When asked if they had “experienced, encountered or observed construction industry-related acts or transactions that they would consider unethical in the past year,” 84 percent of the owners, architects, construction managers, contractors and subcontractors responding to a recent survey said that they had, and 34 percent said they had experience with unethical acts “many times.” It is easy to see why 61 percent of our survey respondents thought that the industry was “tainted” by unethical acts. Whether the acts experienced by the survey respondents are small transgressions or large-scale scandals awaiting court dates, this is a serious knock on the construction industry.
We cannot conclude from this single survey that there is a trend one way or the other regarding construction industry ethical practices. Nor have we set a tolerance level for our analysis. Ideally, the industry would be free of any practices considered unethical, but there always will be some disagreement about what is or is not ethical. Nonetheless, the response to our survey shows that 84 percent of those answering the survey encountered situations that they considered unethical in their business dealings, and that is alarming.