But regardless of the spelling, labor (labour) unions in the construction industry are like the pink elephant in the room that nobody dares to speak of.

*Incidentally, the saying is in fact the “elephant in the room” and not the “800 pound gorilla”. While these sayings are often confused, the 800 pound gorilla refers to a powerful individual or group that will do whatever it pleases while the pink elephant is merely a significant entity that is obviously present.  While construction labor unions can act and have acted as the 800 pound gorilla, in the previous reference they are clearly the pink elephant. *

So why are construction labor unions the pink elephant in the room?  For a few reasons.  One, labor unions in any industry are a political topic with strong feeling on both sides.  Politics, much like religion, are topics that are only broached at settings that are sure to not erupt in uncontrollable violence.  However, I think even a dose of political banter may cross the lunch room table or the water cooler before the topic of construction labor unions arise.  The reason for this is downright fear.

Lets be clear that labor unions are in place to protect, well, labor.  And at the time they were established this was absolutely necessary.  They were formed because management was taking advantage of labor and were not a result of labor ganging up on management.  It is very important to note the origin of labor unions in any discussion of the topic, because I think people very easily forget.

Now, it is my belief that while unions were established for a very good reason, they have now grown to a point where they are no longer serving the purpose for which they were formed and can at times border on counterproductive.  This is evidenced, in my mind, by two incidents that occurred in Philadelphia over the past few years.

Philadelphia has often been called the last real union town.  I moved here from the largely non-union construction market of Colorado and hit the east coast union construction world like a hammer hitting a half embedded nail (very hard).

I was running a small project non-union about 15 miles outside the city when an incident took place in the same area.   It involved members of the local iron workers union beating a non-union contractor with baseball bats over the non-union erection of steel for a Toys R Us.  These are the tactics of fear and intimidation that give unions a bad reputation and sours the work that has been put in to create organizations that work toward better craftsmanship and fair treatment of labor.  I had a few sleepless nights after hearing about this incident that occurred only a few miles from my job.  Dreams of aluminum connecting with with side of my face were not very pleasant.

The other incident took place on the Comcast building which is now the tallest building in Philadelphia.  The Comcast building was designed to have flushless toilets and urinals to reduce the impact on the environment and on water usage.  The union claimed that this was taking millions of dollars right out of the pockets of union plumbers.  Somehow (and I’m not sure exactly how they did this) the union insisted that hundreds of feet of cast iron pipe (yes cast iron, not PVC) be installed in the building.  The pipe was installed and it now sits unused in the Comcast building.

The whole Comcast situation was obviously non-sense and sheds negative light on construction labor unions (i.e. 800 pound gorilla).  So what should we do?  Well, that’s the bazillion dollar question.

I think the first thing is that the unions need to cut out the violence and intimidation along with the non-sense installation of construction work that isn’t even used.  Beyond that, I’m not really sure.  I would suggest that the unions trim the fat and lose the corruption.  This just doesn’t help, and only leads to more anti-union sentiment.

Beyond this, I’m not really sure how to handle it, and from what I gather, nobody else really does either.  Like most large established institutions, there is a lot of old structure that rakes in a ton of money and is tremendously difficult to shake.

If there is any time in the history of history for the construction industry to make strong positive change it is right now.  We’ve been broken down to nearly nothing and establishment and convention didn’t really work too well over the past several years (or really ever).

So you can spell it labour or labor, but if we continue with fear, intimidation, violence, and non-sense, we’re going to be labo(u)ring along a very treacherous road.

I encourage anyone who reads this to sign up for a Wordpress account and leave comments, but let’s keep them constructive (no pun intended).  I think it is time that this issue is discussed and an online forum is a great way to do it while perhaps coming closer to improvement.  Your opinions are welcome.  Thanks -JP

theme song for 2011

While  “Free Fallin’” may be a little bit of an exaggeration, I was thinking about something more like Tom Petty’s, “Won’t Back Down”, where Petty confidently boasts, “In a World that keeps on pushin’ me around, but I’ll stand my ground, and I won’t back down”.  Petty suggests that even at the gates of hell, just don’t back down.

Don’t worry Tom – we won’t!

I looked all over for some positive construction industry forecasts for 2012 and well, I didn’t really find any.  But why?

Everybody says how the economy is improving which may or may not be true, but the unemployment rate in the US appears to be decreasing.  However, the construction employment is still tremendously stagnant.  I suppose this is because construction improvement woefully lags the rest of the economy – lucky for us.

While I couldn’t find any economic info that made me want to “Whistle Dixie” (maybe next year’s theme song?), I did find a great report for construction economic data put out by the Gilbane Company.  While not overly positive, this report gives a great snapshot of what is going on and what can be expected.  If you’re into all the graphs and tables and things like that, you’ll love this.

It’s kinda funny that you’d think a website called Constructonomics would put a bunch of tables and graphs and stuff up as well but instead it has a bunch of touchy feely mumbo jumbo making analogies to rock songs from 1989.  Go figure that one…

But before we  give our Carharts to Goodwill and pawn the Hilti gun (neither of which I have ever owned), just take a deep breath and try to relax in the midst of industry-wide unemployment and underemployment.  Ok?

Now, everyone just needs to realize that things will improve and while it may not be this year, it will definitely be next year.  How do I know this?  Well, I don’t, however, I did read something from the AIA saying that architectural billings will be up nicely this year, which means….Plus, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

But seriously, it has to.  As companies hire more people they are going to need more office space to work and more hotels for travel.  As consumers make more money they’ll need more retail space for shopping and bowling alleys etc. for having fun.  It’s only a matter of time.

How much time?  I don’t know.  But until that time comes we’ll fight, claw, and scrape our way through what hopefully turns out to be the worst downturn of our careers.

And of course……We Won’t Back Down.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a mention of Mr. Darnell on this blog.  Way back in February of 2010 I did a write up on the PPC shortly after reading it for the first time.  At the time, I was gung ho on emotional intelligence and transforming the construction industry into what I thought it should become.  However, 2010 brought challenges that made this difficult.

I didn’t fully realize how far I had strayed from my once unwavering ambition to infuse emotional competence into the construction world, until I re-read the PPC this weekend.  2010 brought challenges for me like none I had ever experienced.  I was for the first time, 100% responsible financially for the projects on which I was working.  Not only was I responsible, but the margins we were working under were slimmer than I had ever seen.  I was also doing hard bid, high risk work.

This stress produced more self interested thinking and my people skills tremendously declined.  I was snappy with clients, designers, and subcontractors.  I think I knee-jerked to the old school, “kick ass and take names” mentality.  Trust me, it’s easy to do when you’re doing a project with a liquidated damages clause of $1000 per day for a late finish.  One week late and I’m eating at the soup kitchen.

So I’ll cut myself a little slack because of the pressure I put on myself, but I won’t let myself off the hook entirely.  It just goes to show  how easily you can lose sight of this stuff.  I’ve studied this for years and when the pressure was on, I kind of lapsed into more entrenched ways of doing things.  You gotta be careful.

With all this said, the pressure of hard bid contracts certainly doesn’t help the movement of trying to get some more emotional competence in construction projects.  In bad economies, margins slim down and hard bidding increases.  But hopefully as things improve, we’ll get into more collaborative projects with a more even distribution of risk.  And hopefully, more emotional intelligence.

This graph was created by Crystal Soda Blast.

I didn’t know much, if anything, about fracking until about three months ago when I downloaded a podcast of This American Life that explored the issue and then specifically looked into two professors who had conflicting opinions about the benefits of fracking.  After listening to the podcast, I came to the brilliant acertion that the whole thing is totally fracked up. 

One of the professors from Penn State, in this NPR tale of good vs. evil, calculated the large amount of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale deep beneath the surface of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and West Virginia and presented his admirable findings with pride to the administration of his University.       

The other professor from the University of Pittsburg did a calculation of the amount of toxic chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process that could be polluting ground water, streams, rivers, and eventually making its way into drinking water. 

One of these professors received wide acclaim and praise for his work, the other ended up out of a job.  

I starting trying to gather facts about fracking (I guess you could call them fracks).  The funny thing is that facts (fracks) are rather few and far between.  It doesn’t seem that anybody really knows if fracking is safe, dangerous, good, or bad.  However, this much we do know, fracking is big money.  It’s big money for drilling companies, but it’s also very lucrative for owner’s of land with gas underneath.  We also know that the fracking practice was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act despite knowing that the fluids used to fracture the rock contain many toxic chemicals including known carcinogens. 

Pennsylvania is sometimes described as Pittsburg and Philadelphia with Alabama in between.  In short, there are some depressed towns in central Pennsylvania and natural gas drilling has transformed these places.  The gas industry has brought money, luxuries, and to many of these people – hope.  But at what cost?  The word is very mum on that one. 

I’m honestly kind of torn about the issue.  I tend to knee jerk to the side of the environmentalists in situations like this, but I can also see the need for quality domestic energy and a decreased reliance on foreign oil. 

However, I do want to make sure we are dealing with the correct information before we rush to judgment.  For example, the drilling and gas companies cry from the mountaintops about how natural gas is so clean burning and a non-contributor to climate change.  This is not true.  While natural gas does burn cleaner and with less impact to climate change, the extraction process releases natural gas into the atmosphere which is a tremendous contributor to climate change, so the net effect is not much better than burning oil or coal.  Sorry, but gas companies didn’t quite hit the mark on that one. 

I guess I’m just an advocate of full disclosure of information and having smart people make good choices based on lots and lots of accurate information.  That’s all.  So when the EPA asked the drilling companies to disclose all the chemicals used in fracking fluids and they said, “No”, that kind of ticked me off. 

Hopefully we’re not fracked on this one.    

I would have loved to explain to Andy Rooney in 1978, when he started doing his bit for 60 Minutes, the whole blog phenomenon.  I’d have to start with explaining the internet, email, laptops, and worst of all, the extinction of the typewriter.  There would be no better sight than to see those eyebrows go up and down as I tried to explain to him what has happened with those machines with an apple on the side. 

However, in 1978, I was exactly zero years old and Andy Rooney was more interested in complaining about coffee cans and household cleaners than trying to speculate on the fate of the typewriter.  I can safely say that he and I were both rather oblivious as to what was about to occur to our World.   

Despite all this technological progress, or as Andy would probably write - ”progress”,  some things have remained rather consistent – people have a desire and maybe even a need to whine, quip, and cry about the minutia of everyday life.  People also, at times, like to hear others’ banter about what annoys them.  Also similarly, people tend to have an attention span of a goldfish for this kind of stuff.  So “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney” was really more than enough time to get your weekly fill of entertaining complaints about our World. 

I remember watching his segment one time when I was about 12 years old – that’s right, circa 1990.  He did a thing on Hallmark cards and all the nonsense that is written in birthday, mother’s day, and father’s day cards.  He read a few of the cards he had strewn about his desk and then remarked, “If my kids gave me a card like this, I’d send them to bed without any supper!”. 

I don’t know why that stuck with me, but every time I go shopping for a card in CVS I think about Andy’s bit.  Some of those cards really are stupid. 

So why is Andy the world’s first blogger and not any other editorial writer of that time or centuries prior?  It’s because of the short, quick delivery and borderline nonsense of his content.  For lack of a better description, Andy spent a few minutes each week bullshitting about our World.  It was a stream of consciousness that sometimes made sense and sometimes did not.  Facts weren’t always checked, opinions didn’t always remain consistent, and there wasn’t always a clear position on what the hell he was really trying to say. 

These are the reasons people hate blogs, bloggers, and the world of amateur written commentary.  But while Andy Rooney was far from amateur, he was certainly a blogger. 

Please contact me if you have any interest in getting involved in this job.  I would need to know if you are interested by October 12, 2011.  Please call at 215-834-5155 or email at john@constructonomics.com

Thanks,

John Poole

My Uncle, who has spent his whole life living within the city limits of Philadelphia, used to call the Philadelphia tap water “Schuylkill Punch”.  That nickname didn’t always give me warm and fuzzies about drinking the Philly tap water.  However, I think the drinking water in Philadelphia is actually less of an issue than the quality of the river waters after major rain events.  This is because Philadelphia, like most older cities on the east coast, has a combined sewer system where stormwater and wastewater are both carried to the wastewater treatment facility in the same pipes.  This is all well and good, until the stormwater is extremely high and exceeds the capacity of the system.   In order to avoid sinks and toilets from backing up into people’s houses, the city has several combined sewer overflow points along the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers and some other smaller creeks. 

Yes, raw sewage pours into these rivers during large storm events.  And not only raw sewage, this water also contains plenty of chemicals and oils that are picked up from paved impervious surfaces. 

According to Rivercast (www.phillyrivercast.org), conditions on the Schuylkill River are unsuitable for certain types of recreation over 30% of the time due to high bacteria levels.  It also creates conditions that are unsuitable for wildlife. 

I suppose Philadelphia could embark on a plan to uproot the entire stormwater system and effectively separate the storm and waste water, but the chances of that happening are right up there with hell freezing over.  A less daunting solution may be to implement systems in the buildings and infrastructure of the city to reduce the amount of stormwater runoff.  Some of these strategies include the use of pavement that allows water to drain through to the soil below instead of rushing off to the stormwater system.  Vegetated roofing also slows the runoff of stormwater.  Stormwater can also be diverted to more vegetated areas prior to being release into the system. 

These and other stormwater mitigation techiques can be further reviewed at http://www.phillywatersheds.org/what_were_doing/green_infrastructure/programs.

But until we get about half of the houses in Philadelphia growing something on their roof, you better be careful about taking a dip in the Schuylkill.