Impacts to Productivity in the Painting Trades

The "Painting Trades" include commercial and industrial painters and drywall finishers, which are normally represented by the same labor union for collective bargaining purposes. They are also members of the same construction trade organization, the Finishing Contractors Association (FCA). Labor is the greatest variable cost of performance for these trades and so, labor productivity is a critical concern of these trade contractors. New and evolving technologies for the collecting of labor productivity data have emerged in recent years, however this data cannot be used in absence of some evidence exogenous environmental influences actually impact the trade contractors' productivity. The FCA funded this research to better understand the factors which impact labor productivity and to what degree. The FCA collected data on 140 commercial painting projects, 56 industrial painting projects, and 147 drywall finishing projects. Fifteen productivity variables were derived from a review of the literature and in discussions with an expert panel of industry executives, selected by the FCA Executive Director1. The data was collected by the FCA using an online survey sent to FCA member contractors. Correlation matrices and single linear regression analyses were performed on the data which revealed the majority of the variables were negatively correlated with labor productivity and were statistically significant at very high levels. This is really project and construction management research, however even though the technology now exists to collect production data in the field, without underlying studies, like this one, linking changes in productivity to exogenous impacts, merely collecting data will be unhelpful.