Superintendents have argued for decades that crew hours disappear into trade-boundary handoffs rather than into slow workers. Somebody finally went and counted.
Associated Builders and Contractors released the first tranche of Multiskilling in the U.S. Construction Industry on September 2, a field-observation dataset built by the Simplar Foundation with Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and UNC Charlotte. Researchers rode along on real jobsites and time-sampled what crews actually did, rather than surveying contractors about what they believe. Brian Lines of the University of Kansas was principal investigator.
The findings, and who paid for them
The headline result is that when workers are credentialed and deployed across more than one craft, a much larger share of the workday goes to work that physically advances the job. ABC reports multiskilling increased direct construction work time by about 39%, and that restricting crews to a single trade dropped the direct-work share from nearly half to about one-third. Idle and waiting time fell roughly 68% during active work periods.
The modeled counterfactual is the number most likely to end up in front of an owner: a one-trade restriction would require about 45% to 72% more workers to complete the same observed work sequence.
Every one of those figures is from an association-sponsored study and should be attributed as such rather than treated as settled industry fact. The 45% to 72% range in particular is a model, not an observation. The safety comparison is self-reported by participating contractors: across roughly 33.2 million work hours, they reported an average TRIR of 0.74, which ABC puts 57% below the NAICS-weighted benchmark, with no reported fatalities.
How much cross-trade work already happens
The more useful finding may be the descriptive one. Workers spent about 36% of observed crew time on work outside their primary trade, across 128 documented trade combinations. A typical observed worker used nearly three distinct skill classifications in a day, and some used as many as six.
That’s not a proposal. It’s a description of how jobs already run. The study estimates a one-trade restriction would force roughly a third of observed crew work to be reassigned, delayed, or picked up by someone else.
The sample, and the argument to be careful with
The dataset covers 40 site visits across 36 projects in 24 states and 22 project types, with project costs from $500,000 to more than $1 billion, taking in 60 multiskilled crews, 644 workers, 30 contractors and more than 11,400 productivity and work-sampling observations. This is the first of three planned releases.
One caution on how the numbers get used. Multiskilling sits inside a long-running dispute over jurisdictional work rules, and ABC filed the release under its own politics and policy category. The field data on handoff loss stands on its own and is worth reading on those terms. Anyone extending it into an argument about who should be allowed to do which work is going well past what a work-sampling study can support.
The credentialing angle is where it lands most usefully, giving training programs a defensible return-on-investment case beyond headcount. That echoes what smaller contractors have been doing with unbundled craft training.
Source: the ABC release and the Simplar Foundation study page.