THINKING BIG : Workers : Muscle and Bone Flesh Out Plans : Now as ever, skill and a strong back make the difference between a blueprint and a building.

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

May 30, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ON THE YAMUNA RIVER, India —

The grandiose dreams of the mighty, the reckonings of engineers are, and always have been, mere will o’ the wisps without the hands and sweat of men and women like Shiv Sunder Jha.

From Monday through Saturday, in temperatures that top 100 degrees, the 25-year-old construction worker from eastern India spends his days bending and fixing steel reinforcement rods almost an inch thick into concrete.

Like 200 other laborers at the site, Jha is working to build a vehicular bridge across the Yamuna, one of Hinduism’s sacred rivers. For a 10-hour day spent handling metal made almost too hot to touch by the scorching summer sun, the skinny fitter earns $1.62.

When work is over, Jha washes the rust off his palms, mounts his bicycle and pedals five miles to the slum where he is living with his wife and two daughters. There, he will wash and eat and then head for bed, rising at dawn for another day of work on mica-flecked sands on the bank of the Yamuna.

“You can’t expect this kind of a job to be nice,” said Jha. “Still, what can I do? If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.”

Change his dirty striped shirt, threadbare lavender trousers and cheap clogs and turn back the calendar 350 years and the young native of Bihar state might have been a hewer of stone on the Taj Mahal, 120 miles downstream at Agra. Or he could have been one of the 100,000 anonymous Egyptians who, historians say, labored 20 years to create the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza.

Human skill. Brute force. A keen eye and a strong back. Now, as then, these make the difference between a blueprint and a building. The conditions that construction workers have labored under have varied greatly through history and still differ. But on the whole, dramatic advances in technology, building materials and construction techniques have led to fewer numbers of people on big projects.

Take, as just one example, the ability to move dirt. An Egyptian working on the 1859-69 Suez Canal project could haul only 30 to 40 pounds of freshly dug sand on his back in a burlap bag. Today, his great-great-grandchild, sitting at the wheel of a modern dump truck, can transport 147 tons--as much as 7,350 laborers at the canal.

Over a six-year period beginning in 1931, 5,000 Americans toiled to build one of the engineering marvels of the 20th Century, the soaring Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Today, “only 10% of that labor force would be needed,” says Jim Davis, executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In fact, Davis maintains, a modern Pharaoh “could probably build the Pyramids today in a year or two”--that is, he adds, if the latter-day Khufu could afford it.

But exponential leaps in productivity have not been uniform. The biggest advances have come in areas such as earth-moving; the use of precast, prestressed concrete, which can be assembled like Lego blocks on the job; pile-driving and the sinking of foundations, and the transition from manual power to diesel and electric.

Modern state-of-the-art construction is now on display 15 miles west of the Hong Kong business district, at the site of the British colony’s new international airport.

Thanks to modern dredging and reclamation techniques, the builders of Hong Kong’s $8.78-billion airport are creating a 3,082-acre island--a land mass as big as Los Angeles International Airport--around the small Chek Lap Kok island, one even tinier islet and in the waters off Hong Kong.

At peak rhythm, the contractors have been shifting 250 tons of mud, rock and dirt a minute.

“It’s now become cheaper to build land than to buy it,” explains Donna Mongan, a spokeswoman with the Hong Kong Provisional Airport Authority, offering a concise tribute to modern progress in engineering and construction.

The Hong Kong project, said to be the biggest short-term excavation and reclamation job in history, is supposed to be completed soon. In 31 months, so much clay, rock, mud and sand will have been moved that, if cemented together, the material could form 347 Empire State Buildings.

Yet the artificially sculpted flattop rising 20 feet above the water seems eerily empty. Only 4,500 workers are now on the job, thanks to modern machinery. Most of the current labor force is not moving dirt, but rather building the foundations of airport structures.

In other areas, productivity increases per worker have been less--or even nonexistent--since the 19th Century.

“Machinery is bigger, better and more reliable,” said Frank Griggs Jr., chairman of the civil engineering department at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. “But once you get away from that, there hasn’t been any gain of productivity that I can see.”

For better or worse, the mind-set of today’s American construction worker is different, Griggs says. In the early 1930s, an employee on the Empire State Building site knew that, if he slowed down on the job or refused a foreman’s dangerous order to shinny up a girder, 100 unemployed men were waiting to take his place.

The 16th-Century Emperor Charles V of Austria is supposed to have said that “where there is great work, there will be many hands.”

That will even apply to Chek Lap Kok by this December, when the labor force is supposed to zoom to 20,000 as construction accelerates on the runways, the “people mover” and the terminal. Hanging the terminal’s 100,000 light fixtures and 5,500 doors and installing more than 1 million square feet of carpet are still very labor-intensive jobs.

Other changes are evident in the construction industry. The first is white-collarization. A medieval stonemason would not have much trouble understanding the role of Jha, the Indian bridge builder. But what would they make of Bryan Germeney, a 55-year-old Briton who goes to the job site in a tie?

Germeney is being paid almost $100,000 a year to verify that contractors’ work on the Hong Kong airport lives up to their promises and to accepted standards.

Germeney is among the one in four people employed on the Chek Lap Kok project that need never get their hands dirty. He also typifies another trend: specialization and the have-talent-will-travel nature of today’s construction industry.

That was not always the case.

When America’s first big engineering venture, the 363-mile Erie Canal, was dug in 1817-25, any New York state farmer with a shovel or wheelbarrow could become a subcontractor, and many did. On today’s world-class building sites, it’s a different story.

“It’s fairly easier to get manual labor: You go for the cheapest,” Germeney says. But increasingly, top-grade engineering and construction professionals wander the globe to ply their specialized trades.

The same trends can be found in India, though on a lesser scale. Jha, the fitter from Bihar, is no unskilled laborer but rather an 11-year veteran of building projects from the Ganges plain to the deserts of Rajasthan. These days, employees like him are the rule in construction.

The 1,765-foot, four-lane span that Jha and his colleagues are working on is designed to funnel more vehicles into New Delhi, a city of more than 8 million people. But Gammon Co., the builder, can’t count on the local labor pool to substitute for Jha.

“We would not get such labor in Delhi, since they [the bridge project’s employees] are tied mostly to skills that are specialized,” site engineer Rakesh Khanduri says. “The man who has been working with us for the last 10, 15 years shifts as soon as we get a new project.”

Naturally, cheap and willing labor is a good reason for a contractor not to mechanize, and it helps hold down capital outlays. In some countries, including India, it is national policy to employ as many people in construction as is practical.

But such a decision has its costs, as the Yamuna project itself proves. Concrete was first poured on Oct. 20, 1992, and the bridge was supposed to be opened to traffic next month. But work is running a year behind schedule.

“In India, all our construction projects are labor-intensive,” Khanduri, the site engineer, explained. “If we had more equipment and highly sophisticated cranes, we could build this bridge in 1 1/2 years. But if we did that, where would these people go?”

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The Labor Armies

Despite modern machines, major projects still require large work forces. Some notable numbers in history:

* GREAT PYRAMID OF KHUFU (Egypt)

Workers: 100,000 (estimated)

Built: 20 years, about 2800 BC

* PANAMA CANAL

Workers: 75,000

Built: 10 years ending in 1914

* HOOVER DAM (Colorado River)

Workers: 5,000

Built: 1931-36