Hi. I just wanted to share my story of my time as a ground-worker (just an fyi about ground workers as some may not know: any building site you see is normally occupied by the ground workers first to prepare the job for everyone else; this includes sewers, roads, concreting, muck shifting etc).
I worked on a project that was building a new hospital. The terrain was rough and we needed to dig deep to install pile caps (concrete and steel foundations that make sure the building doesn’t sink) to ensure a solid foundation for the structure to be built. It was well paid and highly sought after in the beginning. Many people from all over the country (Scotland) would travel here for work. As with any job progress happens and things move along and more and more people come onto the job: joiners, scaffolders etc… a natural progression of this is that the groundworkers would be the first ones off the job as work began to dry up. Now this would normally not be an issue as it is a natural process in this industry. We went from being valuable to worthless very fast as the weeks went on. The collective mental health of everyone was being toyed with as we would be told to work harder as they needed to get rid of a 50 people that week and only those who would go the extra mile would be kept on. This varied from week to week with the number getting paid off being anywhere between 5 and 70 bodies needing to be let go each week. I was a single guy at the time but it was still a hellish experience not knowing if you where safe each week; as a husband and a father now I can only guess this was worse for people with additional home life responsibilities. It really drove home that you are nothing more than a number.