Construction Informer

I asked this question last year on this day and so it surfaces again, because this holiday has surfaced again. Is Labor Day obsolete?

The Census Bureau claimed in a press release today that there are 155 million people in the workforce with 10.5 million of them being self employed. Five percent have more than one job, eight percent work more than 60 hours each week, and six percent work from home. The Census Bureau also claims it was Peter McGuire who organized the first Labor Day in 1882, although if you read last year’s post linked above you will see there is still some controversy about that.

Yet doesn’t it seem this holiday has little passion and labor-related interest associated with it? Where are the parades? How come TBS doesn’t have a 24-hour Labor Day marathon featuring shows with capitalist thugs exploiting children, the weak, and the suffering in their factories from hell? Why is the biggest news of the day about the President’s speech to the country’s school kids? How come the labor unions aren’t holding job fairs? Shouldn’t every city park be the center of rallies demanding a stop to the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy? And how come there aren’t any demonstrations calling for the disbanding of the Federal Reserve, the one entity that guarantees the money earned by the workers is devalued annually? Of course it also wouldn’t hurt to get some protests going over the illegal income tax that all the workers are forced to pay.

If the only reason for the day is to make everyone think their labor is valued, while it is being continually devalued, then perhaps it’s time to call it quits. Last year I suggested we keep the holiday, but switch the day to have it focus on consumerism. I didn’t get any takers on that. So, maybe next year we should rename the day to – Going Back To School Holiday – and then just quit all our complaining about our collective economic plight and settle in for some hot dogs, beer and potato salad.

I’ve often wondered just where the term “punch list” came from. I have found some pretty good speculation on that. For example, one blog writer said it had to do with the term punch since it means to “punch something up” as in fix it. Another blog writer thought it had something to do with a long forgotten practice. Apparently subcontractors used to each have their own hole punches that would punch a hole with a shape unique to them. They would use these punches to indicate they had corrected the deficiency that was their responsibility. Someone else claims it came from the telephone installer process of “punching down” terminals on a block.

Wikipedia also claims the practice relates to physically punching a hole in a piece of paper. They cite a historical practice of punching a hole in the margin of the punch list to signify the completion of the item. Usually both the architect’s and contractor’s documents were punched together so each of them would have a record of the completion of the item. In this case the contractor notifies the architect that work is substantially completed and then the architect inspects the premises and puts together the punch list of items that are discrepancies, or that are incomplete.

Needless to say, complete contract documents are the key to avoiding issues at this point. If something hasn’t been specified then it could be open to interpretation. These kinds of problems are most evident in contracts between homeowners and contractors. Although, even cities and municipalities, and others, run into issues at the end of the project related to the punch list. As you can see from this account of a public building project gone wrong, there can sometimes be some monumental things on the punch list that need to be corrected.

Based upon news articles, disputes over punch lists were escalating through 2003, but since have begun to drop off rather steeply. Perhaps this is the result of more projects adopting Integrated Project Delivery and Building Information Modeling. No doubt as more things become transparent expectations will more closely align with the reality of what’s being delivered.

There is an example of a punch list here.

Was it McGuire, or Maguire, who orchestrated the first attempt to create a day set aside to honor the contributions made by the American workers to the strength, prosperity and well-being of the country?

To this day it is unclear whether the credit for Labor Day should go to Peter J. McGuire, secretary general of the Brotherhood of Carpenters, or, Matthew Maguire a machinist, and later the secretary of one of the machinists locals. But according to the Department of Labor, recent research indicates it was Matthew who proposed the holiday in 1882. It was New York’s Central Labor Union, at which Maguire was serving as secretary, that adopted a Labor Day proposal and set up a committee to advance the idea.

Eventually, after many states first adopted their own Labor Days, the U.S. Congress made it a national holiday in 1894.

But, what does it mean now, 114 years later in an era when few survive who can remember labor activists being hanged for inciting work stoppages to protest 12-hour days, disgusting and unsafe working conditions, six day workweeks and no benefits or vacations? Or that the holiday was grudgingly thrown as a bone to the labor movement out of fears that socialism might be gaining some ground.

It appears that to most people today the holiday is just a day off and a time to relax, socialize and eat hot dogs. It could be fitting that the holiday has evolved to this state – in its own way a tribute to the strides that have been made in humanizing the American workplace. Could it be that so much progress has been made that the reason for the observance just becomes more and more obscure as time passes?

If that is the case then perhaps it’s time to replace Labor Day with a holiday by another name that will appease the modern, struggling masses. Anyone for Consumers’ Day?

On second thought maybe you should just go to lunch together, and each of you buys your own. This is Building Safety Week, as advanced by the International Code Council, and it says some of the credit for safer buildings goes to all those people who ensure construction goes according to code. This includes not only building inspectors but also structural engineers, plan reviewers, and fire officials. Another idea would be to have a pizza party Wednesday afternoon and invite them all. The ICC offers a series of Top 5 building safety tips here, and a list of events for the week including a fireside chat and tools you can use to promote building safety in your community.

I’m a history buff so what I also discovered at this site fueled my thirst for answers about building code origins. Apparently there are some records that show codes, and the penalties for not following them, go back a long way. According to the ICC’s publication "Building Technology-Then and Now:"

…more than 4,000 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi, circa 2200–1800 B.C.E., prescribed the execution of any builder whose faulty construction of a house caused the death of its owner.

Early codes in the U.S., circa. 1625-1630, dealt with fire safety relative to roof coverings while another outlawed wooden chimneys, (scary thought) and thatched roofs. I suppose if you had a building with both a thatched roof and a wooden chimney you might call it…a torch?

Then in 1788 the first formal code was established in what we now know as Winston-Salem, NC, and was entirely in German. Interestingly it was New Orleans that became the first city in the country to require inspections of public buildings.

So there is your Monday morning primer on building codes and if people were really daring enough to use wooden chimneys once upon a time then we ought to be thankful for building codes.

Assigning meaning to the various colors of hard hats seems to fall into the realm of necessity. I recently read where some transportation departments assign hard hat colors to specific stations on the job. So, a visitor’s hard hat would be green and a manager’s hard hat would be white, etc. California DOT actually spells it out in their regulations:

• White hard hat with the Caltrans logo for most employees, used in most settings;
• Yellow hard hat for electrical crews;
• White hard hat without the Caltrans logo for people who participate in Adopt-A-Highway;
• Orange hard hat for, well, what California refers to as “Special Program People,” who pick up litter, (some suggest that’s probably done so they have a matching hat for their outfits).

There are very large jobs where the hard hat colors are also assigned so that different players can be easily identified. For example red hard hats might be designated for first aid responders.

I don’t know but I’ve never been impressed with the various hard hat knock-offs like the cowboy and NFL ones. OSHA has some requirements for hard hats (American National Standards Institute, Z89.1-1969, Safety Requirements for Industrial Head Protection) that one can only surmise are in effect because they help with safety. One note is that they should be inspected regularly for dents, cracks or deterioration. Some maintain that putting stickers and labels on the hard hats will prevent you from being able to do that. I’ve seen a lot of hard hats with all kinds of stickers on them and I have to admit I don’t think I could have seen a dent or crack in most cases.

There is a program called Helmets to HardHats under the direction of the Center for Military Recruitment, Assessment and Veterans’ Employment (CMRAVE). CMRAVE is funded by Department of Defense dollars to the tune of $5.4 million in 2007. The idea is to help transition military veterans to the needs of the construction sector. The organization doesn’t seem to have a particular color in mind for the hard hats it advances. But the website colors are green and yellow.

Believe it or not the very first hard hat was most likely black. Bullard, a 100-year old manufacturer of personal protective equipment, claims it perfected and popularized the concept of protecting heads from damage while working. In 1915 one of the company owners used a design based on the helmets worn by soldiers in World War 1. It seems miners were interested in these devices. The hard hats were made by blending together steamed canvas, glue and black paint. A suspension device fit inside the helmet. At least 18 years later the very first U.S. “Hard Hat Area,” was set up during construction of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, according to Bullard.

I’m not sure how much more anybody can stand regarding hard hat colors on a Monday morning but even if it reminds one person to put theirs on then maybe it has some value.

Others Say: Soon we will be having printed hats for rug dealers as-well-as blue hats for swimming pool cleaners. The dealers of bedding and furniture will be sporting brown bamboo hats.

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