By Debra Stiles
President/Controller
HCF Inc. 
Egg Harbor Township, NJ

Our commercial flooring company is family-owned, with longtime community ties in southern New Jersey. For 25 years I worked behind the scenes, running the business office and learning the business to the best of my ability.

In the Atlantic City area, we have installed or upgraded floorcovering in entertainment venues like the Hard Rock, Oceans and other hotels and casinos. And throughout the region we have worked as part of a contracting cooperative to bid for public projects, including school districts, where we have been able to provide flooring jobs with good wages for our crew under the prevailing wage system. 

This means that we comply with the state’s standards to meet locally determined “prevailing” wage rates, so that our employees receive a living wage with health insurance benefits. This is the right thing to do and a no-brainer for HCF.

We are fortunate to have the clientele and relationships with general contractors that we’ve developed over the years—as well as our membership in the Carpenters union and the INSTALL training and marketing alliance. The ties we have built have helped HCF build a solid reputation for reliability and quality.

A year ago, I took over as the owner of HCF and began to look at ways to grow. My main focus has been to expand into the broader commercial market because it would give us a better ability to thrive during ebbs and flows in the economy. Another big consideration is, we have a really good crew; all of them trained through apprenticeship, and we feel an obligation to keep them busy throughout the year. Expanding into new markets can do that and even help us increase our workforce.

My estimator and I have spent quite a bit of time on our expansion efforts. Some of the projects we have bid on include restaurants, retail stores and business offices. Since we are a smaller company, we have been able to bid competitively over the years. But we are hitting a brick wall in the private commercial market. In most cases, we haven’t even been able to come close in our bids.

We have to ask, what kind of labor are these contractors using? It seems clear that many of the bidders we are forced to compete with are hiring workers for daily cash wages that are far below what we pay. In many cases it is not even worth it for us to bid on these projects. I’m a numbers person, so I know, and I can only imagine what those bidders’ books look like.

We’ve even turned down jobs, knowing that there is no way the jobs can be done well for the amount being allocated for the flooring subcontract. Certainly, the workers on those projects deserve better pay than they’re getting.

I don’t know what the underlying answers are to this problem, but I think it starts at the top. Owners need to make sure their contractors operate above-board, and that bidders know this in advance. Companies like ours that operate honestly deserve a better shot at the projects that will keep us working.