Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • October 14, 2019 • Hartford Business Journal 11 FOCUS: CONSTRUCTION Cruickshank says she's still dismayed at the relatively small number of women she encounters on UConn work sites. She says she makes it a point to stop and greet them. "I'm always amazed women aren't further along,'' she said. Early engagement with girls and young women while they're still in school about professional- and skilled-labor options in construction and building trades would enhance their diversity, Cruickshank said. More and consistent mentoring of women, as well as greater empathy for females in building trades who seek time away to bear children, would be bonuses, she said. "These are all doable things,'' Cruickshank said. Meantime, despite their growing presence in a field predominated by males, female construction workers say they rarely, if ever, en- counter hostile treatment or attitudes from their male coun- terparts. Hicks says skills compe- tency is the prime yard- stick for gar- nering respect on the job site. She says her male co-work- ers have been helpful to her. "I've got to say 99 percent of the guys have been absolutely wonderful,'' she said. In fact, work- site misogyny is the least of problems for AFL-CIO's female trainees, Blackwood said. "My women have problems because they're dealing with systemic prob- lems with poverty,'' Blackwood said, such as access to adequate housing, transportation and social services. Finishing journeyperson Tatiana Southwick met her glazier husband on a job site in 2014. They married a year later. Finishing work entails hanging sheetrock, then sealing and painting interior walls. Born in New Jersey but with Puerto Rican roots, Southwick, 38, originally entered college with plans to become a veterinarian. But she later pivoted and took an office job to help care for her ailing mother. In 2005, she spied a training pro- gram that CWP's Rivera oversaw to prepare women and men for construction jobs. Southwick and two other women were in the co-ed class, but after seven weeks she was the only female to graduate. "I didn't know anything when I started in construction,'' said Southwick, who has come a long way since then. Today, she's a finishing trades apprentice instructor for Dis- trict Council 11 of the Interna- tional Union of Painters and Allied Trades in Middletown, a position rarely, if ever, held by a woman. Other out- ward signs of industry acceptance of women will appear as more females like South- wick become journeypeople and instruc- tors, Rivera and Blackwood say, or turn up on job sites as architects, engineers and project super- intendents. Women bring special talents to construction, Southwick said. "There's an attention to detail that I feel women are a little sharper at,'' she said. Southwick, the mother of five daughters, one of whom graduated from a technical high school with a carpentry certification, said she would encourage them to consider a career in building trades. "I tell them to come on down,'' she said. "But I do warn them that construction isn't for everyone, no matter the gender.'' emergency evacuation alarm, which can be sent to the devices via computer or smartphone. Oul- lette touts the technology as more efficient than traditional protocol, which he said usually involves "someone walking around with an airhorn on-site and blasting it." Through the system's web dashboard, he said, managers can instantly determine which workers have made it out safely as well as the location of anyone still left inside. "So, when the first responders show up, they're not guessing where the people are and search- ing — they're seeking," Oullette said. He said the system was re- cently used successfully to rapidly clear a steel-beam-exposed vertical high-rise site after a thunderstorm rolled in unexpectedly. Although the full benefits of the technology are still being evaluated, Mullen said it is already helping Gilbane identify and eliminate risky behaviors. He pointed to one worker, flagged for hav- ing an unusually high number of two-foot falls, who had actually been jumping down from an elevated foundation wall while traversing a job site. "Even though it's only a couple of feet, those are the kinds of things that can result in an injured knee or a twisted ankle," Mullen said. "It's an opportunity to go and coach that person and help them figure out a safer way of getting from point A to point B." Other wearables, such as strength-enhancing exoskeletons or lumbar monitors, aim to pre- vent fatigue, pain and soft-tissue injuries that can occur with repeti- tive physical labor, said Mike Ferry, chief safety officer for Torrington- based O&G Construction. His com- pany recently piloted an exoskele- ton technology, the Ekso Zero G, to chip concrete on a bridge-replace- ment project in Newington. The mechanical arm, which at- taches to scaffolding, can bear the weight of a 30-pound power tool and absorbs the impact of the chip- ping. Using the arm, a single worker finished the job in four hours when it normally would have taken two people two days, according to Ferry. "It's really grueling labor," he said. Buy-in challenges Despite some early successes, cost is still an obstacle for many com- panies, industry officials say. (The Spot-r system costs $100 per clip, but the network fee varies based on the project scale and complexity of the job site, according to Oullette.) Another challenge is getting buy- in from senior management and workers. CCIA's Butts said many smaller firms lack the person- nel to effec- tively analyze the information captured by the wearables. "It's one thing to adopt it, it's another thing to manage it. So you can collect all this data, but what are you going to do with it?" he said. While some workers are ini- tially wary about putting on a tracking device, education and training usually eases any "big brother" fears, Oullette said. Triax's wear- ables leverage RFID (radio frequency identifica- tion) technology, not GPS, so it only monitors a worker's general wearabouts within a job site's footprint. "We're not tracking you down to the foot," Oullette said. Gilbane's Mullen said most workers accept the technology once they "have an understanding of why you're doing it." Construction employment in Connecticut % of women who Male Female held jobs 1998 52,615 9,704 15.6% 2000 57,142 10,192 15.1% 2002 55,813 10,871 16.3% 2004 57,132 11,203 16.4% 2006 57,965 11,997 17.1% 2008 56,986 11,809 17.2% 2014 48,381 10,092 17.3% 2016 52,137 10,862 17.2% 2018 50,645 11,002 17.8% Source: U.S. Census data Construction's "Fatal Four" Out of 4,674 worker fatalities in private industry in 2017, 971 or 20.7 percent were in construction, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The leading causes of private- sector worker deaths in the construction industry are known as the "Fatal Four" and they include: Falls — 381 out of 971 total deaths in construction in 2017 (39.2%) Struck by object — 80 (8.2%) Electrocutions — 71 (7.3%) Caught-in/between* — 50 (5.1%) * This category includes construction workers killed when caught-in or compressed by equipment or objects, and struck, caught or crushed in collapsing structure, equipment or material. Source: Occupational Safety and Health Administration >> Diverse Ranks continued

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