Robert Merry : The Merry Month
Robert Merry is an independent stone consultant and project manager who ran his own company for 17 years. He also acts as an expert witness.
The entry on a management contractor’s website reads:
POSITIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT
Be committed to creating a tolerant work environment free from discrimination and harassment.
The company does not tolerate workplace discrimination and harassment. All directors, officers and employees must ensure that the company is a safe and respectful environment where high value is placed on equity, fairness and dignity.
This main contractor (MC) was in a rush. The client was breathing down its neck to complete. There were buyers waiting to move in. The project was late. The MC blamed the sub-contractors. It empowered its site managers to issue Delay Notices and Early Warning Notices whenever there was resistance from a sub-contractor.
This might have been justified in some cases but the knock-on effect was not a ‘tolerant work environment’. It was an air raid by the MC to bully and harass all the sub-contractors. It used email, daily meetings and phone calls.
Never mind the MC published new programmes that were obsolete on day one. Never mind that the building had been handed over in a piecemeal fashion, leaving most of the finishing trades with an impossible work load.
At its worst, the stone programme peaked on the graph at 50 plus fixers required on site. The programme was unachievable.
The response from most sub-contractors was to issue acceleration costs and wait for an offer of a deal to complete. Usual practice. It wasn’t their fault. But the MC was having none of it. Instead, it issued a deed of variation and demanded everyone sign up for a finish date that couldn’t be achieved.
Then the MC charged on through the building, completing what it could, leaving a trail of unfinished work and unresolved issues piling up for the sub-contractors to resolve. But when?
Spread over 25 floors with basement and affordable housing in addition, the workers were thinly spread. Some sub-contractors started working night shifts, completing work ahead of others who didn’t have the resources to keep up.
The logistics of the building were in disarray. Internal lifts designated to carry the workforce up to the floors broke down daily. The external hoist for materials could only achieve so much. Storage space that was limited at the beginning ran out as the work spread to all floors, so the MC instructed its logistics sub-contractor to issue clean up notices for storing materials on floors. These then became chargeable to the transgressors.
Despite a company policy that trumpets the aspiration to have a nurse for every 200 people, the MC employed a single nurse with more than 750 people on site. Then it announced that because of the enormous amount of paperwork generated by the turnover of staff on-site the nurse was not available to see anyone who was ill.
The huge turnover of staff was announced in a health & safety meeting. The number of inductions in a month was equal to 50% of the workforce. The actual numbers on-site did not increase – half the workforce was leaving each month.
With the lifts not working properly, there was a wait of 30 minutes or more to get to work. There were stairs, but its not an attractive prospect with a day’s work ahead. Some men urinated in bottles and left them in the bathrooms for others to find. Disgusting, but understandable when the lifts stopped working and the only toilets were in the basement.
This is not a ‘Positive Work Environment’ free from discrimination and harassment.
Do the people buying expensive apartments in this ivory tower in one of the wealthiest cities on the planet have any idea of the intolerable conditions imposed on the workforce who built it and installed all its luxuries?
This is not the first time I have come across this kind of environment – similar conditions, similar punishment, similar short-sited management.
“All directors, officers and employees must ensure that the company is a safe and respectful environment where high value is placed on equity, fairness and dignity.”
Words are cheap. We need to clean up our construction industry. Parts of it are a disgrace.