Steve Ross needs the boot wrote on June 08, 2008 11:42 AM: Steve Ross needs to be relieved of both his union job and city council job.

SPFPAUNIONYES wrote on June 08, 2008 11:37 AM: Memorial Site to Bring Awareness
to The Safety Issues at
MGM Mirage
City Center Project
and all other Las Vegas Construction Sites!

http://www.spfpalocal7777.org/SAFETYFIRSTATCITYCENTER.html

tim wrote on June 08, 2008 11:07 AM: constuction workers are only as safe as they want to be,no amount of safety training will change that.i work there and it is a safe as every other hotel build in town.just lke smokey bear said only you can prevent ..........fill in the blank.

Perini Supporter wrote on June 08, 2008 07:57 AM: John.... There have been 3 entirely different issues at play here. 1. Safety. Perini does an excellent job promoting and maintaining safety. They expect the Union Employees to show up on the jobsite already trained in basic common sense safety. By LAW, the Subcontractors are responsible for safety training, however, since most of their field hands are only temps. the subs expect the Unions to provide this type of "common sense" training. 2. A good portion of the Employees on this jobsite, have never worked in an environment like this one, as they are either "white tickets" (those just hired from the non union housing and light commercial market), or they are travelers from other local unions, that have also never worked in a high rise environment, thus they were NEVER trained properly in safety to do their job. The 3rd issue, and the one that is relative to the walkout last week, has to do with good old fasioned greed by the Unions themselves. Each week that this job progresses, the Unions put approximately $2,000,000.00 into their pocket, (6000 employees X 40 hrs X $8.00 per hour). The walkout had nothing to do with safety, other than the fact that it gave the Unions an avenue to slow down the job and make more $$$. We all wish and pray for a safe job, but exploiting the safety in the name of Dollars is just wrong !!

charlie wrote on June 08, 2008 07:39 AM: Each and every person working on a job site must work safely for safety to happen and it really is up to the contractors and sub contractors to make sure that really happens.
Having said that, these contractors and sub contractors having little more then a hand full of permanent employees rely entirely on the unions to quickly ratchet up to the hundreds of well qualified employees in the form of workers and supervisors necessary to tackle large projects such as the city center. The unions therefore must take nearly all, if not all of the blame for unsafe work practices. Union hired help is advertised as the best help money can buy and as is evident in this case that simply is not true.

Previous large las vegas job sites have a history of the taking of workers lives. Some were killed by their own doing while others were killed by the unsafe actions of others.

I seem to recall something like 5 or 6 workers killed per year during the last construction boom in the late 1990's.

CityCenterEmployee wrote on June 08, 2008 07:27 AM: John,

In response to your article, let me just remind you of one thing, and that being that no matter how much you teach safety and enforce it, there are going to be those employees that will just not listen and not follow the rules step by step to ensure their own safety. They, not the company, are the ones that sometimes will take the shortcuts and end up dead like this fellow did. There is nothing that the Company can do about that. Oh sure, we can have the offender immediately removed off the job site, if we catch him committing a safety violation before he dies. But then after completing a Union approved "safety course," (which he had completed before) he will be back on the jobsite in no time at all.

Then you have "Operator error." People who are just not paying attention to their surroundings, such as may have been the case with this gentleman. Again, you can teach safety until you are blue in the face and it will not matter to someone who is just not paying attention. To blame the company is to forget one thing: that the most effective method in ensuring safety is the worker themselves. If something looks dangerous, then don't do it. Period. If something doesn't feel right, then don't do it, period. You'll go home alive at the end of the day.
Also, if the site is so unsafe, as this article claims, then there would be an astronomical amount more of deaths, but there aren't.
As an employee of Perini, I know first hand that we, as a company, place strict standards of safety upon everyone. We desire that everyone go home at the end of the day