Bechtel and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Partner to Prevent Construction Worker Suicides

Bechtel’s $7 million dollar commitment to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention will provide critical resources and programming to 500,000 U.S. construction workers over the next five years.
 
Bechtel and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) today announced a new, multiyear partnership dedicated to saving lives in the construction community lost to suicide. The initiative was unveiled this morning in Washington, D.C., at an event focused on raising awareness, educating stakeholders on this crisis, and beginning to build a coalition to prevent construction worker suicides.
 
The new partnership will reach 500,000 U.S. construction workers over five years through industry-specific programs and resources developed by Bechtel and AFSP. The $7 million, five-year commitment to AFSP to fund the effort is the largest-ever pledge received by AFSP and the largest single donation ever made by the Bechtel Group Foundation.
 
“This is the start of a long-term, sustained effort to lift up the whole construction community. We want to see mental health become as much of a priority as physical safety in our industry,” said Brendan Bechtel, chairman and CEO of Bechtel. “It’s our belief that addressing suicide in construction is as vital as wearing a hard hat on site. This is the next frontier in taking care of each other.”
 
The construction industry has one of the highest suicide rates of any profession in the U.S. In fact, the number of suicides in the industry is nearly five times higher than the number of lives lost in jobsite safety incidents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, respectively.
 
The initiative will leverage Bechtel’s industry knowledge and reach in combination with AFSP’s expertise in research, education, and effective prevention strategies, as well as its national network of local chapters. Bechtel welcomes participation from others in the industry, as this partnership forms a construction working group and a first-ever senior advisory council to help guide the effort.
 
“We know we cannot meet this challenge alone. Real change will take all of us. We want to build an industry-wide effort, and we are actively encouraging others in construction to join us,” added Brendan Bechtel.
 
“The partnership with Bechtel is the first of its kind for AFSP, and we are thrilled to be collaborating with an industry leader that is focused on improving the mental health of the construction industry as a whole,” said Robert Gebbia, CEO of AFSP. “We’re excited to be building a team within AFSP dedicated to this important initiative aimed at reaching thousands of people in need and preventing suicide.”
 
“All of us who work in construction have seen gains in physical safety that were once unimaginable, become the standard for success,” said Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, who also spoke at today’s event. “It’s time to bring the same mindset, resources, and innovation to the issue of mental health and suicide prevention.”
 
Learn more about this new initiative and how you can get involved at: Confronting Suicide in the Construction Industry | Bechtel.
 
ICYMI: Bechtel and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Announce Groundbreaking Partnership to Confront Construction Suicide
 
Bechtel and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) announced a new, multiyear partnership dedicated to saving lives in the construction community lost to suicide. The new partnership will reach 500,000 U.S. construction workers over five years through industry-specific programs and resources developed by Bechtel and AFSP. Bechtel’s $7 million commitment to AFSP will fund the effort and is the largest-ever pledge received by AFSP.
 
The new initiative was unveiled at an event in Washington, D.C. this week, where Sean McGarvey, President of North America’s Building Trades, joined Bechtel chairman & CEO, Brendan Bechtel, AFSP CEO, Bob Gebbia, and AFSP Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Christine Yu Moutier, to raise awareness of the alarming rate of suicides in the construction industry. Together, the panelists called on others in the industry to join this effort.
 
To watch the full panel conversation online, click here. 
  
Bechtel and AFSP announced a first-of-its kind, industry-specific effort to confront suicide rates in the construction industry. What separates this effort from others is the sustained, multiyear commitment and the invitation for the entire construction industry to join:
 

• Bob Gebbia: “One way [this initiative is different] is that it is an industry-wide initiative. We’ve worked piecemeal in different groups...but nothing ever like this that’s so industry-wide and sustainable over a long period. And one thing we have learned about suicide prevention, it's not one and done. It's got to be sustainable. It's got to actually change the culture which you're working within.”

 

• Bob Gebbia: “I think this is going to raise the bar for other industries because we haven't had such a major industry focus. We can learn things here that will raise the bar for other industries and make them more willing to do something on a scale like this.”

 

• Sean McGarvey: “This gives me real hope that we're onto something where we're all coming together—best practices across international unions, best practices across [the] contracting community, best practices together with the mental health community. It’s a new day in the construction industry.”

 

• Brendan Bechtel: “There's no competition when it comes to safety or well-being. There's no proprietary, Bechtel-specific way to promote mental health, and that's been part of the success [of physical safety]. It didn't matter if you were management or labor, we all wanted to improve physical safety for everybody in our industry. That's the same mindset that we're launching this partnership with, and [why we are] trying to build the biggest tent that we can because everybody wins if we get even a little bit better at this…There are no competitors within the industry when it comes to this. We're all teammates.” 

 
The construction industry has made tremendous progress on physical safety. This new initiative will apply lessons learned to the next frontier in safety, prioritizing mental health and well-being:
 

• Brendan Bechtel: “30 years ago, [Bechtel] and some of our peers decided the only acceptable number of people to lose, or to hurt on a construction site is zero. And it took us 30 years to get there, but we're there…There's a playbook that our industry knows how to execute really, really well because we've done it with physical safety—there's no reason we couldn't do the same for mental health, particularly if it's killing five times as many people as physical safety is on our jobs.”

 

• Brendan Bechtel: “This industry has proven that it excels at doing hard things that no one else can do. Most notably what we've done around physical safety on our projects. And again, that’s a kind of a playbook and a set of strategies and tactics that our whole industry knows how to do well, which is why I'm pretty excited [that] once we get the right expertise, and once we get pointed in the right direction on what we can do, I think as an industry, we can stop being the second highest risk industry for risk of suicide that's out there. That is a shameful statistic for us as an industry. And we will not rest until we change it.” 

 

• Sean McGarvey: “To admit that you're struggling, or that you just don't feel right has been hard to do [in our industry]. Where I think our members are at now…it's not quite an acceptance, but it's an awakening and an understanding of, ‘You know what? This isn't unique to me. This isn't unique to my family. This isn't unique to my colleagues.’ So, I'm interested in having the conversation, where before, these were conversations that didn't happen on our job sites.”

 

• Sean McGarvey: “The timing of what Brendan and his company are doing, along with many of our other colleagues from the EPC community that are in the room [today]…my brother union and sister union members that are here, and some of the things that we at NABTU are going to roll out—to create this, as Brendan coined a phrase, a ‘psychologically safe job site, not just the physically safe job site’—in April at our legislative conference, the timing is really good. I think our people are ready.”  

 
Confronting this crisis will require a culture shift for the construction industry. As colleagues endure tremendous demands and challenging work, there needs to be an understanding that it’s okay to ask for help; the industry must de-stigmatize prioritizing mental health:
 

• Brendan Bechtel: “I'm leaving here with a lot of hope and optimism about where we'll be in five years. It's a special kind of person that chooses to make this industry their career. It's really hard work. It's very stressful, it's very demanding. The next five or six years are going to be even more demanding and stressful than the prior five or six when we just think about the amount of work that's out there to do.”

 

• Brendan Bechtel: “It was not that long ago that employers used to think about our construction Craft professionals from the shoulders down, and you were here to apply manual labor to a problem… And what great companies in our industry figured out, pretty quickly, was that we were leaving a lot of capability and productivity on the table, and that we really needed to engage our construction craft professionals from the shoulders up and make sure that their head is in the game from a safety and productivity perspective. The gains that we saw from that as a company were extraordinary…At the end of the day, that, and this whole discussion here, fundamentally for us as a company, is about restoring the dignity and purpose of the person on the tools in our industry. And one of the reasons people in our industry choose to take their life is they don't feel like they're getting that dignity and respect that they deserve.”

 

• Sean McGarvey: “Where there are a lot of unknowns right now, particularly coming out of Covid, is the amount of availability of mental health professionals for people to be able to schedule an appointment. That's a crisis in itself in the United States right now. When somebody tries to get an appointment with a professional and they say, ‘Okay, how's July 12th?’… Well, we're in crisis right now…So, I can commit to the building trades, legislative and regulatory operations, to getting shoulder to the wheel up on Capitol Hill, or wherever else we need to get new legislation passed, or to get finalized legislation that's been passed in the past, so that we fully deploy the resources that we need in not just for the construction industry but for the country.”

 

• Dr. Christine Yu Moutier: “Effective suicide prevention to me looks like applying evidence and customizing it to a population and measuring as you go. So, while we want to ultimately measure reductions in suicide rates, which right now amongst construction professionals, is almost double for men compared to male American workers, and about 25% higher for women who will work in construction, compared to women who work in other industries in this country. That will be the holy grail is bringing down those rates. But there are interim outcome measures that I hope we will have, [like] toolkits, and that we will have applied them and we will have measured some of those interim results and be able to share that.”

 
With recently passed legislation like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Acts, we're mindful of the tremendous demands placed on the construction workforce. This new initiative comes at the convergence of the United States’ infrastructure boom, with a maturing suicide research field and influx of data on this topic:
 

• Brendan Bechtel: “We’ve got a massive construction boom underway and continuing to expand here in the United States, with the Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS Act, and all the clean energy provisions, so we have massive demand and pressure on construction workers, and so it feels like the timing is even more important now. In this intrinsically stressful, detail-oriented, high-paced operating environment, that we double down on pushing to this next frontier of safety and health for our industry.”

 

• Dr. Christine Yu Moutier: “This partnership is so incredible because the timing, as I’m hearing, [is that] the construction industry is meeting the timing of the suicide research field really maturing. We are sitting in this incredible, wonderful spot of being honored and privileged to translate that science and those answers into actionable strategies.”

 

• Dr. Christine Yu Moutier: “I really do feel that the timing is right. We are going to learn together about how to customize what hits it on the head, and what might kind of fall flat. We will be measuring that impact as we go along. We believe at AFSP, everyone has a role to play in suicide prevention. And I think that’s the spirit that’s certainly coming into this partnership as well for the construction industry.”

 
Bechtel is taking a stand, asserting that addressing mental health in construction is as vital as wearing a hardhat on site and encouraging the entire construction industry to join in this endeavor:
 

• Brendan Bechtel: “The goal here is to build the biggest tent that we possibly can for the whole industry and all the people in it. This partnership, this industry-wide effort is about saving lives.”

 

• Brendan Bechtel: “Let's imagine a future, hopefully no more than five years from now where people think about mental health and supporting people that are contemplating suicide. It's as natural an act for the people in our industry as putting on your hard hat. You don't go to work without your hard hat. Why would you go to work without thinking about a mental health toolkit? That’s the vision.”

 
The construction industry has one of the highest suicide rates of any profession in the U.S. In fact, the number of suicides in the industry is nearly five times higher than the number of lives lost in jobsite safety incidents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, respectively.
 
Learn more about this crisis and Bechtel and AFSP’s new initiative here.