Chapter 19 — Further Reading

A short, honest list. Everything here is either a primary source you can verify yourself or a well-established institution's published guidance. Where I am not certain of an exact document number or title, I describe the source rather than invent a citation — go to the organization's own site and search from there.

A standing warning for this chapter's subject matter. Retention limits, prompt-payment obligations, lien and bond-claim deadlines, the enforceability of pay-if-paid clauses, licensing requirements, and small- and diverse-business participation rules vary substantially by jurisdiction and change over time. Nothing below is a substitute for reading the law that governs your project and your contract, and none of it is legal advice.

1. The subcontract form itself — AIA, ConsensusDocs, or your company's custom form

Why: This is the single most valuable reading on the list, and it is free if your company has a form. Find and read, in your own subcontract: the progress-and-manpower obligation, the coordination obligation, the cure and supplementation clause (note the exact notice period, delivery method, and recipient), the termination-for-cause clause, the notice-and-claim provisions, and any no-damage-for-delay or claims-against-other-subcontractors language.

For whom: Every project engineer and project manager, in the first month of a new job. The AIA publishes a standard contractor–subcontractor agreement designed to work with its A201 general conditions; ConsensusDocs and EJCDC publish their own subcontract families. Most large general contractors use a custom form that is more demanding than any of them — and comparing your custom form to a published one is the fastest way to learn what your company has been burned by.

2. OSHA's construction standards — 29 CFR Part 1926 — and its multi-employer citation policy

Why: Part 1926 is the substance of construction safety regulation in the United States and is available in full at no cost. Separately, OSHA's multi-employer citation policy directive sets out the creating / exposing / correcting / controlling employer framework discussed in §19.6.4, including the reasonable-care standard applied to a controlling employer.

For whom: Anyone who supervises a multi-trade site. Read the policy directive itself rather than a summary; the distinctions between the four roles are finer than most secondhand descriptions suggest, and the examples in the directive are the clearest explanation available.

3. The American Subcontractors Association

Why: §19.9 of this chapter is one general contractor's attempt to represent the subcontractor's view. ASA is the subcontractor community representing itself. Its published material on subcontract terms, payment practices, retention, and risk-shifting clauses will tell you — sometimes bluntly — how the provisions you draft are read on the other side of the table.

For whom: Every general contractor who has never worked for a specialty contractor, which is most of us. Read it specifically to be argued with.

4. The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC)

Why: AGC publishes practical guidance on subcontractor prequalification, subcontract administration, and project delivery, and its local chapters run the training where most working project managers actually learn this material. Its documents are written by contractors for contractors, which makes them concrete in a way academic treatments rarely are.

For whom: Project engineers moving into project management; anyone building a company prequalification program from scratch.

Why: §19.6.3 argues that productivity-loss magnitudes are genuinely uncertain and that the honest approach is a measured mile drawn from your own records. AACE's recommended practice on forensic schedule analysis (RP 29R-03) is the standard reference for how delay is analyzed rigorously, and AACE publishes a companion recommended practice on estimating lost labor productivity that surveys the available methods, ranks them by reliability, and is candid about the weaknesses of each.

For whom: Anyone who will ever price, defend, or attack a disruption claim. Read the productivity document before you quote a percentage to anybody.

6. The Society of Construction Law Delay and Disruption Protocol

Why: A widely used international framework for analyzing delay and disruption, notable for treating float, concurrency, and disruption with more rigor than most contract clauses do. Useful here because a great deal of subcontractor delay analysis is really about who owned the float that got consumed.

For whom: Readers working outside the United States, and anyone who wants a second, independently developed framework to compare against AACE's.

7. The Lean Construction Institute and the Last Planner System

Why: The coordination discipline in §19.6.1 — commitments with names and dates, reading last week's commitments aloud, tracking constraints — is a partial, informal version of what the Last Planner System formalizes, including percent plan complete as a measured metric and structured make-ready work. Chapter 27 develops it properly.

For whom: Superintendents and project managers who run weekly coordination meetings and suspect they could get more out of ninety minutes.

8. Surety industry guidance on performance and payment bonds

Why: Case Study 2 turns on what a performance bond actually does — and, more importantly, on what an obligee can do to reduce its own recovery. The surety industry's trade associations in the United States publish plain-language guides on bond types, the claims process, the surety's investigation, and the obligee's obligations. Read them before you have a claim, not during one.

For whom: Any project manager holding a bonded subcontract. Pay particular attention to what the surety expects of you — payment practices, notice, and preserving contract funds.

9. The Miller Act, and your state's "Little Miller Act"

Why: On federal public work, there is no mechanic's lien; payment security runs through the payment bond under the Miller Act. Most states have adopted an analogous statute for state and local public projects, commonly called a Little Miller Act, with materially different notice periods and claim deadlines. If any part of your work is public, you need to know which statute governs and what its deadlines are.

For whom: Anyone on public work — which includes the Willow Street Community Center. Verify current requirements from the statute itself or from counsel; do not rely on a summary, including this one. Covered in Chapter 5.

10. Federal and state small- and diverse-business programs — the U.S. Small Business Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation's DBE program, and your own jurisdiction's certification agency

Why: §19.10 argues that the barriers facing small and emerging subcontractors are mostly structural — bonding, working capital, prequalification thresholds, insurance limits, package size — rather than attitudinal. The SBA's contracting and surety bond guarantee programs and the DOT's Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program are where the federal mechanisms for addressing those barriers actually live, and most states, counties, and large agencies run their own certification and participation programs on top of them.

For whom: Anyone bidding public work, and anyone trying to build a deeper bid list. Read the good-faith-effort standard that applies to your project carefully — it is the part that most often surprises general contractors, and it varies by agency.

11. The Bureau of Labor Statistics construction series

Why: For the ground truth on construction employment, wages by occupation and region, and occupational fatality data. Use it when you need a real number rather than an industry impression — including for the workforce-availability arguments in §19.10.3.

For whom: Estimators, workforce planners, and anyone who has to defend a labor-availability assumption in a bid review.

12. Engineering News-Record (ENR) and the Construction Management Association of America (CMAA)

Why: ENR for current market conditions, subcontractor and specialty-contractor rankings, and the trade press coverage of defaults and disputes as they happen — reading about other people's subcontractor failures is cheap education. CMAA for the professional-practice side: standards of practice, certification, and the definition of the construction manager's role that this chapter has been describing from the inside.

For whom: ENR weekly for anyone in the business. CMAA for readers pursuing certification or building a career path — see Chapter 42.