With construction booming across most of the US, falling workers’ comp rates may be just the icing on the cake.
Partner Ramsey Brock, vice president of marketing and operations, and one of many Brocks at the 53-year-old Brock Insurance Agency, said worker’s comp coverage is one of the agency’s largest lines of coverage.
He said Tennessee recently filed a 10-15% rate reduction. “Workers’ Comp rates are down. It seems very soft. I’ve got an account that has averaged about $200,000 in claims over the past few years, and they pay $75,000 in premiums, so it looks like a really bad account on paper but I have two or three companies that want to write it. I thought they were headed to assigned risks, but we will have two or three assigned markets that want to write it,” he said.
Brock has offices in Tennessee and Georgia, and is one of the bigger players in the construction space in those markets.
Brock said workplaces are getting safer. “Construction owner are getting smarter, they don’t like the bad press that comes with workplace accidents. I think it is getting better, but at the same time construction companies are having trouble getting workers. They are taking safety more seriously than ever but the quality of the workforce is not what it used to be,” he said.
He and Partner Trae Vaughan, vice president of commercial lines, said that the manufacturing sector has been growing like gangbusters in the region, which has resulted in people who had worked construction moving into manufacturing whenever the construction market is soft. “When the construction market slowed down last time, a lot of people took jobs in plants. They get pensions, they don’t have to travel, they sit on assembly lines inside with air conditioning,” Vaughan said, explaining the attraction of manufacturing jobs. “Skilled labor has moved from construction on to other fields.
“The Biggest issue our construction clients have is finding people to do the work,” he said. “I was at a contractor’s office this morning who said the average age of their superintendents is 63. There is nobody coming out of college wanting to be a construction supervisor either.”
