When your crew is working in trenches 5, 10 or 20 feet below ground, you want to know the shoring and shielding equipment you’ve installed to protect them is doing its job. Pre-use inspection The first step is to ensure the equipment is in optimal operating condition before it arrives at the jobsite. “The problem [...]
The City of Oceanside has broken ground on a new $67 million water purification project that positions the city to become the first in San Diego County to provide recycled drinking water by 2022. The City says the Pure Water Oceanside project will purify recycled water to create a new, local source of high-quality drinking [...]
The last time you negotiated a construction contract, how much time did you spend on the "Force Majeure" clause? Do your contracts even have such a clause? The global impacts of the Coronavirus / COVID-19 ("the coronavirus") outbreak might now put these contract provisions at the center of attention. Generally, a Force Majeure event is [...]
Celebrating 44 years of service to the heavy construction industry, ECA hosted its annual Installation of Officers at the spect acular Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel. The ECA Executive Board, under the direction of President Brendan Slagle of J.F. Shea Construction, was sworn in for their term, before a full house marking the momentous occasion in [...]
The federal government is in the middle of the most significant regulatory rollback in the history of the Republic, irritating the current administration's critics and heartening business owners around the country. But it won't make much difference for California contractors who are still in the thrall of the most challenging state regulatory environment in the [...]
The Workers' Compensation Appeals Board (WCAB) started the new decade by announcing a significant shift in its final rules of practice and procedure. While the changes have been kicking around since August 2017, the agency filed the new requirements with the Secretary of State on December 17, published them on December 31, and they [...]
I don't know about you, but I have had about as much gloom and doom as I need for a while, so this month I thought we might hunt down some good news for the members of the Engineering Contractors Association and other industry friends who enjoy our magazine. It ain't easy, brother, but the [...]
Turning the page on the new calendar is something California employers do with a certain uneasy sense of anticipation as they find out what new laws went into effect January 1st. We will be reporting on these changes in how you operate your business within the boundaries of state statutes, but one of the New [...]
With a new decade underway, there is no way to escape a look back at important stuff, and, in this case, the lookback comes from the federal Bureau of Labor Standards statistics with a review of the nearly steady improvement in worker safety. As with most government reports, there is a lag between when data [...]
You may have noticed, change is in the air…especially, the changes in California state law as it affects the construction industry. While we have covered the strengthened apprenticeship requirements heralded under Assembly Bill 3018, there are other bills (now laws), AB 1768 and AB 695, that tighten prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements well beyond the [...]
