Professional demolition...?

Just how professional is the demolition industry really?

I could never be a politician. Even setting aside my working class roots, lack of formal educational, and even more questionable sense of style and fashion, I just couldn't do it.

I could not look the nation in the face knowing that some of its citizens have no home to go to or sufficient food to eat. I could not sleep nights knowing my constituents were forced to choose between eating and heating; that sick children were forced to travel overseas for medical treatment because we'd spent the health budget on PPE that didn't work; that old folks that had been heavily taxed their entire lives were forced to sell their homes to fund care in their twilight years; and that the rivers and waterways previous generations had fought so hard to clean up were now filled with sewage because I had granted the water and waste companies to deposit what they like, when they like and where.

Which brings me to the subject of demolition. We like to tell ourselves that ours is a professional industry. It certainly has many of the trappings. It has a training and educational regime. It has a highly-structured and well-defined career path. It has more than its fair share of rules and regulations, benchmarks, standards and codes of conduct. Some parts of it even have medals, trophies and industry honours.

But (and it's a big Jennifer Lopez-sized butt) the industry still maims and kills far too many of its workers. It stands idly by while those same workers take their own lives at a rate that is almost four times the national average. It claims to care for the mental health of their own workers and yet it forces them to work under conditions that only serve to increase their levels of stress, depression and isolation. It continues to draw its workforce, largely, from a pool of the uneducated; strokes its collective ego with expensive new equipment, even though much of it is leased at exorbitant cost that can drive individual companies to the very brink of insolvency. Hell, entire sites can brought to a standstill because someone forgot to order the diesel or to pay for it the last time around.

There are great swathes of the demolition industry today that are nudging towards blue chip status. The industry has within it some of the smartest people I have ever met. The sector has made huge, giant, superhuman leaps in technology, safety, and sustainability.

Is demolition professional? Mostly, but not completely. If it is to achieve true, verifiable levels of professionalism, it still faces just as many challenges as those politicians claiming to be focused only on the needs of their fellow man.