Safety First

摘要

COMING FROM A BLUE-COLLAR background in Cleveland, Ohio, it was all just work, work, work. I was never involved with "save the planet" this or that. But working on federal energy-saving programs, I learned a lot about conservation. Now it's one of the reasons I feel good about what I do. Aviles Construction is a company that contracts with the government on low-income energy-efficiency programs. We are a 100 percent Puerto Rican company. For the most part, our workers come to Cleveland with no skills whatsoever, except how to work on cars and stuff like that. We teach them how to do HVAC, electrical, insulation, water-conservation installs, and everything else. It's like a technical school where we pay them to learn these skills. Some of the guys get homesick and go back to Puerto Rico, but most of them stay. Everybody who works for me has been with me for at least 10 years. My dad started this business in 1983, doing rehabs for the city of Cleveland.Then the weatherization program started up. He didn't really train his guys; he was more like, "You're good to go. Get to work." When I got here after college in 2000,1 took it up a notch. I gave guys incentives to learn. They were just this ragtag group of construction guys with beat-up trucks, but once you gave them the opportunity to move forward, they took off.