Higher Quality of Life Means Ending Barnyard Conditions
Kelly Patton works out of laborers’ Local 872 in Las Vegas, where she is currently a flagger on the big MGM Grand project, and she’s giving the prime contractor on the job, Marnell Corrao Associates, high marks for an important part of her workday—the biobreak. “The contractor does a good job of keeping the restrooms clean, which is a big issue because the men’s restrooms can be disgusting,” she says. Unlike the many portable toilets she has encountered that are “soiled and reeking,” the pink potties on the MGM Grand project are only available to women who are given keys. “And they even have a grapefruit-scented smell as well as sanitary soap available,” she says.
Las Vegas’ laborers are the beneficiaries of detailed provisions of collective bargaining agreement work rules that also call for clean portable toilets on every floor of a highrise, daily washouts and measures to protect workers from sun and dehydration. But Las Vegas isn’t New York or Fort Worth and jobsites around the country vary from the primly pristine to the repulsive. “Soiled and reeking,” as Patton says, is a good way to describe many portable toilets on U.S. construction sites this hot summer, say workers.