Human Side of Construction

Human Side of Construction 🏗️ Improving construction through humour and education
💪1,000+ people helped | Community created 🤝
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(3)

09/02/2026

Keep going. You’re doing it. 🫡

We see you and we appreciate you ✊

40% of our workforce retires in 10 years. The math doesn’t work ⬇️• About 4 MILLION people. Roughly 400,000 per year in ...
08/31/2026

40% of our workforce retires in 10 years. The math doesn’t work ⬇️

• About 4 MILLION people. Roughly 400,000 per year in North America.
• There are currently about 300,000 people enrolled in construction apprenticeship programs. Total — not per year.
• And that assumes we build nothing new. It doesn’t include the infrastructure and housing we’ve already promised.

We keep calling this a recruitment problem. It’s a retention problem wearing a recruitment costume. We’re not failing to attract people... we’re failing to keep the ones who already showed up.

400,000 people a year are walking out with 30 years of judgment in their heads and nobody scheduled to receive it.

Read that again ☝️

What is your company actually doing about it? 👇

Follow for more.

08/30/2026

In construction, you’re 6x more likely to die by su***de than by every other workplace fatality combined. Four times the national average.

94% of construction workers reported stress in the past year. 83% anxiety. 60% depression.

And 26% — more than a quarter — reported suicidal thoughts.

Then there’s what keeps people quiet: 45% say they’d be ashamed to talk about mental health at work. 35% were actually discriminated against for speaking up.

Add substance misuse. 7x more likely to die of an opioid overdose than workers in other industries. A quarter of all worker overdoses in the country. In 2022, more than 17 times as many of us died from overdose than from a jobsite incident.

We hang banners about zero harm and count days without a lost-time injury. Meanwhile the thing actually killing our people doesn’t show up on the board.

That’s a lot of numbers. Take a second with them.

What comes to mind when you hear that?

08/29/2026

Not not true 🤷‍♂️

Your experience? 👇

08/29/2026

Interesting data from ENR 🤓 📈

Who have you worked for? 👇

08/27/2026

Tell me I’m wrong 👇

Of course there are good people out there but generally the bar is pretty low for how we treat our people.

The old way isn’t going to work anymore.

What has your experience been? 👇

08/27/2026

Which era are you in 💅

We built the world you live in. So why is the industry still looked down on?Working in construction has always carried a...
08/26/2026

We built the world you live in. So why is the industry still looked down on?

Working in construction has always carried a social and cultural stigma. Somewhere along the way “he works with his hands” became something people said quietly.

But we built the house you live in. The office you work in. The hospital you heal in. And the road you drive on to get to all of it.

Here’s the part nobody says out loud ⬇️

When an industry is told it’s a fallback, the people inside it start to believe it. That belief follows them home. It shows up as “I’m just a…” — and “just a” is where pride goes to die.

You can’t build psychological safety on a foundation of shame. A crew that’s embarrassed by the work won’t speak up to protect it.

So why is the industry looked down on? Tell me below 👇

Follow for more.

08/25/2026

21 times more likely than a workplace fatality.

When you combine drug overdose and suic!de to site related deaths it’s not even close.

Construction doesn’t create these issues but our people have them … and we need to do something about it.

Thoughts? 👇

08/24/2026

Personally I think Ms Rachel would do great onsite. 🦺

Already got the overalls and everything.

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