New tower helped workers pull out of industry doldrums

By Andrew Gomes
Advertiser Staff Writer

Louis Moseley had been waiting three years to build an extension on his small house in Kailua. But with a 9-year-old son and 3-year-old twins, the 33-year-old elevator mechanic had too much debt.

Tyson Marriot, center left, and Vincent Tam, both of WDI furniture contractors, take a lunch break with other workers on Kalia's back stairs. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

Now, after 10 months installing 11 elevators at Hilton Hawaiian Village's Kalia Tower, Moseley has saved up enough extra cash to add a new kitchen, master bedroom, master bath, office and dining room to his house.

When it's all done, his 800-square-foot home will have expanded to about 2,000 square feet. Moseley plans to do a lot of the work himself, but says that without his savings from the Kalia job, he wouldn't have been able to do the home-improvement project.

"I'm excited," he says. "I'm building an extension on my house — oh, yeah!"

Moseley, who works for Otis Elevator Co., is one of roughly 1,000 construction workers who helped with the painstaking and backbreaking building of Kalia Tower over the past 22 months. The tower, one of only a few large building projects in the past couple of years, had a significant economic impact on each one.

"I think all the trades on this job ended up getting overtime because of the deadlines we had to meet to deliver the hotel to the owner," Moseley said.

The tower also helped stabilize a local construction industry work force that had shrunk — along with the state's economy during most of the 1990s — from 35,000 members in the 1980s to 22,000 last year.

"It was a spark," says Bruce Coppa, director of Pacific Resources Partnership, an association between the carpenters' union and unionized building contractors.

While Hilton could not provide a tally of the man-hours or total construction payroll involved in building the $95 million tower, an industry standard estimate is 30 percent of total cost — in this case that would be around $30 million poured into the pockets of workers.

Keith Awana, an iron worker who assembles stairways and railings, spent about six months on the Kalia job with a crew of as many as 37. "It's a definite help," he says. "A big help."

Moseley's crew, which ranged from six to 17 members since July, was sometimes on the job past midnight, making finishing touches on the interior to meet Hilton's exacting requirements. Before the Kalia project came along, some on his crew endured long spells with little work.

Moseley says now he has heard fellow workers saying they're paying off loans and other bills. "It (Kalia) was great for all of us," he says.

Robert Kahana, a labor foreman on the Kalia job, has been in the Hawai'i construction business since 1991. "Construction is like living in the fast lane," he says. "You make good money, but if you get laid off, you make the same as one guy at McDonald's."

"It comes out the same," says Ben Baptista, another Kalia labor foreman. "If you don't work, you don't get paid."

Kahana hopes Kalia Tower will spur more hotel building, which would provide more construction jobs. While industry analysts say that may be unlikely given the slower economy, space restrictions in Waikiki and other limitations, they expect Kalia will at the very least pressure older hotels in the area to renovate.

Denny Heather hopes so. For the past 25 years, he has been driving a lunch wagon to construction sites around O'ahu. He's fed construction workers on projects including the Hawai'i Convention Center, the Hale Koa Hotel and Harbor Court office tower. His last job was at construction of the luxury condo Hawaiki Tower, which was finished in June 1999.

Since August 1999, Heather has pulled up to the construction site of Kalia Tower twice a day — once in the morning to sell pastries and coffee, and once at lunch to sell boxed lunches, snacks and cold drinks.

Heather has sold about 50 lunches a day plus six or so cases of soda and juice. That's good business for the company he works for, Tropical Cater. And Heather also appreciates the work.

"It's a better job than when I used to work at the hotel graveyard shift," he says.