Apprentice rates are lower for a reason, and Washington attaches rules to every one of them. Registration, supervision ratios, step-level pay, and what it really costs you when a foreman covers the ratio.

Every public works bid has line items for materials, equipment, labor, overhead, and contingencies. What most bids don't have is a line item for compliance administration. It usually gets folded into overhead, estimated too low, or ignored until the project is already running and someone realizes how much time it's taking. And the cost we're talking about isn't the emergency fee you pay a consultant to clean up a problem after the fact. It's the cost of having enough capacity