Stairway to Heaven

So I’m sitting in the beautiful lunchroom of my excellent new job, munching away on leftover Mexican-but-made-by-a-Canadian quesadillas and gazing out at the view offered by floor-to-ceiling windows on the 20th floor, when I notice that, on the unfinished floors of the uncompleted skyscraper just across the way, someone has strung up a thin white string at about knee-level to stop the workers plummeting to their doom.

My Canadian Workers Compensation Board training kicked in almost instantly. Trained well by graphic 30 second commercials in which young women are horribly disfigured by boiling pots of water after slipping on a spill someone had neglected to clean up or sliced into pieces after tumbling off an unattended ladder into a glass display case, I clucked my judgmental tongue at that silly piddly string and the idea that it would save anyone. I rolled my eyes. I sighed for the workers, poor vulnerable little sods. “There’s no such thing as an ‘accident’!”

But the reality was, gentle reader, the people being protected by that ineffectual tripwire were, in fact, the lucky ones, the protected ones. The lucky little sods, as it were.

Because up, way up, on the climbing roof of the building, were the majority of the workers, milling over the concrete and steel skeleton like ants on a dead gecko, pounding and pushing and tossing and stacking and hammering and hollering. Of the 30 or so guys, maybe five wore helmets. None wore gloves or protective eyewear. They stood beside towering stacks of unbound metal beams and climbed up teetering columns on rebar. There was nary a harness or rope to be seen.

I felt vaguely queasy. I had visions of someone getting squashed by a cascade of metal or tripping on something and plunging off the edge of the building.

And then I saw him: a young man squatting on a 2x2 (I’m guessing – not so much a carpenter, me) that stuck out about thirty centimeters from the external rebar shell of the building. The board was visibly bowing slightly under his weight. The heels of his trainers dangled over nothingness.

He was, based on my vantage point on Floor 20, about 15 stories above the ground. 15 stories straight down, a sheer grey concrete face with nothing to stop him where he to lose his balance, get a leg cramp, trip...

And he didn’t seem to care. Why would he, really, when he was only one of about 10 men wandering around on the narrow wooden spines. Two even stopped to have a cigarette and a bottle of water, chatting amiable as their shoelaces flapped in the yawning space below them. As long as they grabbed onto a protruding bit of rebar while they jumped between the boards, what was to be concerned about?

I asked a colleague how frequently construction workers were killed in Mexico. She sighed. She couldn’t look at the workers, said they made her feel sick.

All of this has raised two questions in me:

1. How is it possible to walk with on wobbly sticks of wood 15 stories up with the careless confidence of someone on the pavement below (where I have no doubt one of them will end up in time…)?

and

2. Just how much is a Mexican life worth, really?