Solidarity Sunday: Driving out the Snakes
St. Patrick's Day is Tuesday. It was fun to see so many people taking the weekend to celebrate. Maybe you were among them.
St. Patrick is Ireland's patron saint who, as legend has it, drove the snakes out of Ireland. It's a legend about confronting threats that are quietly spreading and pushing them out through persistence, awareness and leadership.
Speaking of snakes…
Across the residential and service sectors, particularly among MEP contractors, private equity firms have been rapidly slithering in, buying contractors and rolling them into large investment platforms. Analysts note that these trades are particularly attractive to investors because demand is steady and the industry is highly fragmented, making it ideal for consolidation strategies.
While it can be attractive to investors, private equity is no friend to the worker.
What Workers Experience After a Buyout
When private equity acquires a contractor, the trucks usually keep the same logo and the work continues much as before, at least on the surface.
But inside the company, workers often notice changes quickly.
Decisions that used to be made locally start coming from corporate offices hundreds of miles away. Productivity dashboards and margin targets start appearing in management/staff conversations. Support head count gets cut, and service technicians sometimes feel increasing pressure to upsell equipment or hit new revenue goals.
The culture quickly shifts from diagnosing problems and helping customers to meeting weekly sales targets or pushing equipment replacements. Check out some Reddit threads and you'll see hundreds of places where workers are talking about this. As one HVAC technician put it the job can start to feel like "selling equipment instead of figuring out problems."
For workers who entered the trades to master a craft, it can feel like a different career than the one they signed up for.
That Chaos Brings Opportunity
In that kind of volatile environment, working union with a guaranteed contract, benefits, and a retirement pension can start to look pretty attractive. When organizing workers from PE-owned residential companies, the most effective message is the simplest:
You signed up to be a skilled tradesperson, not a salesperson.
That message resonates with workers who feel the culture of their company shifting away from the work itself.
A Contract in an Industry That Keeps Changing
Investors buy, consolidate competitors, expand the business, and eventually exit the investment. For workers, that means ownership of their company may change every few years.
Union membership can offer stability in that environment.
A collective bargaining agreement protects wages, benefits, and working conditions regardless of who owns the company. The contract stays in place even if the name on the building changes.
For workers navigating an industry that increasingly feels like a financial marketplace, that stability matters.
Turning a Threat into an Opportunity
Private equity investment in the trades is unlikely to slow down anytime soon. They love the residential sector because it can be turned into a scalable sales business, which creates a recruiting opportunity for us (provided they have transferable skills).
We can offer an attractive alternative to workers who are uncomfortable in that situation. Great pay, family health coverage, and a retirement pension sounds pretty good. In addition to a solid union culture with the protections we've negotiated, the complex industrial and heavy commercial work where our signatory contractors thrive is built on skill, relationships, and long project cycles that don't fit the typical roll-up model.
If the legend of St. Patrick teaches anything, it's that challenges spreading quietly don't solve themselves. Sometimes they require leadership willing to stand up, rally the community, and drive the snakes out.