Construction leaders can move between union and open shop contractors, and the move changes how they staff, train and discipline a workforce. Planning, safety and client skills transfer. Labor sourcing, jurisdiction and retention do not. Before hiring across the line, test which of those habits the candidate has already had to relearn, and budget time for the rest.
Two superintendents can run the same forty-person crew on the same kind of building and be doing different jobs. One called a hiring hall on Thursday and received people she had never met, trained to a known standard, whom she can send back on Friday. The other spent three years assembling his crew and will spend the winter finding work to keep them. Hire construction leaders across that line without noticing it and you get a capable person solving the wrong problem.
What is different about leading union and open shop work?
The source of labor, and so the leader’s main worry. A union contractor draws craft workers from a hall under a collective agreement that sets wages, jurisdiction and ratios. An open shop contractor recruits, trains and keeps its own people. The first manages a contract. The second manages a workforce.
The legal footing is specific to this industry. The Labor Relations Act allows construction employers to sign pre-hire agreements with unions before any workers are on the payroll, which is why a signatory contractor can staff a job in a city where it employs nobody. Federal data on union membership shows construction above the private-sector average and far below its own mid-century levels, with the split running by region and by trade.
| Leadership task | Union contractor | Open shop contractor |
|---|---|---|
| Staffing a job | Call the hall, manage the mix | Recruit, move crews between jobs |
| Training | Joint apprenticeship programs | Company-run or association programs |
| Wages and benefits | Set by agreement | Set by the company, job by job |
| Work assignment | Trade jurisdiction rules | Multi-skilled crews possible |
| Layoffs | Return workers to the hall | Carry them or lose them |
Neither model is easier. Each puts the difficulty in a different place, and a leader’s reflexes form around wherever it sat for them.
Which skills transfer when construction leaders change sides?
Planning, sequencing, safety leadership, owner and architect relations, and cost awareness transfer almost whole. They are about the building. What does not transfer is everything about how people arrive on the job, what they may be asked to do, and why they stay.
A union-trained leader moving to open shop work meets retention for the first time. Nobody is coming from the hall. If the best carpenter foreman leaves, he leaves for a competitor, and the superintendent is expected to have seen it coming. That leader also has to learn to train: registered apprenticeship programs exist on both sides, but in an open shop the company or its association has to organize them. At a self-perform contractor large enough, that work becomes a seat of its own, the workforce development director.
An open-shop leader moving to union work meets jurisdiction. The habit of having a versatile crew do whatever is next (set a door frame, patch concrete, move material) can produce a grievance by lunch. So can a favorite worker brought from the last job in the wrong order. Leaders who make this move well find a steward they can talk to in the first week.
Both sides share the shortage itself. In the 2025 AGC and NCCER workforce survey, among firms with openings for each role, 81 percent reported difficulty filling superintendent positions, 77 percent estimating positions and 76 percent project manager positions.
With numbers like those, refusing every candidate from the other labor model is a luxury few contractors have. The better question is how to tell who will adapt.
How do you interview construction leaders from the other labor model?
Ask about people decisions, and listen for which system the answers assume. A candidate who has thought about the move will describe what they expect to be different. One who says “building is building” has not thought about it.
Questions for a union-side candidate joining an open shop contractor:
- “Your best foreman gets an offer for two dollars more. What do you do, and when did you first know he was looking?”
- “You have eight weeks between jobs for a crew of twelve. Where do they go?”
- “How would you bring a laborer up to carpenter?”
Questions for an open-shop candidate joining a signatory contractor:
- “Who decides which trade installs the equipment pads?”
- “The hall sends someone who cannot do the work. Walk me through Friday.”
- “What is in the agreement about foreman ratios, and how does it change your crew plan?”
Then check references on the specific point. A former project executive can tell you whether this superintendent built relationships with business agents or fought them, and whether crews followed him from job to job. Our note on reference checks covers how to ask.
Where does the labor model shape the executive roles?
Above the field, the difference becomes commercial. A union contractor’s operations head negotiates and administers agreements and manages benefit-fund obligations. An open shop operations head owns recruiting, wage strategy and training budgets. Estimators on both sides price labor from different rate structures.
One exposure deserves a specific check at the executive level. Contractors that contribute to multiemployer pension plans can owe withdrawal liability if they stop contributing, a subject the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation covers in its multiemployer guidance. A chief operating officer or division president hired from the open shop side to run a signatory company needs to understand that before proposing to change how a division operates. In the trades the labor model sits even closer to the margin, and our note on the electrical operations leader describes the seat that owns hours estimated against hours spent.
Geography does much of the sorting. Texas and most of the Southeast are right-to-work states where open shop building dominates: a general contractor in Dallas, Houston or Charlotte may never have signed an agreement. Heavy industrial, power and some large public work in the same regions is often built under project labor agreements, so a leader in Atlanta can meet both models in one year. Contractors expanding from the Midwest or Northeast into those markets, and the reverse, are the ones most often hiring across the line. Our note on a division president for a new region covers that expansion.
When crossing the line is the wrong hire
- A dual-shop structure with legal separation to protect. Who manages which entity is a question for labor counsel before it is a recruiting question.
- A first-time move with no support. A superintendent crossing over on a job with no experienced general foreman beside her is being set up to fail.
- A leader who is contemptuous of the other model. Either direction. It surfaces in the first dispute and the workforce hears it.
Most contractors making this hire cannot advertise it. A signatory firm recruiting open-shop leadership, or the reverse, tells employees, competitors and business agents something about its plans. Selah Talent Partners handles it as confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, described in our note on confidential search, for contractors across the United States. If that is your position, tell us which side of the line you are hiring from. Whichever direction the hire runs, the candidates worth having can already explain how the other half of the industry gets a crew to the gate on Monday.
Sources and further reading
- Labor Relations Act, National Labor Relations Board, statute text including the construction industry proviso
- Union membership, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members summary
- Apprenticeship programs, US Department of Labor, Office of Apprenticeship
- Workforce survey, Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER, 2025 national results
- Multiemployer guidance, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation