Leaders in the residential construction community today face having to choose between two opposing paths. The choice is wrenching.
They’d rather–as we all would–believe they can pick both.
The reality is that they’ll have to select one or the other, at least for the moment: Lives or livelihoods? Either way, the cost seems unfathomable, and is currently the cause of a pit in our stomachs that grows each day and aches, dull and growing, each night.
Here are two notes that went to city councilmen in one of America’s leading residential construction markets the past few days.
“The reason I am writing you is to ask about why the City has not closed large construction sites. Right now, inspectors are not going on job sites, and doing any inspections. If you are concerned for the city workers and have a belief that there is a chance of infection, then logic would say that all the workers are at the same risk. It also sends the signal that you are more concerned for city employees than you are for the actual citizens. I have two projects, and I am concerned for my workers and their families that business-as-usual is the protocol right now. There is no social distancing on the job sites, and general hygiene, even on a good day, is very low. Dirty Porto-Johns, lack of and/or if any hand-cleaning stations, crowded buck hoists with 15 to 20 people at a time. These are a few of my concerns, and I can imagine how quickly and devastatingly fast this virus could pass through a job site. Attached is an article that shares my concern. Could you please address this concern with city officials and the Mayor? You have taken lots of actions to curtail the spread of the virus however this one still exists and I believe is potentially very dangerous.
Having not received a reply after a day or two, the second note was as follows:
Hey X,
I know you’re busy, but I wanted to follow up on my previous email and share this article.
Like Italy, we’re faced with making decisions before we can see the true cost of not acting. But unlike Italy, we have a picture of what the near future will look like if we don’t take drastic action now. What we are seeing from places a few days ahead of us on the pandemic’s trajectory is that by the time the human cost is apparent, it will be far too late. My guys are doing their duty to keep the job going and get paid, but at the end of the day we are scared for ourselves and our families and looking for leadership to step in, since like many we’re on contract and this decision is out of our hands. Like Dr. Fauci said, at the end of the day he’d rather be criticized for being too proactive than not proactive enough. This is an urgent matter, I’ve been in business in XX for 30 years and have never seen this level of underlying fear, and desire for leadership to step in, which is why I’m reaching out to you. I realize and appreciate what you and the city have done, but this decision needs to be taken out of the hands of individual companies.
Please call me to discuss or if you have any questions. And feel free to share these messages with anyone you’d like.
The fragility of human life and the intricate, fragile balances that sustain local, regional, national, and global economies now stand in high relief.
Choices–easy, moderate, difficult, and seemingly impossible–crop up amidst all this fragility at breakneck speed, an unrelenting torrent of decisions, judgment calls, revisions, U-turns, and full-circle action plans. Around all of us are worried innocents. Inside us is this pit in our guts. We have no choice but to choose, but we don’t want to.
Being human, we attempt to use our best judgment to choose a “lesser of evils” path forward.
A Hobson’s Choice, on the other hand, is not a lesser-of-evils choice. It’s picking what is available as an option, or nothing at all.
The “what is available” option–in my mind, at least–is, for each of us to decide in our hearts right now as the next right thing to do.
A builder, or a developer, or a contractor, or a manufacturer, or a distributor, or an investor, or a lender, or an architect each faces choices right now for which we have no playbook, no manual, no Harvard Business Review article, no case study, no legal nor historical precedent, as an instructional guide. Our moral compass, our ethical structure, our character may be all we each have to fall back on as we come up to and face these choices.
What we can do–meanwhile–and without compromise, is to go to all possible lengths today to draw on one of the most boundless and beautiful traits of human beings through all time–which is that we, as adults, act mightily with care, not just for ourselves and our own families and children, but for other families and their children.
The clock is ticking, counting down ’til the moment every one of us will have to make this hardest of choices. Do we go all out to save our economy, our business, our livelihoods? Or, do we go all out to shut down activity of all kinds enough to #stopthespread and #flattenthecurve? It may be that if all of us can summons fortitude enough to weather 30 to 45 days, we have reason to think we may have reached the better side of the epidemic curve.
Encouraging signs, on the public health crisis front, have begun to emerge from both China and now Italy, after massive measures have been taken to hit pause on normal life, normal business, and normal contact. Are we thinking we’re somehow exempt or exceptional in what outcomes we can achieve without similar total shutdown measures?
I’m not smart enough to know.
Here’s what i do think:
- Any workplace still operating–having been deemed “essential”–needs to be cleaned, inspected, and protected so that people entering and leaving those sites can do so without undue stress that they’re exposing themselves and their family members to elevated risk.
- Hire out-of-work hotel or restaurant or entertainment arena associates as cleaning crews, with appropriate personal protective equipment to go through plants, construction sites, and distribution facilities multiple times a day.
- Double-down on scheduling, staging, cadencing crews to ensure spacing; clearly mark six-foot social distance task-sites so that workers can observe best practices on the sites.
- Convert building materials distribution centers to worker safety and staging areas to ensure all human resources moving into sites are scheduled, protected, and instructed as to how to complete tasks in ways that will continue start-to-completion velocity at lowered risk levels.
- Ensure that protective gear is available to workers; it’s wonderful that builders are pulling out the stops to ensure that respirators, masks, and face-shields, etc. are going to the front lines of the health worker community. However, this extraordinary measure will come back to bite the construction community if it leads to more patients flooding into an already-stressed healthcare system.
In a very real sense, the pit in our stomachs right now comes from the recognition that we do need both–lives and livelihoods. Choosing an order, one before the other, will be the hardest choice any of us will ever need to face. The next 14 to 45 days may put each of us in the position of having to make it. This is why every issue we face today–as builders and business executives and partners–is a leadership issue.
