Mates Helping Mates

Every year 190 Australians working in the construction industry take their own lives; this means we lose a construction worker every second day to suicide.

And, construction workers are six times more likely to die from suicide than an accident at work. For our young workers, the facts are that they are well over two times more likely to take their own lives than other young Australian men. This is simply not good enough.

More needs to be done. So we decided to take action and raise awareness of this issue within our workforce. We recently partnered with Mates in Construction NSW to roll out mental health and wellbeing training for all our workers. The General Awareness Training program introduces workers to the nature of the problem, that it’s okay to talk about mental health, and provides practical guidance as to how they can assist. A simple action like checking-in on your mates, may just change a life.

So it’s not just a one-off event, we continue to raise awareness of this topic throughout the year during events such as R U OK Day and Safe Work Month. At Gremalco, we’re aiming for prevention and we want to be part of the solution.