Belaboring Labor Board Your recent editorial regarding the National Labor Relations Board’s decision on bannering seemed to be based on the premise that, because the best interests of the industry rest on having robust union and open-shop employers, the industry is better off if the labor law is interpreted by the boards so that both are healthy. I am disappointed that ENR would seek to engage in an exercise intended to balance the equities rather than to take a position that is based exclusively on simply supporting what is right and promotes free and open competition for the entire construction
Did you take your best-ever construction photo this year? We invite you to share it with everyone by entering it in ENR’s annual “The Year in Construction” photo contest. The contest, now in its tenth year, has grown in popularity. Last year, we received 1,752 entries, which is considerably more than 2008. Every year, the editors say the photos are improving in quality—and that’s not hype. Cameras are improving in ease of use and in their ability to capture a photographer’s intent. Moreover, with the proliferation of picture-taking devices—from cell phones and the vast range of digital cameras to video
Many customers and industry colleagues already know me as vice president of McGraw-Hill Construction media sales and, previously, associate publisher of ENR during the past eight years. Now, as I take the helm at the publisher’s desk for ENR, it is a special honor, a responsibility and an opportunity all in one. Photo By Tom Sawyer For ENR Bonington pledges to carry on ENR’s tradition of excellence and leadership. div id="articleExtrasA" div id="articleExtrasB" div id="articleExtras" It’s a special honor because many may not know that ENR is the founding brand of the McGraw-Hill Companies. With more than 135 years of
The article “With Retainage Mandate Gone, A-Es Look Forward to Payday” seems to suggest that retainage on federal contracts is no longer an issue. While the new rule is a step in the right direction by making retainage “optional,” the fact is that federal contracting officers still may resort to this practice at whim. div id="articleExtrasA" div id="articleExtrasB" div id="articleExtras" The rule states, “The contracting officer can withhold up to 10% of the payment due in any billing period, when the contracting officer determines that such a withholding is necessary to protect the Government’s interest.” We would like to see
Your editorial (“The Gulf Oil-Spill Disaster Is Engineering’s Shame,”) is an insult and assault on the engineering profession. ENR should retract the editorial because it misplaces responsibility, cites an honorable profession as something far less than deserved, makes an outlandish connection between disasters such as Three Mile Island, the Challenger, Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil Spill and the engineering profession as a whole. It also indicts a profession with only a slight mention of what the engineering profession has contributed to the world’s society. Your lame point that somehow “engineers have to help each other protect against corporate power
Raising the Quality Of The ‘Integration’ Debate The A/E/C industry will benefit greatly from Nadine M. Post’s recent article “Integrated Project Delivery Boosters Ignore Many Flashing Red Lights”. The article raises the quality of the debate about integration’s benefits and how best to achieve them. Integrated project delivery (IPD) offers a variety of advantages in aligning the interests of the parties engaged in delivering a project. Its various forms rely heavily on building trust and cooperation among participants while engaging the general contractor (GC) and key subcontractors earlier in the design process. However, very similar results are achieved on traditional,
ENR Clarifies Key Issues Unresolved in BIM, IPD I wanted to express my gratitude for the series on building information modeling and integrated project delivery that Nadine Post delivered through the pages of ENR, most recently in “Integrated-Project-Delivery Boosters Ignore Many Flashing Red Lights”. Post brings a level of discernment that was lacking in other attempts to cover these complex, interrelated subjects. The primary difference between this approach and the others is a willingness to address specific areas in which these tools and forms of agreement require further development. The credibility of ENR and the objectivity of the articles encourage
Offshore Legal Relief Costly and Unlikely Missing from your otherwise clear reporting in “Chinese Drywall Cases Mount” is the fact that getting a legal judgment against a foreign corporation and/or manufacturer is far different from actually collecting the judgment against them. ENR should cover this issue to help homeowners manage unrealistic expectations as well as help plaintiffs judge how much money they should spend in court to get a potentially hollow judgment. When the pockets empty out at the top (in this case, Taishan Gypsum), the trickle-down liability, finger-pointing and collateral lawsuits could be endless. William a. Tolbert Chairman and
Disney Concert Hall Redux As president of the owner/operator of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, I read with interest the article on Frank Gehry’s Beekman Tower. While it was generally informative, I wish to correct serious errors in the first paragraph. Walt Disney Concert Hall is a complex structure perfectly designed and suited to its purpose. As such, the design and construction team were, indeed, confronted with challenges that far exceed those of Beekman Tower. To say that Disney Hall was “tortuous” to build is like saying a Wagner opera is “tortuous” to perform. Such profoundly important and
Graphics Are Misleading In Stimulus Story I would like to point out that the circular graphics used on pages 26-29 in the cover story “As Federal Dollars Pour Out, A Second Stimulus Plan Grows” are inappropriately used. These charts compare obligated funds to ARRA Total Allocations by using the ration of the diameters, not the ration of the areas. As such, they visually mislead the viewer into believing more funds remain to be spent. The chart on page 29 is the most egregious example. Values below the chart indicate that $2.1 billion of the total $5.5 billion in this category