My job is economy dependent, while my fiance’s is not. She also makes more than me. She is also doing the job she dreamed about doing since 3rd grade… Meanwhile I’m doing my job for the paycheck and because my college cut the forestry program the summer before freshman year. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to be a stay at home dad.
All but one of the construction sites I work with in my state have found loopholes to stay active… Non are remotely essential. Not to mention, who the hell is going to actually enforce the closures? Cops won’t b/c the superintendent onsite will have an answer for everything.
My gut feeling is that if folks took social distancing seriously and did what they could to avoid other people, none of this forced isolation stuff would be neccessary. But, people haven’t been taking it seriously, so now they have to be forced. Like you said, if you were already doing “the right thing”, nothing will really change for you with the new restrictions.
…are trying to legislate stupidity. Legislating stupidity never works. If the enforcement agencies are not going to go full Nazi (no, I don’t think they should), it’s pointless; except for all the small business people getting reamed by forced shutdowns.
Most chemical plants and refineries have screeners taking temps and asking the screening questions as the workers enter. My company is staffing some around the country and my son is working for a friend’s company who is staffing screeners also. Maybe they are putting something like that in place.
There is way too much money at stake for those guys, individually, at a rank and file level, to mean anything.
Just the penalties for not meeting the deadlines for progress on those builds is enough to dump every single person there and replace them, let alone the entire value of the contracts for the subs and destroyers they’re building.
And, I’m also quite certain that a very large number of those guys are required to wear the same respirators as I do, which exceed the N95 standards. Whether welding, grinding, grit blast, paint, a whole slew of those functions basically require space suits on government jobs now anyways.
The guys on our shop floor wear the same kind of stuff, but not under all conditions. I’m sure plenty of guys are wearing those when required by OSHA, but OSHA’s not requiring everyone to have that level of PPE in a shipyard that employs thousands in confined spaces. It doesn’t presently exist.
According to my buddy it is just business as usual in the usual confined spaces. Nobody’s getting masks or any noticeable change in way of working.
According to him… Maybe he’s grinding an axe and exaggerating, but I doubt it. I have no way of knowing first-hand right now though.
Edit: I didn’t mean to gloss over the rest of your post, I just mostly agreed with it. I’m part of the same machine that keeps churning. For better or worse.
Yeah, I know I’m not telling you anything new about that.
But that kind of surprises me. It sounds like they may have some pretty relaxed practices there then, which places do develop, but that’s a whole other thing all together.
Well the PPE is just not there. Even if BIW wanted to supply everyone with the best there was it cannot be procured at this moment, and certainly not on the scale to outfit that shipyard. That’s why I’m inclined to believe my buddy (who I’ve known for years and is a helluva good natty lifter).
There are some measures like offering unpaid time off, but I can’t say I’m totally current on the situation aside from what my buddy told me a few hours ago.
T-Nation side story: BIW’s largest union, The Local S6 elected Chris Wiers as President last year. He no longer competes in powerlifting, but he is one of the strongest men ever to live in Maine. You can look him up. Total beast. And he’s been all over BIW for quite some time on this issue.
Those are P100, and not that it’s your problem to solve but those are from a company just to the north of da Burg called MSA and are designed to fit under grind shields and welding hoods, which they actually do pretty well.
I’ve had the filters stockpiled for a couple of years because they were freeish, and last a good while just welding odd ends here and there at home in a well ventilated garage.
Doesn’t affect me directly, but my wife just told me one of her former clients had to say goodbye to her husband via Facetime because the hospital wouldn’t let her be with him as he passed due to Covid19 concerns. He did not have it not does she.
I dunno, but some of the ways we’ve reacted to this are blowing my mind. In Maryland, a father is no longer allowed to be present during the birth of their child.
While I disagree with this kind of policy, I fully understand it. These decisions are not made lightly, and are highly nusnced. I think we have liability issues to blame here more than virus overreaction.
Ie, people suing hospitals for negligence after contracting the virus there, claiming that other hospitals didn’t allow visitors to prevent additional infections.
An infant died, dude. That absolutely, positively makes sense. The client having to say goodbye via FaceTime is totally fucked, but even that is defensible. Hospitals are stretched thin and short staffed. Nobody can just afford to expose somebody else willingly. It’s not just for the wife’s safety. It’s for the safety of the entire hospital staff, and everybody who suffers if the hospital doesn’t have enough people there (and they don’t already). There have to be firm lines drawn.
I also understand why you’re against a lot of this, I respect that, and, having been there for both of my children’s births, I’d be furious if I was denied that right. But I’d stay home.
I’m also in an essential job that will have to show papers to be out and about if things get locked down any more beneath you guys (in VA). If there were just about any other reason, I wouldn’t be cool with this. But nearly a thousand people are dying a day WITH something like 3/4 of Americans (or more) staying home and practicing social distancing protocols, and they’re telling us the peak is yet to come. The honor system just isn’t working.
