Something about the Miami building collapse that no one is asking:

[jaxexpat]

62. But to be fair, Malaise, one person's cultural issue is another's quality of life issue.

Cast-in-place concrete buildings are expensive to build but they offer structural reliability unachievable from other techniques. But like every other type of building construction, they are built under deadline conditions. More often than people would feel comfortable admitting, construction quality suffers from the pressure of completion schedules. The US has a critical shortage of skilled construction labor. It's been the case for at least 25 years all across the country. In the building boom areas it's been a problem for much longer. South Florida is the poster child for such a building boom run rampant. The situation is common where a form carpenter would be promoted to foreman and a foreman promoted to superintendent out of the need for those positions to be filled due to a need to meet contract conditions. Often this takes precedence over any regard for the necessary qualifications or experience required for competence.

I have been to construction progress meetings wherein a contractor is using 100% of his company's workforce. But due to weather or changes in project scope or a shortage of competent labor finds himself running behind schedule. Project management's answer to this is to demand the contractor put on additional shifts or pay another contractor to perform the work in order to catch up. He has no additional personnel to throw at this. Even if he did, he'd have no supervision for the crews. It is NEVER financially viable to place another contractor in addition to your own on the same project, even if one could be found. The morale of the entire workplace at this point can sink so that the workforce fails to perform, often due to the irregularity of payroll and/or sub-contractor commitments. All too typically the contractor will simply go bankrupt, leaving the project broken, critical path objectives incomplete with disastrous consequence for the quality of structural integrity. This is a COMMON scenario in a building boom environment.

I believe that the negative affect of contractual scheduling pressure and the inability of the workforce to accomplish quality production under those high pressure conditions will prove to be the culprit here as well as in other disasters which are waiting to reveal themselves. Sometimes it's not the politics of regulations so much as the power of techniques employed to ensure that faceless investor's expectations get met which are our downfall. In the US, it's greed which has the most power.