Auto body repair & detailing: Prime and block, hail damage, paint shops

Question
I've been a painter about 12 yrs. Recently we've had a lot of hail damage vehicles. Most are completes and only some hoods and roofs are being replaced. These jobs come in at around 30 hours refinish. Insurance seem to be stuck on that number no matter what the vehicle. I never see prime and block time anymore State farm sent us a letter stating its included in repair estimate. Body techs cant do it yet on the same car I get 30 they get 120 hrs. My arguement is that they are being paid for it if its included in repair time. Again I only recieve refinish time not repair time. I'm just a painter not a writer I'd like to know your take on this. I'd like to get paid for the work I do. Everyone knows it has to be done. How can I get paid for it? Thanx

Answer
Kevin, I've given your question more thought than any other question I ever received. I'll try to be straight, yet gentle. This is a grey area in any shop with separate painters/bodymen. I'm now a combination guy, but I've worked for 2 other shops with separate paint shops- this is always a quandary. At one shop, I had to do all the priming and first block- then I primed again. The painter took over and did all the wet blocking. The second shop, the bodymen taped the car up, had it all ready to primer, but the painter did all the primering and blocking. Now, most shops tend to consider this operation part of paint labor for several reasons- first, the painters always make more hours than the metal guys, yet the metal work is much more technically difficult than painting. Lets face it, painting is all about repetition- you find a good system that works, and it's basically the same thing over and over. Sand and spray, scuff and buff. Also, paint shops are more likely to have a painters helper than the metal shop. I could teach a painters helper to do scuff and buffs, masking and paint prep in a couple weeks (to where it was good enough to actually help me out as opposed to being a hindrance to production.) Metal shop helpers are just in the road for the first couple of years, even if they have some technical training. It takes years to learn frame repair, suspension repair, and how to do straight filler work. They spend most the day asking how to fix stuff- so the metal guys basically do 50% of the apprentice's job for no pay. Anything the painter apprentice does goes on the painters pay. Now, not every shop has an apprentice, you may have to do everything start to finish, and I'm aware that every shop is run different. 30 hours doesn't sound like enough to you, but let me throw this out there to you- 15 years ago, back when every darn GM car and truck made was losing paint due to delamination, I was getting paid 13 hours to paint cavalier sized cars from the moldings up. (no bumpers.) That included stripping the old paint, masking, sealing it up, painting, scuffing and buffing. (GM also expected door handles yanked for that paltry sum- something I never did unless the paint peeled around them.) I got paid 30 hours to do an entire G-van from the break line up- but they usually had rust down low, so I had to warranty that for about 5 more hours. Once again, start to finish. It sounds like you are getting around 3 hours per panel- it's light, I agree, but some of it is surely blend time which, as you know, only pays around 1 to 1.5 hours per panel. I also know that I personally consider overall paint jobs of any type a shit job- one that isn't going to make me more than a couple hours over flat rate. You are just facing a lot of them, and you are surely getting tired and burnt out in a hurry. Everyone loves to paint a nose, or down the side- it's gravy money. Blocking 1 or 2 panels is easy- blocking 5 or more is a lot of work, especially with hail damage. You have to block the entire panel like you are doing a restoration- which sucks. The apprentice is usually not capable of this sort of operation, so the painter has to do it. The adjuster is unwilling, or unable, to separate this operation- I personally can't remember ever seeing an insurance estimate with separate block time- it was included with the job. You need to find some sort of happy medium with the bodymen, and make some sort of temporary agreement to help make it a little more fair- but when you go out and look at the work THEY are doing- grinding and filling entire horizontal panels with filler, then spending hours scrubbing them down with machines, then again by hand- ask yourself if they are really better off than you, or if you would want trade places for 1 week. I would rather block 10 primered panels than fill and level 1 panel full of bondo. It's horrible, filthy, noisy work that takes truckloads of patience, and hours of elbow wrenching labor. Shit work. You are all in the same boat, I hope you can all come together to get through the hail damage. I know how it is, believe me, but it will peter out soon enough. Good luck to you! Bill