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As racist and other discriminatory actions continue to plague construction sites across the U.S., including the Puget Sound region, the industry has ratcheted up efforts to combat it often in extraordinary ways.
When an incident happens on a Turner Construction job, police are called and the site is shut down for up to two hours for a meeting with employees and subcontractors.
It’s one example of a seismic shift in the industry, which has been focused on physical safety for decades. That outlook has broadened in recent years to include psychological and emotional safety.
It stems from recognizing inclusion is key to sustaining the industry’s already constrained workforce, which is aging and needs to be built up.
Industrywide, job sites across the country haven’t felt like safe places for women and people of color to work, Turner Construction Vice President and Seattle General Manager Bill Ketcham said in an interview this spring.
Bill Ketcham is vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., in Seattle.
He had just come out of Turner’s Inclusive Environment Summit, which around 100 people from some 50 subcontractors and other Turner partners attended in SeaTac.
“Turner’s been on an ongoing journey to create inclusive, safe workplaces,” Ketcham said. “Now we’re at the point where we’ve identified the need to collaborate with trade partners and organizations.”
Turner has a strict zero-tolerance policy when it comes to graffiti or etchings on job sites. The meetings that follow a site shutdown are not managers going through a handful of slides in front of the workers.
“It’s also about having a courageous conversation and having a dialogue with the group to further everyone’s knowledge about where we are and why we’re doing these things,” Ketcham said.
Stopping work is a huge burden in construction, which is driven by tight schedules, so it’s tempting to gloss over hate speech. Ketcham says that’s not changing the industry.
The Associated General Contractors has created a program called Culture of CARE, which promotes hiring based on skills regardless of race, sex or sexual orientation. AGC’s website shows that nearly 200 construction and related companies in Washington state, including Turner, have signed onto the program.
Ketcham said the key to success is ensuring there’s a healthy working relationship between laborers and their foreperson.
“We can put the best programs in place. We can talk about this all day long. But if that relationship is not a positive one, where there is that caring environment, that safe place, then there are groups of people that won’t want to work in the industry,” Ketcham said.
that from top to bottom reflects the demographics of each community where it operates.
Of the company’s 11,000 employees worldwide in 2021, 6,500 were based in the U.S., and of those, 71% were white, 11% Hispanic, 8% Black and 6% Asian.
And of Turner’s white U.S. employees, 53% were men and 18% were women.
“Construction has been a very male dominated industry for very long time and a lot of that is because it hasn’t been that open, caring space that we’re trying to create now,” Ketcham said.