There's an old saying here in Alaska that the Great Land has two seasons: Winter and road construction. Our winters are hard on roads paved and unpaved, and a good deal of time and money is spent by the state and the several boroughs in filling potholes and doing various other road repairs while the weather permits.
So in the summer, while enjoying our brief annual season of warm weather, while out on the roads, we often see road crews out on the job, and yes, we see the "flaggers" - people holding the signs that say "SLOW" or "STOP", controlling traffic on the work site. A lot of these flaggers are women; I haven't crunched the numbers for what percentage of Alaska summer road workers are women.
In Australia, though, some mindless Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) rules have resulted in a surfeit of what the Aussies call "Lollipop Ladies," for the shape and size of the flagging signs they carry. Here's how that happened.
Late last year the ABC had another whine about the unreasonable demands of the construction industry – “long hours, early starts and rigid schedules” – and suggested putting “gender on the tender” — meaning that companies competing for government jobs must fulfil gender equity quotas.
Well, that’s already happening, particularly in Victoria which requires women to make up 3% of trade positions in government projects over $20 million and the ACT which demands 10% female employment for government projects over $5 million.
Note that there's nothing in there about necessarily hiring the best possible person for the job, or even people capable of doing work that sometimes involves heavy physical labor. No, they have to hire a certain number of women, whatever is necessary; that means that somewhere, on the margins, some women will be hired and will be idle, as there are not enough jobs that they can physically do.
That brings us to the Lollipop Ladies.
Four years ago the ACT government announced successful tenders for the build of a new school must have a 100% female management team on site. Given the dire problems of getting women into the construction trades, one solution has been to push women into management and admin. Currently females handle 17% of such roles in the construction industry.
But the most visible and controversial women in construction are of course, the traffic controllers. Those high-vis heroes of the roadworks universe, standing in the blazing sun or pouring rain, twirling their giant red-and-white lollipops – known in Australia as the Lollipop Ladies.
So how much is all this costing?
Recently a book on The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews included a chapter on workplace relations by John Lloyd, the first Australian Building and Construction Commissioner. His section on construction in the Melbourne Metro Tunnel revealed traffic controllers are paid $126,200 (£65,000) but explained that’s only the beginning. Night and weekend work attracts double time rates, plus numerous other work entitlements adding a further $540 every week to the cost of employing a single traffic controller.
Remember, road projects are government contracts, meaning that the Australian taxpayers are picking up this tab.
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This is bad enough, but Australia's unions are also down with the scam. Aided and abetted by the Labour government, the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) is involved. The union has convinced the Australian government to eliminate something called the Australian Building and Construction Commission, or ABCC, which was a regulatory chock under the wheels of the unions, keeping their demands at least somewhat in check.
That's over now. At least one study shows that CFMEU thuggery has cost the people of the Australian state of Victoria an unnecessary $15 billion.
The union is also partly responsible for the explosion in Lollipop Ladies, in conformity with DEI standards.
‘They are the women we love to hate,’ headlined one of the many media stories ranting about their huge wages. ‘Lollipop lady sparks outrage after revealing how much she earns in a typical week – and the eye-watering amount she’s paid for a 15-minute shift,’ fumed the Daily Mail, discussing revelations from one traffic controller that she’d raked in $148 for just 15 minutes of work.
It’s not just the money. There are just too many of them. There are constant reports of overstaffing to meet union mandated minimums e.g. two to four controllers per site for shift rotations, even during quiet periods. Safety regulations require at least two controllers per high-risk site for safety, even if traffic is light. This is the result of over-prescriptive rules from road authorities and work, health and safety regulators, falling over each other to pile on demands.
Whenever something like this comes up, it's tempting to direct our ire at the people most visibly taking up these phony-baloney jobs, in this case, the Lollipop Ladies. But these people are taking advantage of the real problem: DEI policies that require a certain number of road-work employees to be women, whether they can do the job or not. That's the real problem. The Lollipop Ladies are participating in the scam but they aren't the architects of it; they are a result of the "if you build it, they will come" principle.
Australia's left-leaning government has to fix this problem, or preferably, the Australians will vote the DEI-favoring pols out. Meanwhile, this is another lesson to Americans: This, right here, is exactly what results from leftist governments: Idiotic requirements that end up being a huge drain on the taxpayers.
