Abstract
Construction workers who worked on “Ground Zero” after 9/11 in New York City were exposed to stressful and traumatic conditions. Clinicians, trade union leaders and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations designed a psychosocial capacity-building project which helped workers to recognize, understand and respond to their reactions through a series of interventions that included peer training, psychosocial workshops, brochures, and outreach and referral services. The project emphasized the use of mutual aid and social support through group interventions facilitated by clinicians and offered by trade unions. The article describes the planning and implementation of the project as well as the results of qualitative evaluations of the effectiveness of the project.
Highlights
The details of the attacks on the World Trade Center are well known and there have been hundreds of articles, chapters and books published about how they affected people and the myriad of immediate, mid-term and long-term mental health and counseling services offered to thousands of people
8 Its president at the time of the WTC disaster was Ed Malloy, a steamfitter who helped build the World Trade Center in the 1970‘s and who along with Jeff Grabelsky, Director of Cornell University‘s School of Industrial Relations Construction Industry Project, served as co-director of the Building Trades Support Network. This sense of teamwork and mutual obligation provided the foundation for the resiliency model that the Building Trades Support Network (BTSN) adopted when it was formed by the BCTC, Building Trades Employers Association (BTEA) and Cornell University‘s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) to respond to the psychosocial needs of workers assigned to Ground Zero
Project Planning, Design and Implementation After consulting with a psychologist9 who had been involved in organizing and conducting trauma support workshops for the families of union members impacted by the disaster, the proposal to create a Building Trades Support Network was drafted and assigned to a Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Project Manager10, a core team member and an organizer who had a degree in social work and a capacity building/mutual support orientation, which informed the project
Summary
The details of the attacks on the World Trade Center are well known and there have been hundreds of articles, chapters and books published about how they affected people and the myriad of immediate, mid-term and long-term mental health and counseling services offered to thousands of people. This sense of teamwork and mutual obligation provided the foundation for the resiliency model that the Building Trades Support Network (BTSN) adopted when it was formed by the BCTC, BTEA and Cornell University‘s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) to respond to the psychosocial needs of workers assigned to Ground Zero.
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