Yards lose workers when customers come calling

Home Channel News, May 1, 2000 by Brae Canlen

Calif. dealers see poachers everywhere

PARAMOUNT, CALIF. -- California lumberyard dealers are feeling uneasy these days when they see a customer locked in conversation with one of their employees: the worker might be discussing the starting date of his new job.

"I used to be able to pick up yard workers from [my] contractors," said Kevin Lindsay, wistfully recalling the good old days of abundant labor. Now the pro dealer, based here, is watching his employees defect to condo managers, plasterers, and anyone else who walks into his lumberyard, ostensibly to purchase building materials. Within the past few months, Lindsay Lumber has lost an inside salesman to a door installer and the assistant manager of the mill shop to a drywall contractor. Lindsay almost forfeited his lead mill guy to a contractor who repairs termite damage. "I literally bought him back," reported Lindsay, who matched the competing offer.

Although this trend is not confined to the West Coast, lumberyard poaching is prevalent throughout the Golden State, where a healthy economy has made it easy for workers to say sayonara for a few more bucks an hour. Employees who moonlight for contractors or do odd jobs on their own frequently find themselves tempted by greener pastures. While competing lumberyards traditionally try not to hire each others' workers, their customers show no such reluctance.

Eric Roberts of Sunnyvale Lumber has lost a yard foreman and a salesman to the same framing company. "Yesterday they tried to take my assistant manager, too," reported Roberts, who was interviewed in mid-April. (The assistant manager declined the job offer.) After plucking Sunnyvale's yard foreman, the framer had the audacity to ask Roberts how he planned to keep up his delivery schedule now that his manager was gone.

"If one of my suppliers hired one of my guys, I'd cease to buy from him," Roberts said. But the northern California pro dealer has little recourse when one of his customers conducts a raid. "I can get mad at them, but I'm not going to stop selling to them," Roberts conceded.

John Saunders, president of the Lumber Association of California and Nevada, also takes it on the chin. When customers carry off workers from his Campbell, Calif., yard, Economy Lumber, "we let them know we don't like it -- in general terms," Saunders reported. As a countermeasure, he and his management team stress the value of Economy health insurance, retirement and profit sharing plans -- none of which is typically offered by contractor firms.

The strategy already has changed the mind of one employee who gave his notice. Saunders hopes it will work on another worker now being courted. "We keep telling him it's a cyclical thing," said Saunders, referring to the feast-or-famine nature of the building trades. "We want to make sure he looks at the whole picture."

In many instances, myopic employees see the error of their ways once the rainy season starts and the jobs dry up. Augie Venezia, general manager of Fairfax Lumber and Hardware near San Francisco, has lost several yard workers and truck drivers who later returned seeking employment. Venezia turned them away. "We have a policy against it," he stated.

Some dealers are taking a hard line against poaching even before it happens. Charlie Cain, general manager of Mill Valley Lumber, doesn't stand around wringing his hands when a contractor spends too long chatting with one of his employees. After the customer leaves, Cain conducts his own t[hat{e}]te-[hat{a}]-t[hat{e}]te. "I ask straight up what they were talking about," said Cain, who often suspects nefarious motives. And sometimes he is right. His workers have been approached about jobs, Cain reported, but he hasn't lost one to a contractor yet.