The Greatest Generation Learned its Lessons; Are We Ignoring Ours?

by Paul Deffenbaugh | 2 August 2021 12:00 am

After all, if more people are comfortable working at home, and more students can learn remotely, why do we need such a high investment in office buildings, dorms and classrooms?

To answer those questions and many more that we hope provide a glimpse of the future of the construction industry, we conducted a survey. You can read about it here[1]. As part of our special report, we also looked at how the pandemic affected individual companies and what they learned from it. Senior Editor Mark Robins reported on what our readers experienced during the pandemic and what they expect to happen within their companies after it. Read his feature article here[2].

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was at its essence about safety, Associate Editor Christopher Brinckerhoff delved into the procedures and processes contractors and suppliers needed to implement to keep crews and other workers safe. He also asked and reported on which of those procedures people thought would carry forward beyond the pandemic, as well as giving us an update on where OSHA stands in its review process of job-site health and safety procedures. Read his feature article here[3].

In addition to business practices and safety, our survey inquired about technology, wellness issues and contractual changes. For the most part, our respondents and interviewees report they dealt with the new challenges they faced, but they didn’t necessarily think the pandemic would significantly change their day-to-day operations.

I have to say I agree with them.

Call me pessimistic, but do you remember after 9/11 when the country came together in the face of a foreign attack, and everyone hung an American flag in front of their house? Then, within a few months, we were back to our typical—or even more vehement—political squabbling. Do you remember during the housing recession when we believed that we would move away from amassing ridiculous levels of consumer debt and using our homes as ATM machines? We thought Americans would actually begin to save money. Since 2010, consumer debt has increased 31%, according to the credit reporting company Experian.

In the two decades of this millennium, our country has already faced three life-defining events: 9/11, the housing recession and now the COVID-19 pandemic. In terms of impact, I won’t stack these two decades and those three events against the 1930s and 1940s with the Great Depression and World War II, but you can’t dismiss these events as small blips that haven’t—or won’t—have significant consequences.

What is different and what seems to fuel my pessimism is that we’re not learning from our life-defining events. The Greatest Generation did learn from those events. It made changes and pulled together over the long term to improve our country and make it the envy of the world.

Us? At this time? I’d have to say that as a community, we have become selfish and predatory.

I hope that the construction industry and the rest of the country will fully understand the lessons of this pandemic and make adjustments going forward that benefit all of us. That’s the optimistic side of me. The pessimist in me worries that we will absorb those lessons and figure out how to make them work for each of us individually—economically, politically and personally—and not how they will work for all of us.

You have heard me preach this regularly from this space. The construction industry needs to evolve from a cost-based environment to a value-based environment where we pay for the value we get rather than the price we want. Where quality design and construction are admired and rewarded. Where workers get compensated at their true value.

I’d love to see that happen, and if there is anything good to come out of this pandemic, it is my hope that we move the industry in the direction of rewarding value, and that our focus on price would begin to wane. I suggest that begins with recognizing and paying trades people what they are truly worth.

Source URL: https://www.metalconstructionnews.com/articles/the-greatest-generation-learned-its-lessons-are-we-ignoring-ours/

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