Normalising the abnormal
We’ve mastered the art of accepting the unacceptable. From global pandemics to industry fatalities, we no longer recoil in horror. Instead, we keep score, turning human tragedy into a mere statistic.
I am constantly amazed at society’s capacity to normalise the abnormal; our willingness and even eagerness to accept something that would have previously been unimaginable.
Cast your mind back to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. One minute we were reading news reports of some disease outbreak in China; and the next, we spent two years indoors, confined to barracks, our only topic of conversation the brand of vaccination we had received.
COVID and the resulting lockdown forced me to give up my job as a magazine journalist, and to embrace LiveStreaming. For almost the entirety of 2020, if I wasn’t live-streaming I was learning how to. But regardless, each weekday, I would stop what I was doing, turn on the TV to find out just how many of my fellow citizens had died from COVID the previous day. Within just a few weeks, counting the dead became part of my daily routine.
That normalisation extends way beyond the confines of COVID, of course. We have normalised the fact that our politicians will say one thing and do another. We have normalised the fact that the rule of law differs depending how much money you have in the bank. We have normalised the fact that water companies place profits above the need for clean rivers and seas. We have normalised the fact that national leaders will seek to boost their waning popularity by starting a war in which thousands will die. Violent crime is a statistic; hardcore pornography is mainstream; and a celebrity sex tape is not cause for public embarrassment. It is the fast-track to celebrity status.
And here in the demolition and construction industry, we have turned normalisation into an art-form. 8,000 companies have gone to the wall in the past two years, and there is a collective shrug of acceptance.
Tens of thousands of working men and women were forced into self-employed status to ease the strain on contractor bottom lines. No-one batted an eyelid.
Thousands of men and women are laid off in the run-up to the festive period so their employers can avoid the burden of paying so-called valuable staff at a time when workloads ease.
When 10 UK demolition companies were found guilty of bid-rigging and price-fixing, the response was not one of dismay. Rather, the 10 firms remained within the industry fold; their crimes dismissed as just another example of the “brown envelope” system that had been in place for longer than any of us can remember.
We have normalised working practices that we know to be risky, harmful and potentially deadly.
And then, there’s the big one; the large woolly mammoth in the middle of the room; the universal acceptance of the seemingly unacceptable.
Each year - in fact, each working day - there is an acceptance that millions of men and women will go to work on demolition and construction sites. but that not all of them will make it home. And those that do may well have been injured or maimed along the way.
We know the causes, of course. Working at height; slips, trips and falls; working in close proximity to heavy machinery. But rather than amending our working practices, we have risk assessments. We have toolbox talks. We have health and safety briefings. We have normalised hazards to the point where there is a system to record the occasions when those hazards claim victims.
Worse still is the normalisation of site fatalities. Across industry, and specifically in the field of demolition and construction, we have become so accepting of deaths in the workplace that we have created a league table to monitor which industry sector kills the most each year. Think about that. Injuries and deaths in the workplace are so regular, so frequent, so NORMAL that we keep score.
My part of the industry - the media part - is equally guilty; equally complicit. We have normalised site fatalities and the league table that records them to the point where 30+ industry deaths aren’t even worthy of the front page. Instead, there is a moment of reflection if the annual fatality stats rise, or a silent sigh of relief if they fall, and then we just go about our business once again. We don’t even ask for the names of the deceased. Deaths are normalised to the point that dead workers become numbers and statistics; digits in a ledger of the expected.
That is not the action of a mature, professional industry. That normalisation is not the action of a caring society.
It is the action of an industry that sees its workers as expendable; as cannon fodder. And it is a sign of a society that increasingly rotten to its core.
