Decreasing Productivity Rates In The Construction Field

I recently read an article from the “Journal of Construction Engineering and Management” that confirms the trend of decreasing productivity rates in the construction field in the USA.  This confirms that we don’t do business like the good’old days.

 In 1990-2010 era there is has been an increasing Union and worker rights movement.  Personally I believe this is cause by a variety of factors such as increasing level of personal entitlement and litigation. This has led to better safety, labor rules, and an overall worker environment.  I think it is safe to say that the industrial revolution era of sweat shops and rampant worker fatality/injuries is a thing of the past and a transition that China and India are going through now.

As a supervisor contrary to popular belief, the safest crews that follow the protocol’s to the letter are also the most productive. You can point out on a case by case where individual safety procedures and quality measures drastically slows down production however the GOAL here is to not have the fastest production times actuly this is very narrow sided to have this belief.  The GOAL is the bottom-line, to create these goods/services the cheapest way within the time constraints.  Often the bottom-line is effected by safety and quality.  A worker injury or bad lot of product quickly erases the fact that the lot was produced in record time. As a rule of thumb when I was managing my 50K a day crew I knew that the smallest injury would cost approximately $250,000 In litigation and employee compensation and $100,000 dollars of internal department administration/contractor costs to process the claim. As you can see it hardly made sense to take a change to get 110% of planned production for the day to rush or cut corners.  In conclusion there are many metrics of production but we should not lost sight of the GOAL.