Episode Transcript
Kirk: Welcome to Talk the TAUC, the podcast that goes beyond the jobsite and into the conversation shaping union construction’s future. I’m your host, Kirk Westwood.
Today, we’re diving into the idea of building fast with confidence. Joining me is Connor Watumull, co-founder and CEO of Miter, a platform that’s changing how contractors manage people, projects, and payments. But this conversation isn’t about software. It’s about possibility. From the Empire State Building to the Golden Gate Bridge, we used to build iconic infrastructure at unbelievable speed. So what happened? And how do we get back there without compromising the values that define union construction?
Kirk: Awesome, Connor. Thank you so much for joining us today on Talk the TAUC podcast.
Connor: Thanks for having me. Really excited.
Kirk: I am as well. To kick it off, the first question I ask everyone is what is the last song you got stuck in your head?
Connor: Oh, man. I think it has to be 12 to 12 by this new band called Sombr. It’s this 20-year-old New Yorker who has an old school vibe, but in general it makes me feel very old because he’s 20 years old.
Kirk: I’m going to have to look him up because it’s not common that someone will throw one at me that hasn’t also been stuck in my head. I’m very susceptible to earworms.
Connor: Oh, yeah. Don’t listen to it. It’ll be bad for you.
Kirk: Good to know. Let’s just kick off with the big question. Why does it feel like construction has gotten slower over the last few decades?
Connor: I think the big reason is because it has gotten slower, and it’s also gotten a lot more expensive. There are some crazy examples of that.
One of my favorites is the New York Subway. If you live around New York, you probably like to make fun of the recent Second Avenue extension project, which took 10 years to build 2 miles of subway, which is insane when you consider the original 9 mile subway was built in 1900 and got built in 4 years. So more than 100 years ago, we built 9 miles of subway in 4 years, and today it takes 10 years to build 2 miles. It’s an especially extreme example, but the data as a whole supports the general idea that that construction’s getting slower.
If you look at data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the NBER, which is the best data that we have, they show a big divergence in construction productivity, which is output per hour work, and the construction industry versus other industries. So manufacturing, agriculture are actually getting a lot more output per labor hour today than they were 50 years ago, but construction’s pretty flat, and there’s some of the data that it’s actually suggesting that it’s declining,
Kirk: Which is completely insane. It’s a little frustrating. There are lots of theories swirling around about what’s going on. When I talked to my boss about this, he’s like, oh well, yeah, but back then people were dying. Safety has changed and this has changed. It’s not fair to compare. That’s probably true. There are so many theories. What are some of yours?
Connor: First of all, I think we probably wouldn’t choose to go back in time. Things have gotten a lot better in certain ways, but it’s true that paperwork, rules, and regulations are one of the bigger factors.
There are a lot of factors, by the way. No one really has definitively said this is what’s happening. But a lot of people and a lot of our contractors we work with would agree that it’s a lot of paperwork and rules.
That isn’t just a vibe that things have gotten. Regulation has got more intense. The US legal code is literally orders of magnitude bigger. If you just measure how many rules there are or how many words there are in federal or state statutes, it's because laws are created way faster than they’re deleted.
You rarely hear about us removing laws or removing rules. You hear a lot about new rules being created. A lot of these rules impact contractors more than they do other industries.
A lot of them actually slow down the construction process itself, so they actually impact what goes on in the job site. Others are back office impediments, so they just cause the back office to be continually stubbing their toe dealing with paperwork.
Then there are others that just make it harder to do business, which also impacts the speed at which we can build things. There are just a lot more hoops to jump through to build anything.
But again, a lot of these hoops are really good. Construction really has gotten so much safer. Workers and communities do have a lot more say in what’s getting built and how it’s getting built, but you can’t really deny that the hoops do slow down the building process.
Kirk: Funny. You’re talking about the laws that get created much easier than they get deleted. I think we’ve all seen this. The Internet memes or the lists of random laws in these places.
The one that I always remember is it’s illegal to tie your horse to City Hall in Salt Lake City. I understand why that law’s in place. That one’s relatively self-explanatory, but it’s illegal to do this or that in these places because we make new rules but we don’t get rid of the old ones. Sometimes we’re trying to dance to a couple of different musicians at the same time.
Connor: It’s like our gear closet. We add a lot to our gear closet at home, but very rarely do we say we don’t need these things. So sometimes that’s probably necessary.
Kirk: It’s funny that same thing. When I first started my first podcast 8–9 years ago, we didn’t have a podcast studio. We opened up our gear closet and we’re like, well, this camera will still work and this mic will still work. This soundboard will still… I mean, they’re not good, but for the purpose of a podcast it’s fine. All the stuff, the relics that we hang on to.
Connor: Oh yeah.
Kirk: Speaking of history, let’s ground some of this in history. When I was preparing for this conversation, I was going around the office and I was like, hey, tell me big engineering projects that you can think of and doing different research.
One was the big dig in Boston, which took 40 years. For the record, I get that one. That one’s a pretty incredible thing. No hate on that.
Connor: Tore up the city.
Kirk: They tore up the city. They dug under a river. It’s pretty impressive. But the Panama Canal which cut a continent in half took 10 years, and that feels pretty fast. Many people died. It was a cursed project. It was 10 years without permission. We just showed up with bulldozers.
Then we have the Pentagon which—I only learned this for this podcast—was designed in three days and built in 491 days during World War II. That’s insane.
What were some of the other ones? The Empire State Building was built in 416 days. The Space Needle was built in 400 days. The Space Needle might be a little bit different than the others because it’s more of a decoration than a building. I’ve eaten at the top of it; it’s lovely, but what changed?
The Pentagon, which was this edifice of construction, was built in a year and a couple of months, which is like 17 miles or some odd 400 days.
Connor: It’s pretty incredible. There are lots of examples of this. The bridges where we live in the Bay Area. The Golden Gate Bridge was built really fast, and you just have all these examples.
These days it’s very, very hard to come up with examples like that. They do exist, but they seem rare. Hard for anyone today to answer the question with 100% accuracy because we weren’t there. We have to read about what life was like in the 1800s or the early 1900s. But it’s pretty wild reading about those.
There’s a great book, for example, on the Brooklyn Bridge. The whole project was run really by these very smart engineers, the Roeblings. Basically, they were not accountable to a lot of things.
You mentioned that, hey, we just showed up in Panama and just with no permission started building. it wasn’t quite Panama in Brooklyn, but the Roeblings were not really accountable to a lot of people. They were loosely accountable to a single city agency that was set up to oversee the project. All that agency really cared about was that public dollars were getting spent responsibly.
The Roeblings would meet with the agency every month, tell them how things were going, and show them their receipts and expense reports, but that was it. The agencies that we have to get permission from today—environmental reviews, OSHA, certified payroll, workers’ comp reporting—all those agencies didn’t exist yet.
Even work authorization, which is can you legally work in the US, this I-9 process, E-Verify, even those basic work authorization processes and systems weren’t formalized until much later in the century, so the 1900s and 2000s. There were essentially way fewer people that you needed to get permission from to build. Way less of a back office that you had to manage the building process. So you can just build.
Now, it wasn’t all great. We idolized a lot of these projects, but in the Brooklyn Bridge project, specifically, they set up kaizens, these huge pressurized containers so the workers could actually build underneath the East River, and the workers who went down there got the bends. Would we go back in time and rebuild the Panama Canal or the Brooklyn Bridge or the Pentagon in the same way? Probably not, but there was a lot less paperwork for sure.
Kirk: Absolutely. Here in TAUC we have the Zero Injury Safety Awards every year. Just to talk about how the zero injury philosophy has changed a lot since the Industrial Revolution. It used to be that someone dying on the work site was just the cost of doing business. You mourned them for a minute if you mourned them at all and you moved on. It was just that people were replaceable. We’ve very gratefully and thankfully changed that mentality, but along with it back to the top, we’ve added so many more rules while not getting rid of the old ones, and it’s created some interesting bottlenecks.
Connor: Absolutely.
Kirk: So were those projects of yesteryear better or worse? Obviously, we’ve talked about the safety and the collateral damage to the workers. But what has changed from the lean paperwork environment? Is it better? Is it worse? Is it different? What has changed from the paperwork to build things?
Connor: Better and worse. All is equal. We want to build fast. The faster we build, the better off we are both as citizens of a society. [...] pretty great (I think) to have high speed rail connecting major cities in the US, or a better grid and a lower electric bill, or more housing. We want to build things quickly. By the way, it’s a lot better for our industry, too. The faster we can build things, the more work there is because it makes sense to build more.
On that dimension, the projects of the past really were better, and all as equal we’d prefer to build fast. But again, I don’t think we choose to go back in time. I think there are very few people who would advocate that yes, we would build the Empire State Building again and lose dozens of lives. I just don’t think that’s a trade-off that we would make at this point.
We made huge strides in working conditions, safety, and wages, and it’s tough to argue that we should increase speed and sacrifice those things. So better and worse, tough to say on net, but I don’t think anyone argues that we’re at the optimal trade-off point, and that there’s no room for improvement.
Kirk: So it seems that construction management, from what we’re talking about, in yesteryear was about materials and deadlines, and now it seems to be more about people and paperwork. Is that a fair statement?
Connor: I think totally fair. Before you can even build, you’ve got to do a paperwork marathon. There are permits and zoning and insurance certificates. You’ve got to set up tax accounts wherever you’re building. There’s a lot more paperwork and it zaps the energy of the industry.
We work with so many contractors who are just getting started and who maybe operate in one state or one trade, and they suffer from compliance anxiety. They’re less ambitious because they say, I don’t want to go into this new state because I just don’t know what I’ll have to do. I’m scared about the laws that I don’t know about, and I don’t have the back office who’s set up to do them.
I think it’s limiting the scale at which we can build things, the scale at which contractors can achieve. You see it in rising overhead costs as well. The back offices of our industry are getting bigger.
Kirk: Backing up a little bit, if you just walk into that back office, what does the back office have to deal with before a single brick gets laid? What’s that process look like?
Connor: We talked about getting permission. You’ve got to get a lot of people’s approval to build. Then even once you get that approval, there’s a lot of paperwork to line up.
People talk a lot about environmental review. If you’re doing a big infrastructure project, you need to make sure that you’re not going to destroy trees or rare species. By the way, a lot of those regulations are good.
I’m from a town that, in my opinion, destroyed too many trees along its way to urbanization, but I think we’ve gone overboard in many situations. So once you get the permit, maybe once you get approval from the local city council, the housing authority to build, then the real paperwork starts.
You have to get licensed and bonded often, depending on where you are. Maybe you’ve got to set up tax accounts because the taxes in Ohio are really different from the ones in Pennsylvania. Even within Pennsylvania, you have different authorities.
You’ve got union agreements, certified payroll requirements. You have to set up a safety program, make sure you can file with OSHA. That’s not even taking into account all the financial controls. So onboard your subs, make sure they’re compliant, and respond to RFIs. There’s quite a bit of paperwork that you either have to do or at least get prepared to do before shovels ever hit the ground.
Kirk: Would it be fair to call this a choke point to progress in moving forward?
Connor: I think it is. Again, we talked to so many contractors who are earlier in their careers and just say, my business is big enough. I don’t want to get any bigger because it would be more paperwork and headache, and I’d have to hire a bigger back office. So just draining the collective energy of our industry matters a lot.
Also, the proof is in the pudding. If you just look at where future infrastructure is getting built, there’s a common theme. There’s one thing that Texas and China have in common, and there are not many things those two places have common.
Kirk: That is quite the bold statement. There’s something that Texas and China have in common.
Connor: Yeah, what is it? What do Texas and China have in common? There are a lot fewer barriers to building. As a result, as a consequence, both of those places are where the future is getting built.
Most of us are aware that China’s ranking out infrastructure at a pace that we have never before seen in history. In the US, nowhere are we building faster than China, or in general we’re not building faster than China, but there are places that are building much faster than others.
In the US we see infrastructure getting built at places like Texas and Arizona, where there are a lot fewer rules. We have data centers, advanced manufacturing, grid scale, utilities, semiconductors. There’s a pretty common theme.
Now we’d love to measure, are we sacrificing some of those important rights and principles around safety and equity to get infrastructure built quickly? But it’s pretty clear that the infrastructure of the future is getting built in places like Texas and China.
Kirk: We said that no one wants to go back in time, nobody wants to go back to the old days. Environmental impact studies in a lot of cases are good. The safety standards that we have put into place are good. But how do we strike a balance between the choke point of paperwork and programs and systems that we have put in place to still keep up with our peers and keep up with progress that our society demands?
Connor: Again, I don’t think many would argue that all regulation and rules should go away. A lot of the regulation has been incredible for us and society and workers. Certainly, the TAUC community is a testament and one of the big advocates for ways that construction’s gotten a lot better.
I think to better balance the trade-offs though, two big opportunities come to mind. The first is better regulation. In a lot of cases, that means more regulation, actually, like when something’s not happening right, adding rules can sometimes make sense. Maybe more often, though, it means less regulation or different regulation.
I’d love to see more standardized regulation across jurisdictions and localities. One very unique thing about the US is that the rules that you’re subject to actually vary a lot based on where you are. So standardizing regulation across jurisdictions (I think) would reduce a lot of the complexity and paperwork in the back office.
Personally, I think a lot of us in the industry would love to see more of a focus on transparency and accountability. So making sure that folks are held to account and that their operations are transparent, rather than actually prescribing ways in which you have to do things.
Then, similar to what we were talking about before, I’d love to see governments and agencies more regularly audit their rules and delete the ones that no longer make sense. You’ve mentioned that, hey, you can no longer tie up a horse to city hall. There are tons of rules like that that made a ton of sense back in 1920, but if you look at things in 2025 maybe this is no longer the way that we should do things. Maybe we don’t delete that rule, but we update it and say, hey, we’ve got to make the 2025 or 2030 version of it now that society’s quite different.
The second big opportunity is (I think) making it easier for contractors to comply with the rules and regulations that exist. The public sector and agencies have a huge role to play. Make it easy. Make it easy on contractors to comply.
First of all, make the rules simple. Often, rules are legalese and you’ve got to hire lawyers to understand them and understand how to comply with them. The public sector should make laws extremely simple to understand, and then make it really simple to prove your compliance.
Would love to see more automated ways of compliance reporting. Often this does not exist. Contractors have to send in literal PDF documents to certain agencies that may or may not actually get checked, but you’ve got to do it anyway.
I think the public sector has a huge role to play in simplifying rules and regulations, and then making reporting easier. Then the private sector has a role to play as well that can help contractors better understand the laws but also create guardrails in the business so that you can comply with regulations, improve your compliance without breaking the bank, and also without spending a lot of brain energy doing it when you run your business. These are back office systems that automatically keep you compliant without you needing to hire more people.
Kirk: Obviously, neither of us has any hand on regulation itself. In our ecosystem, we can’t change the rules. It doesn’t sound like the issue is the rules itself but just how we can manage it, how we can adapt to those rules.
Connor: Certainly, I do think in many cases the rules should change, but the rules will exist and rules are good. Again, I think we should all celebrate just the incredible strides that we’ve made on safety, working conditions, benefits, and even the environment. Without rules we wouldn’t have made those strides. Absolutely the rules are going to exist, but it’s about how we manage it. It’s ways that we enforce the rules that I think can change a lot.
Kirk: I like that. Let’s circle back to those big historic projects. We talked about the Canal, the Pentagon, the bridge. What are the lessons that we can take from how those got done so quickly and bring that to our modern era?
Connor: One commonality between a lot of the projects that got done crazy fast was they were controlled and run by basically one accountable design build contractor, who had the authority and the scale to build a big supply chain, and make both design decisions and project management decisions.
Those contractors were often massive and big enough, and did enough of the big projects to line up suppliers, subs, and big workforces. They found ways to standardize the procedures and supply chains involved in building. It’s just this power of integration and scale that is really important.
By the way, scale is really hard if you are subject to very different conditions across jurisdictions. Again, back to standardizing some of these rules and regulations, having a patchwork of regulations really does limit scale and does limit us moving quickly.
Another big observation is that the inevitable cost of building—by the way, there are costs of building; building things is disruptive—those costs become more acceptable when you realize just how beneficial these projects are to the economy and society.
I think the leaders of a lot of the big, historic infrastructure mega projects were doing cost benefit analysis a little differently than we are today. They were more willing to accept some of the societal costs, knowing that the pay-off to having a great new bridge, to having more housing was really big. They were willing to accept some of those costs and some of the disruption.
The final observation, just that when you read about the Canal or the Pentagon, the bridge is that you just had this feeling that maybe 100 years ago that building infrastructure was just cooler. I don’t have a way of saying that, but all of society was celebrating these projects.
For example, when they completed the Brooklyn Bridge, people lost their minds. There were parties in the streets, there were conventions. It was days of celebration. These days, we don’t see a lot of that. You don’t really see—
Kirk: Well, because I have cable. There are other things to watch. But yeah, I get your point. There’s less public celebration of infrastructure.
Connor: There is, so how do we make infrastructure cool and worthy of celebration again.
Kirk: That’s a really good point. Now, if those projects, if the Brooklyn Bridge, if the Pentagon had to go through today’s paperwork gauntlet, what effect would we see? How much different would it have been?
Connor: So tough to say. It’s a great thought experiment. If you were to put the Roeblings or Robert Moses in today’s environment, then put them through the environmental impact review process or put them into today’s environment, what would happen? I’d imagine they’d have a much tougher time. Frankly, I’m not sure either of them would’ve gotten into the business. They would’ve gone and done something else.
That’s another big factor. Are we limiting the number of people who want to work in construction because there’s just a lot more red tape and paperwork to get stuff done? I think if they were building and if they were in this business, I think they’d have a much tougher time.
Kirk: It’s funny. You can compare that to so many things there. The barrier to entry for cool projects is a lot higher. Some people know, some people don’t. My first career was in Union, but was in the film industry. There’s this really cool interview with Kevin Smith. Are you familiar with Kevin Smith?
Connor: No, I’m not.
Kirk: Okay. Kevin Smith is a great indie film director, very big in the comic book space. He owns a comic book store, and he’s big in the comic book space. He was told by some of his fans like, man, you should make the Green Arrow movie, a big budget, $300 million movie. He said, absolutely not. I don’t want it. They’re like, what do you mean? You would do so great.
He’s like, listen. I make movies that cost $1–$20 million. Because when you make a movie with $1–$20 million, they write you a check, they pat you on the head and they say, see you when the movie’s done. When they write you a $300 million check, they want to have a say. They have lots of opinions on how it’s going to go. I don’t want a $300 million problem. I want a $20 million problem, because a $20 million problem is me hanging out with my friends, celebrating the streets, and making a movie. But a $300 million movie is a headache.
Connor: Oh man. That resonates so much. It sounds just like so many contractors we work with. They got into the business because they like doing a good job for their customers and hanging out with a small set of people. They’re like if we had to get much bigger, we’d have to set up a massive office and we basically become HR, where you have to hire a lot more people.
I think the lesson is the same. How do we make scale easier? How do we make these bigger projects more fun, more connected to the actual process of creating and building, and less on all of the paperwork along the way?
Kirk: So if paperwork is that choke point, what does a world look like if we figure that out? If we manage it better and we make a $300 million movie look like a $20 million movie as far as ease of creation, what does that world look like?
Connor: I think we’ll get much better and faster at building things. We can get much more ambitious about building infrastructure in the US, which again has so many important knock-on effects on economic growth and the ways that we can live in society. We’ll spend less time in traffic. We’ll spend more time in beautiful environments, whether those are urban environments or rural environments and more time with our friends and families. The knock-on effects of making it easier to build are just immense.
Again, as we’re doing cost benefit analysis, I’m not sure we’re doing the benefit part of the analysis right as like the return to these big projects are just so high that I think we should be taking that into account.
Kirk: Then to just throw this in, does that mean that technology and AI and all of these things that everyone’s heard about, is that going to come in and replace the headache, replace the people, free up the people? What does that next step look like?
Connor: It’s interesting. A lot of the anxiety around technology and AI is very rightly focused on. Hey, what does this do to folks who may be impacted? At the same time, there are industries that are starving for talent, so how do you square those two things of, hey we don’t have enough electricians. We’re starving for a lot of the skilled trades. At the same time, we’re rightly anxious about jobs that may be impacted by AI.
I think similar to other technology revolutions, it basically allows people to focus on higher value things. Some people would. I don’t think a lot of people today would love pushing plows and agriculture. That was like a huge job. A lot of people were pushing plows hundreds of years ago, and I think we’re happy we’re not doing that.
That’s true for the plow. It’s true for lots of jobs where today we would say, we don’t want that job. That’s actually not a good job. Similar to prior technological revolutions, I think the AI revolution, we’ve got to make sure that we responsibly go through the transition, ensure that folks have work to do. But I think if it does a job, a lot of the technology in AI will melt away in the background and help a lot of us focus on our core business.
I really hope more people consider joining the trades because we need people to build really important projects, and there’s a lot of work in society that maybe is not worth spending time on anymore. I’m hopeful that we’ll collaborate and technology will help us build infrastructure with safety, speed, and ambition.
Kirk: Amazing. I completely agree. I think that it’s been a great conversation. I think that tech is the answer. I think that we do need to figure out a way to get back to building big things fast, making it fun, and developing the world so we can catch up with those peers. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
Connor: No, this was a great conversation. I’d say that this is a focus of ours and something that we’re excited about over the next 5–10 years.
Kirk: Well everyone, Connor’s going to be actually doing a webinar with us here on October 16th talking about some of his products and how they can help with a lot of this, so please check us out on October 21st. We’re very excited for that, answering some of the questions about what Miter does and how it can help with a lot of this. But thank you so much for joining us today.
Connor: Thanks so much for having me. Had a great time.
Kirk: Awesome. Connor, thanks for sharing your perspective. We talk a lot on this show about where the industry is going, but if conversations like this remind us we’ve done great things before, and with the right alignment, tools, and trust, we can do it again. If you want to learn more about Connor and the work Miter’s doing, visit miter.co. And as always, subscribe to Talk the TAUC on your favorite platform to stay connected with the voices building tomorrow’s workforce today.
