Working in the Mechanical Space
** The first draft of this was written in January of 2023, which I forgot about until now, July of 2024**
On or about the end of September of last year, as the regular work in the residential mechanical industry transitioned from installing AC’s to furnaces, an exit made itself apparent to me, and I took it. I took a layoff, and started up my first EI claim in years, with the vague expectation that I might attend school for training in the new year.
I had no inclination to work another winter doing furnace swaps even though, for the most part, I did manage to stay indoors. I frankly dislike doing furnaces. The work, in general, is labour instensive on a good day, and depending upon the homeowner, can range from nirvana to utter nightmare. In general, homeowners see the utility room as a place to store things, often stuff they can’t bring themselves to throw away, and on occasion, it can be piled high and tight.
Customers simply don’t understand — and why would they??– that a furnace swap is a really big job, often spannning several rooms, and space ** yes SPACE** is the ulitmate essential of the installation technician. Yes, why would they know, especially when the guy booking the job is more interested in getting it booked than making life easier on the ones doing the job, and so goes the time honored battle between sales and service, where sales makes the promises that service has to deliver, and the further separated, the wider the difference.
On roughly 30% of the jobs, the complications were minimal enough to call it ‘nice’, and I truly looked forward to producing the kind of results I would be inclined to put my name to. A clean install, where everything looks like it was “done on purpose”, makes for an actually satisfying day. Yes, there is always the grunting reguired to cart the old furnace out and haul it away, but that goes relatively quickly… for the most part. If you can get it, churning your way to a pristing result, for me, was a pleasant way to spend the day.
Though the above picture is a nice example, this particular home had a small area to work in, a basketball hoop that overhung the driveway (which I hit), a dog that always wanted out of the gate, and really poor access in and out of the house. Behind me, as I’m taking the picture, was a pile of ‘stuff’ that had to be moved so a hole could be cored outside for the exhaust and AC, and to top that off, the AC was installed in a bush.
Over the 18 months that I worked this last job, I’ve literally seen every manner of living you can imagine. From mansions, immaculate in every way, to slum-lord shit-holes I wouldn’t let a dog sleep in, as well as everything else in between. The vast majority of homes are relatively clean, often somewhat cluttered, but it’s always the extremes that get remembered.
Some people and their crap, who don’t and won’t move their things out of the way, who think a furnace swap takes up a footprint of about 20 square feet, who have little rat dogs that bark all @%#^ day, or indolent kids that need a good whuupin’, or both…, can really drive a guy nuts and make it hard to remember that you are a guest in their house, and that geting a new furnace is a really big deal to them, and expensive as well.
So, as the installer, there was always that a running battle in my head to maintian a level of respect for the owner, as you crawled over their stuff, and kindly relocated their fridges, and suitcases, and maintained a smile as you said “Ah, no problem, it’s part of what you are paying for anyways.” For me, I searched for an endearing quality of the owner I could focus on to help overlook the things they simply weren’t aware of, and I guess that’s service for ya…
It would make it a lot easier to take, mind you, if the pay were better. When you are coming from Union work out in the gas plants, this was not what you would call a great living wage. It paid the bills I guess, which is what I was looking for at the time, but there was no overtime, no benefits, and no future in which it looked like that was going to happen. Getting ahead was reserved for management alone as a study of the numbers would reveal.
It didn’t take me too long, maybe 8 months, to get my head around some of the numbers, and as I was doing so, really came to conclude for myself just how broken this industry was as a whole. The entire industry, not just the fledgling outfit I was working for, is structured in such as way as to remove as much liability from the owner as possible, and place it on the installer, who did the majority of the labour and got roughly 10% of the profit generated by their work.
First and foremost was the general pay structure. For the vast majority of installers, the pay is on a piece-work basis. Installers are either sub-contractors with their own businesses, or employees who negotiate a wage. As a sub, the job pays a flat rate — AC = this… furnace swap = that… AC/furnace swap combo = this and that. As an employee it pays a certain # of hours per install. This all sounds good if you say it fast, as generally the money offered looks as though you will make more that way.
What this does, however, is set up a series of incentives which are good for no one involved but the owner of the business. Paying piece-work removes any incentive on the part of the owner to get the bid right, as all the downside is transferred to the installer. Immediately, the owner doesn’t care if the house is a mess or clean as a whistle, whether it is a 4 level split (awful installs) or new home construction. A house is a house. A job a job. Extra time and effort, if needed, is put on the installer. “Some you win, some you loose.” is what I was told. Well, coming from a career in construction, that is a recipe for disaster as anyone knows not all jobs are the same… unless to you pass on the risk like above.
Then, there is the installers point of view. For them, any incentive to do a quality job is gone. The job pays the same looking nice, or looking like shit. As long as it works, and there are no callbacks, that’s all that matters. There is no incentive to practice your skills, or improve upon anything, unless it results in less time taken. Quality is not an incentive at all, outside of ensuring there isn’t a call-back later on, and this is another part that’s broken.
If there is a call-back, the installer has already been paid, so they are going back on their own dime. Fine, if the installer messed up, but that isn’t always the case. There are a hundred scenarios where the homeowner will call back for something that has nothing to do with the job that was done. Regardless of this, the installer will always arrive at the door thinking it is on their own dime, and their incentive is to fix it as quickly and cheaply as possible so they can leave.
So, how would you structure things so that the correct incentives were in place? Firstly, it think it would take staff that you can trust, and I imagine that is the reason the space is currently structured as it is. Everyone below management is incentivized to take all that they can from wherever they are so they can do side jobs for cash. A pocket of screws here, a little copper there,… because hard work isn’t rewarded with anything but more hard work.
Unless you come from outside the trade to see it, it is normal operating procedure, and for those coming up in the trade, like begets like. That’s just the way it is, so the culture continues unabated, and unaware of the structural disincentives. In fact, it appears to me, that the only real incentive is to get out from under as quickly as possible so you can make the kind of money you see slipping past you every day. So… there is no incentive to stay an installer either.
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And that is just the way it is. Anyone with talent has no incentive to stay, and moves to become independent as soon as possible so he can begin putting the sizable margin in this industry in his own pocket rather than someone else’s. Those without either the talent or drive remain installers for someone else and live the life granted them by their employer and their own lack of ambition.