On Worker Wellness
Date Posted: September 12, 2022
Posted In: Discussion, Workforce,
From AGC’s Constructor Magazine: For most of the history of the construction industry, says Cal Beyer, the topic of mental health has been taboo. Addressing things like depression and substance misuse were nonstarters.
“We see this often in male-dominated industries — in the military, heavy manufacturing, oil, gas and mining,” he explains. “People talk about ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, which looks at early childhood trauma and construction has high rates of that — separation anxiety, single parents, people raised without a lot of stability.”
The expectation was that folks should leave their issues at home, notes Beyer, vice president, workforce risk and worker wellbeing for Holmes Murphy & Associates, a member of multiple AGC chapters.
“This industry is high risk. Many owners require strict drug testing. People working in insurance — even me — were advocating for that because the risk was lower for contractors with testing programs.”
Alas, it’s been a strategy with consequences.
“We kicked a lot of good people to the curb,”
Beyer admits. “We didn’t have great pathways for treatment and recovery.”
These days, however, things are trending positive. Companies across the AGC spectrum have been stepping up to address and de-stigmatize mental health among construction workers, addressing not only the industry’s high rates of suicide — but its contributing factors.
PUTTING OUT THE FIRE
Beyer describes the industry’s suicide rate as a five-alarm fire.
“It was something we needed to address before anyone could go upstream and address the things that started it,” he notes. “And the fact is that suicide was easier to talk about than mental health. And it took the pandemic before we could talk about substance misuse.”
Indeed, COVID-19 was a game changer.
“It really, really, really brought mental health issues to light,” says Pat Devero, vice president, national safety for McCarthy Holdings, Inc., who says one positive of the pandemic has been the light it shined on this, one of the industry’s darker corners. “We’d been talking, pre-COVID, about how as an organization, we could better push out our various suicide prevention campaigns.”
In the past, milestones like May’s Mental Health Awareness Month or September’s Suicide Awareness Month would trigger messaging addressing the issues, but at some point a collective light bulb went off amid McCarthy’s leadership in safety, HR and elsewhere in its national and regional divisions.
“We need to be talking about this all year long, we realized. We need to maintain a cadence of communication on this topic.”
Once suicide was a subject out in the open, says Beyer, the big elephants in the room became fair game, factors like depression, anxiety, substance abuse that can put people on the road to self-harm.