.
The case against is equally concrete. The all-in cost of a union hour — base wage plus welfare, pension, training and industry funds — is materially higher than the open-shop equivalent in most Canadian markets, and on a labour-intensive scope that difference is the difference between winning and losing a competitive bid. Jurisdictional lines restrict how the crew can be deployed: work that a single multi-skilled worker could perform must be split among trades, which raises crew sizes, creates idle time and makes the sort of crew rebalancing exploited in Question 1(b) harder to execute. Manning provisions, ratio clauses limiting apprentices to journeypersons, and restrictions on subcontracting narrow the contractor's freedom to organize the work. The contractor inherits the risk of industry-wide bargaining: a strike or lockout at the sector level can halt a project over an issue the contractor had no part in, and picket-line and hot-declaration rules can spread a dispute from one site to another. Grievance and arbitration procedures, while orderly, are slower and more formal than a direct conversation with an employee, and discipline and layoff must respect seniority rather than performance.
The open shop mirrors these trade-offs. Its strengths are lower direct labour cost, freedom to assign work across trade boundaries, the ability to reward and retain the strongest performers individually, and simpler and faster decision-making on crew composition and discipline. Its weaknesses are that the contractor must build and pay for its own recruiting, training and benefits administration; that skill levels are less uniform and must be verified worker by worker, with a corresponding supervision and rework burden; that in a tight labour market the firm competes for the same workers without a dispatch list to draw on and can face high turnover mid-project; and that it carries a standing organizing risk, since a certification application can change the firm's status during the life of a contract. Safety and quality outcomes in the open shop are not inherently worse, but they depend far more on the individual firm's programme than on an industry-wide standard.
In practice the decision turns on four project-specific questions. Does the owner or the funding source require a union workforce or a project labour agreement? How labour-intensive and how price-sensitive is the scope — the more it is both, the more the wage differential dominates? How quickly and how deeply must the project be manned, and does the local open-shop market actually contain that many qualified workers? And how much schedule risk can the project absorb, given that a sector-level work stoppage is a real, if infrequent, event? A contractor bidding a fast, heavily manned public project in a market with a strong building-trades presence will usually be better served by the union route; a contractor executing a smaller privately funded fit-out in a market with a deep open-shop workforce will usually be better served without it. What is not defensible in either case is to price the bid on one basis and staff it on the other.
