182| BusinessWorld |
July-August 2014
As we look toward that five-year future,
some headlines would be in safety. We look
at ourselves as leaders in the industry with
our STEP program, our safety academies,
and our efforts in furthering the reach of the
Construction Coalition for a Drug- and
Alcohol- Free Workplace. Up to one-third
of all workplace incidents are drug- and
alcohol-related. That’s why we joined other
construction groups to form this coalition.
All members of the industry can take the
pledge to create drug- and alcohol-free
jobsites at drugfreeconstruction.org. There
are also best practices and model policies.
The idea here is to essentially eliminate
fatalities and incidents from our industry
and increase the effectiveness of our
industry from a safety perspective. We are
constantly striving to do that and our goal is
to make our industry incident and injury-
free.
Fr om a wo r k f o r c e d e v e l o pme n t
perspective, there are a lot of opportunities.
There’s a workforce/skilled workforce gap
and we’re focused on improving the
construction industry’s image. We do a lot
of work with our partners, NCCER, Build
Your Future, Go Build, ACEMentor, Skills
USA, and others to create a positive image
for the industry. Construction is a great
career path for people coming out of high
school or college and there’s a lot of new
technologies that are emerging with regard
to building information modeling (BIM),
GPS technology and 3-D printing, so we’re
in a situationwhere we’re always looking for
ways to become more productive, provide
more value to our construction users, and
add to our workforce development and
productivity efforts. In fact, ABC recently
launched a suite of BIM training classes,
assessments and product discounts called
Project Virtual targeted directly at
contractors.
From the political advocacy perspective, we
work to support pro-business candidates
that will defend the merit shop philosophy
of free enterprise and open competition.
ABC’s Political Action Committee (PAC)
is consistently among the 10 most active
national association PACs and we look
forward to expanding our activity over the
next five years.
