[TheForge] Re: Iron & China

[theforge@mailman.qth.net]

an interesting example of outsourcing...
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SLC library's concrete was pre-formed in Mexico

For a concrete example of how U.S. jobs are being outsourced abroad, 
check out Salt Lake City's new public library.

    The 87,000-square-foot structure's facade was assembled entirely 
from concrete panels cast in Mexico. That's right, a construction site 
where much of the construction was done offshore.

  "The idea of manufacturing a building a couple of thousand miles away 
and then exporting it, well it was considered crazy," says Alejandro 
Fastag, director of Prefabricados Tecnicos de la Construccion SA, or 
Pretecsa, the company hired for the task.

    Instead of pouring concrete forms on site, Fastag's firm cast more 
than 2,000 individual panels at its plant in the Mexico City suburb of 
Atizapan de Zaragoza, then shipped them 2,350 miles north. Carried on 
mammoth flatbed trucks  --  a total of 140 truckloads for the Salt Lake 
City library  --  each panel was delivered in the order of its 
assembly. The average payload per shipment: 10 tons.

    "We're talking about a six-story building that leans and curves, and 
warps and twists," says Brian Frasier, project manager for closely held 
HHI Corp., the prime contractor on the site. "It was a very complicated 
structure. But Pretecsa's panels showed up on time, ready to mount."

    By the time the $65 million library opened last year, Pretecsa had 
poured almost  4 million pounds of concrete into a complex design in 
which no two precast panels were precisely alike. While the panels were 
cast with Mexican labor, local workers were hired to assemble them on 
the building lot.

    The practice of "panelization"  --  making components in a factory 
and then assembling them at the building site  --  has been gaining 
ground in the housing and commercial construction industry for years. 
Making components for U.S. projects outside the U.S., using non-U.S. 
labor, is an evolutionary step for the building industry, and one 
that's expected to continue, particularly when foreign suppliers offer 
more competitive prices.

    In Salt Lake City, Pretecsa was tapped for the project partly 
because one precast company in the area had closed recently, and 
another was about to. The library's contractor, HHI, was already 
acquainted with Pretecsa when it began trying to line up a source for 
the project's precast concrete. "We contacted precast contractors in 
Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas, but they didn't feel they could do it 
cheaply enough, once you factored in their shipping costs," says Steve 
Crane, the project manager for VCBO Architecture, the local firm that 
teamed with Boston architect Moshe Safdie on the project. "Pretecsa's 
low-cost labor made up for the higher shipping costs, and they came in 
the cheapest," Crane says.

    Going across the border for building components is likely to grow 
more common in coming years.

    The economics of building offshore have to do mainly with the high 
cost of skilled labor in the U.S., where workers who pour concrete 
"slip forms" rarely make less than $20 an hour. Migrant work gangs  
composed of green-card-holding Mexican immigrants have become 
increasingly common on large construction sites, especially in states 
where unions are weak.

    For sophisticated jobs, such as the library, using Mexican labor at 
the source is an obvious attraction. Pouring panels for the Salt Lake 
City project, Pretecsa says, took more than 163,000 man hours  - -  
topping $3 million in U.S.-equivalent labor costs  --  not counting 
materials and shipping. Pretecsa's fee for all its services, including 
materials: $2.5 million.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune, The
Publish Date: 2004-03-04
On Monday, March 15, 2004, at 02:30 PM, Mike wrote: