Hot take: I think the ground guy gets too much blame when things go wrong on site

I was working a job in Phoenix last August, putting a tower crane up on a school site. We had a near miss when a tag line got snagged on a rebar cage during the final pick. The ground guy froze up for a second and I had to set the piece down hard to avoid a swing. Everyone started yelling at him but in my experience, the real issue was the radio delay and the blind spot from my cab. I told the foreman the path wasn't clear from the jump and he brushed it off. Has anyone else had to play middleman when the setup makes the job harder than it needs to be?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_hayden9d ago

Dude I just read a safety report from a Texas job last month that basically said the same thing. They had a ground guy get chewed out for a dropped load but the investigation showed the crane operator had a 30 second radio lag and the path was blocked by a material stack the foreman approved. Blaming the ground guy is the easy move when the real problem is the site layout and communication setup. I swear half the time the ground guy is just the scapegoat for a bad plan nobody wants to fix. Why is it always the lowest paid guy eating the blame?

skyler_kelly699d ago

Nah man I gotta push back on that... the ground guy has one job and it's to watch the load and communicate. If that radio lag was known they should've had hand signals or a spotter. Every site has bad layouts that's just the reality of construction it's not gonna be perfect. The foreman approving a material stack doesn't excuse the ground guy from walking the path first and calling it out before the lift starts. Sometimes the lowest paid guy gets the blame because he's the one who dropped the ball on his specific task... not because of some grand conspiracy.

tessalane9d ago

My buddy runs a small landscaping crew and the same crap happens ALL the time, the homeowner blames the guy pushing the mower for a missed strip when it's actually the foreman who rushed the layout. It's like that thing where the person with the least power gets the heat because nobody wants to admit the plan was flawed from the start. Honestly, this whole pattern just shows how easy it is to point at the closest person instead of fixing the broken system underneath.