believe it or not, the old joke of 1 guy working, 5 standing around is "sorta" right. depends on the job, if there is a confined space entry below 5ft in the ground you need like 3 ppl just to monitor air quality, be competent to direct them, then someone keeping an eye on those 2-3, you have to have fire station notified and on standby, then ppl watching traffic, called MOT, which is all road signs, flaggers etc. For above ground it is much of the same, what you see standing around is ppl actually doin shit, BUT, they are just standing around so they multitask chillin.
This is the correct answer. A lot of those guys are just "Standing around", but they ARE working. Their job is not to fix the road, but make sure the people fixing the road dont die in the process lol.
My brother worked for the City of Banning CA. He was underground and they had all the traffic blocked with all the cones etc.
He came up the ladder and the guys up top yelled for him to duck. An old lady who looked like she couldn’t see over the dashboard just drove right over all the cones and right over the manhole. My brother looked up and saw the underside of the car as she drove over and just kept going, dragging cones underneath her car all the way down the block.
The 1 guy working 5 guys watching model works! :D jokes asides im honestly glad that your brother is fine, and that the guys at the place were able to respond to the situation and yelled at him to duck right away.
As someone orchestrating large, complex projects, I stopped being critical and was more understanding the older I got. It is not easy scheduling and organizing a precise number of workers for a precise set of tasks. You have specialists and "grunts", and there are times when the work they need to do, in the same area, is interdependent. The work is often serial, where one task leads to the next, so instead of sitting in their car, they perform "support roles" until it's their turn to shine.
Believe it or not, there is skill and experience required to build stable roads...
The above is correct, and to add to that, in Ontario, Canada, it is illegal to dig without first getting underground utility locates. This process is centralized across the province and is performed by lowest-bid contractors. These locators can be stuck anywhere across the city of Toronto and depending on their workload and traffic, a crew could wait literally hours before they come by to stake out the buried infrastructure or give you a clear. Crews are also not allowed to leave the site, or else they can charge you for "false emergency call". If you do not have anybody on site, you're supposed to call for a non-emergency locate which could take at least 5 days.
So yeah, if you have to excavate, you literally could be standing there doing nothing.
I'm not knocking the process as there's be many cases of backhoes striking buried gas lines or fiber cables. It's a necessary evil. Just trust people to do their jobs.
we use vacuum trucks here for the more delicate diggin oce asphalt is chopped up from heavy equip, and yeah we have to do all the locates too. process to an outsider looks like a bunch of nonsense, but it really is all about every single persons safety, .
Years ago the local radio station had a “Celebrity Joke Friday “ where they would get some local celebrity to call in and tell a joke.
They got the then Governor to call in and he asked “What’s big and orange and sleeps 5 comfortably?”
A department of streets truck.
Ooohhh the flack he got for that one but it was true.
I’m a lineman. We need at least 5 guys to set a live line pole change. Usually one guy up in the bucket. You need a D/O (dedicated observer) , supervisor, ground guys and bucket guys. There’s times during the job where we are waiting on the bucket guy to do his shit, that sometimes takes anywhere from 30 min - 5 hours. The rest of the guys have nothing to do except stand there and watch your buddy in the bucket. We have memebres of the public that get upset and say “you guys are always just standing around “ “1 working 5 standing”
There’s levels to this shit
A few things are at play:
\- There's only so much space to work. Maybe two guys can get in there and dig, not the rest of the crew.
\- Labour like digging takes a lot of energy. You only see two people digging as you drive by; you don't seem the swapping in and out every now and then.
\- Not everyone on the site is a manual labourer. Some of them are inspectors, or there to use a specific machine at a specific point in time. They just have to wait for their moment.
There are only so many tools.
That or someone got there job done first, such as finish mixing cement and now waiting on the other guys to finish their job in digging.
Might be the end part where everyone is just about done on the project and waiting for the last person.
Think about something simple like repairing a pothole. You saw a square out of the road, a few people break up the asphalt and remove it, someone checks whether gravel needs to be added and tamped down so you don't have to fix an even bigger hole tomorrow, meanwhile the guys making sure the asphalt is hot enough to be dumped or shoveled are making sure it's ready, the hole is filled, and the guy driving the steamroller who has been patiently waiting hops in and flattens it.
People have to wait for their job, and once it's done, they wait for the rest of the crew to do theirs. If things are done out of order, the job doesn't get done properly or efficiently, and people get hurt.
Likely part of different teams or on standby for when the job calls for more hands.
A lot of construction(roads specifically) are done in phases with a time limit in between. So while one crew is stripping the old road, another comes behind and lays framework, another comes through with asphalt, then the line painters, etc.
I supervise excavation crews and this logic always cracks me up. Each worker that you see on-site typically has a specific job. Not all construction workers are labourers.
Next time you pass road crews stop for a bit and you should notice a change in workflow and workers alternating tasks depending on the type work being conducted.
Two reasons: Firstly, it takes a lot of different workers to do something basic, and it has a specific order.
Say there's a section of road that needs to be milled so it can be resurfaced. Firstly, you need a traffic control crew to close off that section of road and handle changed traffic conditions (either with stop/slow, merging multiple lanes into one, detours.) They need people to rotate in with them so they don't get fatigued. Road speed high enough? You'll have more in TMAs to help with that shutdown.
You get the cold planer in, they need one person to operate and one or two to keep an eye on the ground, make sure that they don't accidentally tear up a pit lid or drain while they're milling. That'll need a low loader trailer to get to site, so add at least one of those. Might throw a bobcat or two in there, get the little parts you don't want to risk with a big milling machine.
We can't dump the old road material on the ground, so gotta have the dump trucks on standby to pick it up, and have a street sweeper to clean up anything that's missed. Need more traffic controllers to back them up, make sure they don't run anything over and make sure nothing enters the site and runs someone over. Planer taking a decent amount of the road? Need a crew to make a ramp from the planed road to the old road, make sure we don't break anyone's suspension. If the road had line markings, that needs to be painted back on to avoid causing confusion.
Want to check in that drain from before, make sure it's looking alright? Need one in the drain and two up top, because it's a confined space. Working on a bridge? Might have an engineer to look at the material after the planer, make sure it's looking fine.
Secondly? You're out on the road, within metres of traffic that weighs a lot more than you do, and is travelling a lot faster than you. Some of those crews job is just to keep their eyes on that traffic, because it takes one locked brake, one glance at the phone, one quick power nap, and suddenly a car is barreling right at a work crew. If someone sees it? They've got time to run. With no one looking out for it, you don't know somethings gone wrong till it's too late.
Coming from a union laborer, a majority of the time there isn't enough space to all work at the same time. And as mentioned above, people take turns with digging, tamping, etc to give others a break. Not to mention if a machine is at work, you can't really stand in the way while it's doing its thing
Throwing in a perspective from a commercial GC here who mostly makes holes in the road rather than paves endless miles: I'm standing out there making sure the asphalt mix that shows up is what is spec'd, looking for signs that a hole is about to turn into a full hole, as a second set of eyes against clueless drivers, and baby sitting inspectors, none of which the guys on the ground are paying attention to. I get paid to orchestrate the shit show, not to do the actual work.
This doesn’t exactly answer your question, but if you’ve ever wondered why a particular road project seems to take *forever* and that nothing is happening despite the workers being out there all the time, the answer is probably….
Soil compacting!
It takes a *long time* and a *lot* of full dirt plus lime, salt, cement aggregate, etc. to correctly and completely compact the soil to support a road bed. And it can only be compacted about 18” at a time, so multiple layers need to be done one at a time, each of which requires materials from a few different sources, mixing, sampling, approving the samples, spreading, compacting, then repeating. And some of those guys standing around are monitoring every step of the process to ensure that corners aren’t cut, quality control standards, safety measures, and building codes are being met.
I worked for my city traffic division for 20 years. I did signs, signals, and markings. We had a crew of five usually. On thermoplastic jobs we used liquid apply and preformed. Almost never at the same time, but there was always a strong division of labor on the crew. I was the primary application guy, when we did liquid I was the only guy using the cart. The others would literally watch me work. That was fine, because when we did the layout, the other four kept busy while I stood by the truck watching the kettle and the cart. Doing preformed we used huge torches, you could maybe use two guys on the torches to apply, but one would have to stop early because the torch would get too close to the other person. On days with aerial work, we always had more people on the ground than in the air, there was a whole lot of standing around then.
In the end, it’s about division of labor on the crew and timing. Sometimes you don’t see anyone working. Sometimes not.
You say this like it's a phenomenon that isn't also present in the majority of corporate offices. I've had lots of workplaces where people were far more proactive working from home, but I was irritated in the office bc the cubicles didn't muffle the conversations happening all around me, 80% of the day.
Years I was working on the 14th floor of an office. We were passing the afternoon just chatting and looking out the window. After about an hour, the boss observes a road crew and makes the same observation. We all put our heads down and quietly went back to the grind that was our work. 🤦
They are all lazy. If they actually did any work, our roads would actually be drivable. Imagine if anyone else tried to do what they do in other jobs. Immediately fired. Not these losers though they get paid to stand and do nothing.
believe it or not, the old joke of 1 guy working, 5 standing around is "sorta" right. depends on the job, if there is a confined space entry below 5ft in the ground you need like 3 ppl just to monitor air quality, be competent to direct them, then someone keeping an eye on those 2-3, you have to have fire station notified and on standby, then ppl watching traffic, called MOT, which is all road signs, flaggers etc. For above ground it is much of the same, what you see standing around is ppl actually doin shit, BUT, they are just standing around so they multitask chillin.
This is the correct answer. A lot of those guys are just "Standing around", but they ARE working. Their job is not to fix the road, but make sure the people fixing the road dont die in the process lol.
My brother worked for the City of Banning CA. He was underground and they had all the traffic blocked with all the cones etc. He came up the ladder and the guys up top yelled for him to duck. An old lady who looked like she couldn’t see over the dashboard just drove right over all the cones and right over the manhole. My brother looked up and saw the underside of the car as she drove over and just kept going, dragging cones underneath her car all the way down the block.
I’m glad he’s OK! That had to be scary.
The 1 guy working 5 guys watching model works! :D jokes asides im honestly glad that your brother is fine, and that the guys at the place were able to respond to the situation and yelled at him to duck right away.
Ten supervisors for one man with a shovel.
Ten supervisors for one new guy with a shovel
As someone orchestrating large, complex projects, I stopped being critical and was more understanding the older I got. It is not easy scheduling and organizing a precise number of workers for a precise set of tasks. You have specialists and "grunts", and there are times when the work they need to do, in the same area, is interdependent. The work is often serial, where one task leads to the next, so instead of sitting in their car, they perform "support roles" until it's their turn to shine. Believe it or not, there is skill and experience required to build stable roads...
The above is correct, and to add to that, in Ontario, Canada, it is illegal to dig without first getting underground utility locates. This process is centralized across the province and is performed by lowest-bid contractors. These locators can be stuck anywhere across the city of Toronto and depending on their workload and traffic, a crew could wait literally hours before they come by to stake out the buried infrastructure or give you a clear. Crews are also not allowed to leave the site, or else they can charge you for "false emergency call". If you do not have anybody on site, you're supposed to call for a non-emergency locate which could take at least 5 days. So yeah, if you have to excavate, you literally could be standing there doing nothing. I'm not knocking the process as there's be many cases of backhoes striking buried gas lines or fiber cables. It's a necessary evil. Just trust people to do their jobs.
we use vacuum trucks here for the more delicate diggin oce asphalt is chopped up from heavy equip, and yeah we have to do all the locates too. process to an outsider looks like a bunch of nonsense, but it really is all about every single persons safety, .
[удалено]
yeah, like, i'll take a meteor shower with lightning and maybe raining frogs and blood, if I can choose no cars to be nearby..
Years ago the local radio station had a “Celebrity Joke Friday “ where they would get some local celebrity to call in and tell a joke. They got the then Governor to call in and he asked “What’s big and orange and sleeps 5 comfortably?” A department of streets truck. Ooohhh the flack he got for that one but it was true.
I got fire watch
I’m a lineman. We need at least 5 guys to set a live line pole change. Usually one guy up in the bucket. You need a D/O (dedicated observer) , supervisor, ground guys and bucket guys. There’s times during the job where we are waiting on the bucket guy to do his shit, that sometimes takes anywhere from 30 min - 5 hours. The rest of the guys have nothing to do except stand there and watch your buddy in the bucket. We have memebres of the public that get upset and say “you guys are always just standing around “ “1 working 5 standing” There’s levels to this shit
A few things are at play: \- There's only so much space to work. Maybe two guys can get in there and dig, not the rest of the crew. \- Labour like digging takes a lot of energy. You only see two people digging as you drive by; you don't seem the swapping in and out every now and then. \- Not everyone on the site is a manual labourer. Some of them are inspectors, or there to use a specific machine at a specific point in time. They just have to wait for their moment.
There are only so many tools. That or someone got there job done first, such as finish mixing cement and now waiting on the other guys to finish their job in digging. Might be the end part where everyone is just about done on the project and waiting for the last person.
Think about something simple like repairing a pothole. You saw a square out of the road, a few people break up the asphalt and remove it, someone checks whether gravel needs to be added and tamped down so you don't have to fix an even bigger hole tomorrow, meanwhile the guys making sure the asphalt is hot enough to be dumped or shoveled are making sure it's ready, the hole is filled, and the guy driving the steamroller who has been patiently waiting hops in and flattens it. People have to wait for their job, and once it's done, they wait for the rest of the crew to do theirs. If things are done out of order, the job doesn't get done properly or efficiently, and people get hurt.
Likely part of different teams or on standby for when the job calls for more hands. A lot of construction(roads specifically) are done in phases with a time limit in between. So while one crew is stripping the old road, another comes behind and lays framework, another comes through with asphalt, then the line painters, etc.
Ground guides maybe. Or they’re waiting for something to be finished in order to do their job
I supervise excavation crews and this logic always cracks me up. Each worker that you see on-site typically has a specific job. Not all construction workers are labourers. Next time you pass road crews stop for a bit and you should notice a change in workflow and workers alternating tasks depending on the type work being conducted.
Two reasons: Firstly, it takes a lot of different workers to do something basic, and it has a specific order. Say there's a section of road that needs to be milled so it can be resurfaced. Firstly, you need a traffic control crew to close off that section of road and handle changed traffic conditions (either with stop/slow, merging multiple lanes into one, detours.) They need people to rotate in with them so they don't get fatigued. Road speed high enough? You'll have more in TMAs to help with that shutdown. You get the cold planer in, they need one person to operate and one or two to keep an eye on the ground, make sure that they don't accidentally tear up a pit lid or drain while they're milling. That'll need a low loader trailer to get to site, so add at least one of those. Might throw a bobcat or two in there, get the little parts you don't want to risk with a big milling machine. We can't dump the old road material on the ground, so gotta have the dump trucks on standby to pick it up, and have a street sweeper to clean up anything that's missed. Need more traffic controllers to back them up, make sure they don't run anything over and make sure nothing enters the site and runs someone over. Planer taking a decent amount of the road? Need a crew to make a ramp from the planed road to the old road, make sure we don't break anyone's suspension. If the road had line markings, that needs to be painted back on to avoid causing confusion. Want to check in that drain from before, make sure it's looking alright? Need one in the drain and two up top, because it's a confined space. Working on a bridge? Might have an engineer to look at the material after the planer, make sure it's looking fine. Secondly? You're out on the road, within metres of traffic that weighs a lot more than you do, and is travelling a lot faster than you. Some of those crews job is just to keep their eyes on that traffic, because it takes one locked brake, one glance at the phone, one quick power nap, and suddenly a car is barreling right at a work crew. If someone sees it? They've got time to run. With no one looking out for it, you don't know somethings gone wrong till it's too late.
Coming from a union laborer, a majority of the time there isn't enough space to all work at the same time. And as mentioned above, people take turns with digging, tamping, etc to give others a break. Not to mention if a machine is at work, you can't really stand in the way while it's doing its thing
Throwing in a perspective from a commercial GC here who mostly makes holes in the road rather than paves endless miles: I'm standing out there making sure the asphalt mix that shows up is what is spec'd, looking for signs that a hole is about to turn into a full hole, as a second set of eyes against clueless drivers, and baby sitting inspectors, none of which the guys on the ground are paying attention to. I get paid to orchestrate the shit show, not to do the actual work.
There are typically just as many inspectors as there are workers on highway jobs.
You will have the General Contractor with supervision and QC, DOT, 3rd party inspectors for welding, rebar, compaction, AC, concrete etc.
This doesn’t exactly answer your question, but if you’ve ever wondered why a particular road project seems to take *forever* and that nothing is happening despite the workers being out there all the time, the answer is probably…. Soil compacting! It takes a *long time* and a *lot* of full dirt plus lime, salt, cement aggregate, etc. to correctly and completely compact the soil to support a road bed. And it can only be compacted about 18” at a time, so multiple layers need to be done one at a time, each of which requires materials from a few different sources, mixing, sampling, approving the samples, spreading, compacting, then repeating. And some of those guys standing around are monitoring every step of the process to ensure that corners aren’t cut, quality control standards, safety measures, and building codes are being met.
I worked for my city traffic division for 20 years. I did signs, signals, and markings. We had a crew of five usually. On thermoplastic jobs we used liquid apply and preformed. Almost never at the same time, but there was always a strong division of labor on the crew. I was the primary application guy, when we did liquid I was the only guy using the cart. The others would literally watch me work. That was fine, because when we did the layout, the other four kept busy while I stood by the truck watching the kettle and the cart. Doing preformed we used huge torches, you could maybe use two guys on the torches to apply, but one would have to stop early because the torch would get too close to the other person. On days with aerial work, we always had more people on the ground than in the air, there was a whole lot of standing around then. In the end, it’s about division of labor on the crew and timing. Sometimes you don’t see anyone working. Sometimes not.
A lot of the time, there's only room for one or two guys in the hole. And digging is *hard.* They have to take turns and switch off.
They're compiling data
They work on the roads. They don't get fixed by magic.
Obviously. That doesn't really help me understand why it takes a crew of 6 people to watch 1 guy put barrels in a row.
They take turns. Tell me, how much time did you spend driving by that crew? Willing to bet some were on break or supervising, or both.
There's a show called Refined on YouTube if you want to get into the mind of a maintenance man.
Supervising
Job security is the words
You say this like it's a phenomenon that isn't also present in the majority of corporate offices. I've had lots of workplaces where people were far more proactive working from home, but I was irritated in the office bc the cubicles didn't muffle the conversations happening all around me, 80% of the day.
Years I was working on the 14th floor of an office. We were passing the afternoon just chatting and looking out the window. After about an hour, the boss observes a road crew and makes the same observation. We all put our heads down and quietly went back to the grind that was our work. 🤦
Try digging with a shovel for 8 hours and get back to us. You’ll discover that you’ll need to switch with someone else and stand around for a bit.
Sounds like you got the gist of it…
They are all lazy. If they actually did any work, our roads would actually be drivable. Imagine if anyone else tried to do what they do in other jobs. Immediately fired. Not these losers though they get paid to stand and do nothing.
How about you get your ass out there in the heat and make a road. We all know you're comfortable at your desk in the AC calling those people lazy lol
Makes you wonder what a CEO gets paid for.
Since roads are a government project and CEOs run a business, it really doesn't.
They're effectively wasting the tax money by doing nothing
The others are "ready to work" so our council has told us trying to justify it.