Smear campaign

Recently, I was part of the project management team on a major city-centre redevelopment in London. It was a partially contractor-designed project, with a team of consultants, novated to a main contractor appointed under an amended JCT design-and-build contract. All work on site was subcontracted to firms of the main contractor's choice.

The client wanted to partner and run it as a model site, so "model" welfare facilities were provided for the workforce. Work started on the site: then to everyone's consternation, somebody began smearing the lavatory walls with excrement. Letters went out from the contract administrator to the main contractor and from him to the subcontractors. You can imagine what they said. Copies were posted on the welfare facility walls. Meeting minutes threatened contractual hellfire and damnation. But the problem just got worse.

Eventually a culprit was found. He was a young black man from Luton. His story was that he spent four hours travelling every workday in a smoke-filled van, enduring racial abuse that his colleagues described as "banter". He was energetic, articulate and educated to NVQ level 3. He worked for a labour master providing "self-employed" people to a mechanical services subcontractor working for a trade contractor, employed by the building services package contractor, appointed by the main contractor on a bespoke subcontract.

Effectively, the young man ran the workface where he operated. He kept it clean, safe and well-organised, and he did the day-to-day liaison and co-ordination with other trades and with floor and package managers. Many of these were transient antipodeans on their world tour or Eastern Europeans whose first language was not English. So far as the workforce was concerned, the role of the visiting dignitaries – architect, engineer and so on – was unclear.

Along with most of his colleagues on the workforce, the man was five times removed from the main contractor, six times removed from the client. He had no idea who he worked for, who the client was or what the project was for. When asked for an explanation of his behaviour, he said money was not the problem: he was well paid – even after the labour master's rake-off. But he said that coming to work made him feel like shit, and this was his way of expressing it.

The project management team's solution? The project manager wanted to kick his backside and shout at his boss. The contract administrator wanted to use his powers under the contract to order the man's removal from site. The main contractor wanted to contra-charge everyone in sight with the cost of repainting the lavatory. None of the other members of the project team, myself included, had any effective suggestions for dealing with the cause of the operative's problems.

The man concerned solved the problem for the team by leaving, not just the site but, I believe, the industry.

In this era of multiple subcontracting and a disenfranchised workforce, the notion of best practice project management in construction seems like wishful thinking.