Education

Construction Firms Are Already Taking Steps to Protect Employees, Most of Whom Already Wear Protective Equipment, While Halting Work Will Undermine Efforts to Add Hospital Capacity The chief executive officer of the Associated General Contractors of America, Stephen E. Sandherr, issued the following statement in reaction to steps being taken to put in place arbitrary…

Last week, the Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health (ACCSH), which makes construction regulation recommendations to OSHA, held two public teleconference meetings to address how the agency could increase awareness and potentially update its standards for hazards that pose a great risk to industry workers — falls, excavation and trenches, opioids and suicide.  For falls, committee members…

Grant Program Provides More Than 300 Women with Harnesses that are Better Designed to Fit & Recruit More Women into Industry    Autodesk and the Associated General Contractors of America are awarding grants to 21 construction firms to provide more than 300 fall protection safety harnesses designed for women, the two groups announced today. The grants…

Common issues that small businesses may encounter •             Capital access. Incidents can strain a small business’s financial capacity to make payroll, maintain inventory and respond to market fluctuations (both sudden drops and surges in demand). Businesses should prepare by exploring and testing their capital access options so they have what they need when they need…

The exponential growth of big data has had a profound effect on the heavy building materials industry. Per Techjury, every person this year will generate 1.7 megabytes of data in just a second. In 2019, internet users generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. In addition: Large infrastructure projects are voluminous — requiring an…

The use of mobile phones for wireless streaming of music, podcasts or other entertainment is everywhere. Walk down any street in the country and you’ll often see more people wearing headphones than those that aren’t. Some of these listening devices even come equipped with sound-canceling features that completely block off noises from the outside world….

Project “Daily Reports” are some of the most important, yet overlooked aspects of a construction project. These reports serve many beneficial roles such as holding parties accountable to their obligations, providing the basis for an as-built schedule, recording manpower, documenting site conditions, and recording any other important and relevant information that happened on the job…

Robots, machinery and software promise to aid with the skilled labor shortage, or at the very least free up managers’ and other workers’ time so they can focus on more important tasks.  In the next three decades, as many as 2.7 million construction jobs could become automated, according to a report from the Midwest Economic Policy…

Each year, Federal civilian employees sustain work-related injuries and illnesses. In 2018, Federal workers filed almost 107,000 new claims and received approximately $3 billion in workers’ compensation payments. Many of these work-related injuries and illnesses are preventable, and executive departments and agencies can and should do more to improve workplace safety and health, improve efficiencies,…

5G technology has been touted as the next leap forward in the digital technology arena, and Houston is one of the first cities to roll out the new tech, but what does this mean for Houston’s economy? Well, it could mean a lot.  5G networks need smaller and more closely deployed antennae that can attach…