Happy holidays

Words: John Smith Jr.

The MCAA staff is extremely busy this time of year Jeff and Tim are spending a lot of time preparing for the World of Masonry in January.

We have shortened the conference by one day. We did this as a result of the survey last year. We have a lot of seminars and events for the three days. Take a look at the information and register. We added an additional hotel in a modest price range to encourage you to bring a larger group to the convention. We offer a lot of seminars that would help your staff and company in the next year.

As far as Masonry in the country, most companies are reporting continuing growth. Profits are still slim but the opportunities are growing. We continue to address Manpower issues with NCCER as we have seen area’s that are starting to have difficulty finding qualified craftsmen. We just hired a new staff person Terry Ruppel to begin our initiative to work hand in hand with the high schools, career centers and community colleges in the states of KY and TN. He will work to encourage high school programs in the trades and become their liaison and sponsor with NCCER so they can credential their students. Credentialing their students will give them the ability to track their training and show competence on both the written and performance side.

We are also working heavily on the silica issue. Our coalitions busy evaluating the new rule and I can assure you from what we have initially discovered of the rule, it will dramatically change the masonry job-site and create a new burden on mason contractors with paper work and new liability exposure. We are hopeful that we can get changes made to the rule. The proposed PEL of .50 is not a practical or feasible limit we can meet. Our studies have showed that wet cutting can’ get consistently below .8-.9. Look for more information on our website on this issue we need all mason contractors to work together to try to get changes made to this rule. It will make compliance with the rule extremely costly and quite complicated.

Please enjoy your Holiday and make time to register for the convention.

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