I just returned from Chicago where W&C and USG hosted our second annual contractor roundtable, this year with commercial ceiling contractors (a feature on the roundtable will appear next month). There was a universal unspoken acceptance among these very successful contractors that shook some of the observers: that subcontractors are somewhat helpless to control their own destinies.
Increasingly, subcontractors are at the mercy of the general contractor in such a way that one contractor was provoked to concede, "I guess we must really love this work or else we wouldn't do it." There was consensus that the GCs do have a disproportionate amount of power over the sub's destiny.