New state grants support suicide prevention in construction industry

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The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry awarded new grant funding last month to help two organizations tackle a leading safety hazard in the construction industry: mental health.

Minnesota Building Trades unions partnered last year with their employers, represented by the Associated General Contractors (AGC), to push state lawmakers to address the mental-health crisis in their industry, pointing to suicide rates among construction workers that are four times higher than the national average – and even higher among men.

With the combined $750,000 in new funding, two organizations – the AGC of Minnesota Foundation and Suicide Awareness Voices of Education – will create outreach and engagement programs tailored to construction workers, aimed at promoting mental well-being and preventing suicide.

In a statement announcing the grants, DLI Commissioner Nicole Blissenbach said prioritizing construction workers’ mental health “will save lives.”

The new grant program is modeled after a similar initiative, led by the state’s Department of Agriculture, to address higher suicide rates among family farmers.

Both farmers and tradespeople face stressors unique to their communities. For construction workers, they can include working long hours away from home. And employment is cyclical for most; when their trade wraps work on one project, there is no guarantee of a job waiting for them on another.

LIUNA Minnesota and North Dakota President and Business Manager Joel Smith, a leading advocate for the DLI’s new grant program, said the macho culture on a construction job site can make some tradespeople hesitant to ask for help dealing with stress.

But the construction industry has changed its culture before, Smith added.

“Thirty-four years ago when I got my start, safety wasn’t emphasized nearly as much,” Smith said during a breakout on mental health during LIUNA’s infrastructure summit last October.

“We changed the culture around safety. Now we need to change that culture around mental health, to remove the stigma and let our people know it’s OK to talk about it. But it’s going to take all of us.”

For its part, the unionized trades and their contractors in Minnesota already have begun the work of changing their approach to mental health, even before lawmakers approved funding for the new grant program.

Many unions and their contractors have begun including mental-health awareness into their first-aid trainings and increasing the number of times workers can access their employee-assistance programs (EAPs). LIUNA rolled out a hardhat sticker – “What’s Underneath Your Hardhat?” – encouraging members to look out for each other’s wellbeing.

With the new grant funding, AGC CEO Tim Worke said, the contractors’ foundation and its partners in labor – and, he hopes, local developers – will expand on work to break stigmas around mental health in the industry.

Plans include an expanded suicide prevention training, with a new, tailored curriculum that will reach more than 1,500 construction apprentices statewide.

During the summit last fall, Worke said the stakes are high not just in terms of saving lives, but for the industry’s success in recruiting and retaining young workers, too.

“I’m absolutely convinced that if we cannot change folks in the industry that do not value mental health, the workforce is going to respond with their feet,” he said. “They’re going to move to another industry that does.”

– Michael Moore, UA editor