Housing & Construction

Housing production continue to slow in February off strong levels as rising lumber and other material prices continue to affect the housing industry.

“Fall Protection – General Requirements” is OSHA’s most frequently cited standard for the 10th successive fiscal year, the agency announced Feb. 26 during an exclusive Safety+Health webinar.

“Turnkey framing subcontractors are finding themselves in a bind as the cost of raw materials increase, or become scarce, but their contracts with the general contractor don’t give them much of an ability to escalate their payment terms in an equitable way,” says Kent Pagel, legal counsel for SBCA and the National Framers Council (NFC).

The construction industry’s use of independent contractors and subcontractors, even sub-subcontractors, is standard practice.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) announced that it intends to withdraw the independent contractor final rule issued on Jan. 7, 2021, and rescind a current rule on joint employer relationships under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) which took effect on March 16, 2020.

March 15 was the deadline outlined in Executive Order 13999 for OSHA to issue an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) for COVID-19. 

The SBCA’s National Framers Council (NFC) is a member of the Construction Industry Safety Coalition (CISC), which is made up of 30 trade associations from all sectors of the construction industry, including commercial building, heavy industrial production, home building, road repair, specialty trade contractors, material suppliers, and construction equipment manufacturers.

The residential real-estate market is on its biggest tear since 2006, just before the housing bubble burst and set off a global recession.

Listening to Toll Brothers’ first quarter earnings call earlier this year, I was struck by a comment CEO Doug Yearley made during the question-and-answer session.

Black Buffalo, a global provider of large scale, building-grade printers and proprietary cement-based ink, has worked with the International Code Council Evaluation Service to expand criteria in the ICC-ES AC509 – 3D Automated Construction Technology for 3D Concrete Walls report from single- to multi-story building.