Despite one of the toughest winters on record, Hines, the developer of the new Devon Energy Center in downtown Oklahoma City reported that the tower is on schedule and just passed 500 feet on its way to 850 feet and 50 stories making it the tallest structure in Oklahoma.NewsOK.com reported some interesting stats about the building scheduled for first occupancy in 2012. The main entrance to the building will be a rotunda which will be as tall as the nearby 12-story Colcord Hotel. The tower will also feature a public Garden Wing with restaurants, shops and trees, as well as a 285 seat auditorium. It was originally planned to rise to 54 stories, but after revisions it is now scheduled to be 50 floors.Devon, an Oklahoma City based company, hired Holder Construction from Atlanta, GA and Flintco Construction from Tulsa, OK as the project’s joint general contractors. They were awarded the contract because they promised the shortest interruption to downtown area parking. In a May 2009 video report by Oklahoma City’s News 9, Flintco’s Mark Grimes talks about
In part 2 of their investigation which we told you about last week, Randy Travis, a reporter with Fox 5 in Atlanta, follows the money on the use of undocumented workers. In this case, 50 bricklayers from Mexico were employed to work on two school sites and the Gainesville, GA police department headquarters, but were not paid for the work by the subcontractor Surig & Sons who hired them to do the work.According to the video, even though the masons provided false papers, they were allowed to work on the projects and then were not fully paid by the company for the work that they performed.
February 19, 2011
An investigative news team from Fox 5 television in Atlanta recently took a hidden camera onto a public school construction site in an effort to determine the use of undocumented workers on a publically funded project, something prohibited by law in Georgia. What they found was a “sub-sub-contractor” – a masonry company using illegal workers to do the work, to the detriment of local masonry companies who only use legal verified workers. By state law, all construction workers on publicly funded projects in Georgia must have their identities checked with E-Verify to be sure that they have a legal right to work, but the masonry company laying bricks on a new school was “not even registered as an E-Verify company.”
February 16, 2011
You might know him from the Discovery channel program, Dirty Jobs or more recently as the spokesman for Ford on the Super Bowl ads, but did you know that Mike Rowe has a construction industry website meant to entertain and inform? It is a creative way to see more of what the industry has to offer including 112 job profiles, videos of skilled tradesmen talking about their work, job listings and much more. For example, in his introduction to the “Work Is Not The Enemy” section, he talks about the image of skilled labor and how the attitude toward those who make things in their jobs has changed.
February 13, 2011
Democratic lawmakers in Nevada outlined a jobs bill that they will submit to the Nevada Assembly on Monday. The bill is aimed at keeping construction projects “Nevada...
February 11, 2011
Construction Citizen attended a lecture this week about Ethical Dilemmas in Construction Industry Labor Practices at Texas A&M University along with over 275 students and...
February 04, 2011
Lawrence Rebman, director of the Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, spelled it out very clearly in his recent Director’s Spotlight entitled Worker...
February 03, 2011
We received a link to a Yahoo Finance article from a fan of Construction Citizen. The article is entitled: Coalition of 'Unlikely Bed Fellows' Continues Growing to Nail...
February 03, 2011
As you saw in David Dennis’ blog post earlier this week, these are the times when doing the right thing becomes more important than ever but it becomes even harder when owner’s and the competition is squeezing you, your profits and your training for the future.Since the recession and the current unemployment in our industry of over 20%, many of us have shelved training for a workforce for the future. One thing we need to remember about the future is that it arrives whether we are ready or not. One of my friends told me the other day that the future is already here, it is just not widely distributed yet.In the 2008 US Bureau of Labor Statistics study of the workforce needs for the next decade we learned that the industry would likely need 1,800,000 new construction workers by 2018 to offset the retirements and the demands for new construction. Surely we have had to reset those numbers and extend that period to 2020, but the demand and the need will be there.
January 19, 2011
This letter is from the first newsletter that we received going into the new year and it is important. It describes one company’s workforce development program that meets...
January 15, 2011
