SEARCH
Get the Latest on Pulte Homes |
|
 |
|
Keep up with the latest news about Pulte Homes, one of the nation’s largest home builders, on Building Justice’s updated website, http://poorlybuiltbypulte.info/. The site also enables homeowners to complete a survey about their experiences with Pulte.
Building Justice is a partnership of the Painters and Allied Trades union (IUPAT), the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA), the AFL-CIO, Pulte homeowners, community members and elected officials to improve conditions at Pulte developments.
Workers in three Western states employed by contractors hired by Pulte report unpaid wages and overtime, pressure to work through break periods and pressure to bypass safety precautions. They report sexual harassment and discrimination on the job. Some workers also report that appropriate construction materials, safety equipment and potable drinking water are not available.
Last month, 50 angry workers and supporters delivered “lemon awards” to a Pulte executive at a Nevada State Contractors Board meeting. The awards followed release of a new report, “Poorly Built by Pulte, No Different at Del Webb.” The report is based on surveys of 872 Pulte and Del Webb homeowners from Nevada, Arizona and California.
According to the report, 63 percent of respondents complained that their homes had construction defects, and another 43 percent of respondents reported they would not buy another Pulte or Del Webb home. Click here to read the full report.
To learn more about the Building Justice Campaign, click here and here.
You can link your website to the revised Poorly Built by Pulte site here.
2 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
After months of protesting for-profit home builders it must be obvious that these major companies will not change! Why is this the case?
The drive for profit maximization of the owners, the salary and bonus of the managers and contractors is dependent on profit maximization, the drive for quick sales in competitive markets, the collapse of the housing market, etc. all are factors that create the conditions described in this article.
With the knowledge of the skilled workers and the organizational power of the labor unions, it is the most opportune time for organized labor to establish it’s own national quality and affordable home building corporation.
The quality of the labor, the quality of the materials, and by driving out greed in the decision making, and by consulting with consumers, new communities of housing could be designed and produced.
The opportunies for creative design using new energy efficient technologies and materials are now bringing affordable and quality housing back into the market.
Now that the UAW has become a 51% of Chrysler(?), and now that auto companies forced the UAW to take on VEBA retirement funding management, so it is entirely appropriat the the unions become their own employers.
That is worker owned and worker managed businesses will have to be established out of necessity. Capitalism is now bankrupt and collapsed and no longer has “living wage” jobs for millions of people. Millions of jobs have gone overseas as manufacturing has left the U.S.
These jobs are not coming back… perhaps ever… because under the capitalist model, the investors have to see big profits in the business plan before they will invest.
Worker owned/managed enterprises have become a major means
of economic survival for workers in Argentina, Mexico, etc.
See the DVD movie “The Take” in which shows workers in Argentina
taking over factories abandoned by hundreds of employers, and built up
viable businesses.
It is very important to establish the permanent legal basis for these
new economic institutions so that these entities will not be taken away
from the workers. Worker equity in economic enterprises must become
an essential principle that cannot be violated by big corporations politically connected.
The industrial re-awkening of the U.S. (and other countries) could become a transitional economic force to end the entire system of unending exploitation and war.
The worker owned/managed principle could be extended to many industries where workers are especially exploited.
The trucking industry. Restaurants and restaurant chains. Major infrastructure construction companies (roads, bridges, etc.).
Does anyone out there know who the really good builders are - meaning the ones who hire ONLY Americans and those who are in this country legally, and companies that pay fair living wages and guarantee safe working conditions for their employees? Is there a company out there that does this?