Most general contractors price weather risk, supplier default risk and permit risk. Very few price the possibility that nobody will deliver concrete for two weeks.
More than 350 ready-mix drivers at 15 CalPortland plants across Northern California walked out on August 6 in an unfair labor practice strike. They ratified a one-year contract on August 21.
What triggered it
According to the Teamsters, the company refused to set bargaining dates and made unilateral changes to wage-package language, which is what makes it an unfair labor practice strike rather than an economic one. That distinction matters: ULP strikers have reinstatement rights that economic strikers don’t, which changes the leverage on both sides.
Locals 853, 665, 315 and 150 represented the drivers. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie brokered the settlement.
The deal
One year, with industry-standard wage and health-benefit increases and full preservation of existing contract language for the term. Nobody won structurally. The company got twelve months of labor peace and the union got money without giving up language.
“A year ago, this company wouldn’t even commit to hiring our members,” said Tom Gesualdi, director of the Teamsters Building Materials and Construction Trade Division. “But through Teamsters militancy and solidarity, CalPortland Teamsters protected their jobs and won vital wage and health benefits increases.”
The schedule risk nobody prices
Ready-mix has no substitute and no shelf life. When 15 plants go dark across multiple counties, every pour on every job in that radius stops, and the restart isn’t instant because the plants and the trucks have to re-sequence against a backlog of deferred pours.
Two weeks of that in the Bay Area is a multi-project delay event with no obvious contractual home. It isn’t force majeure in most standard forms, and a materials-supplier labor action rarely appears in a schedule risk register at all.
The one-year term is the part to calendar. This comes back around in 2027, and any project pouring in Northern California next summer should assume the possibility and say so in the schedule narrative now.
Large conversions are particularly exposed, because the structural work is concentrated and hard to resequence. Metro Loft’s 529-unit conversion at 845 Third Avenue is the kind of Manhattan job where a two-week supply interruption reprices the whole schedule.