Since the Great Recession of 2008, the economy has been slow to recover, but it has recovered. It has been recovering in the sense that many companies who laid off millions of workers who had full-time salaries and benefits, have been working with thousands of temporary workers to do some of the work that has returned to the companies. Of course, it’s not enough work to warrant hiring full-time staff with benefits, but the contractor and subcontractor gigs seem to be working well.
While the economy should – eventually – come back to 2007 levels, for now the temporary-worker approach has become more of the norm. But what is found in a recent study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is that these temporary workers are costing host employers and staffing agencies tremendous costs due to worksite injuries.
[Image courtesy of Western Area Power via a Creative Commons license]A recent OSHA initiative and ASSE seminar have been established to help temporary or contract workers at a job site reduce their rate of fatal injuries. The goal is to provide these workers with the same safety as their full-time brethren, like these power-line workers.
Which leads to an interesting dilemma – who takes responsibility for this? On the one hand, the host employer was probably under some presumption that the workers sent by the hiring agency had some basic level of training and competence in the industry in which they were working. However, the staffing agency may only be going on the presumption that if a worker is willing to work in that industry, the agency’s only job is to provide the body for the labor and it was the onus of the host employer to do the necessary training. When you have that going back and forth, you can see there is a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon, through which many temporary workers can fall – figuratively and literally.
This is where the ASSE and OSHA have stepped in to help. After all, the temporary worker industry is no longer small potatoes – the latest estimate is that as many as 2 percent of all non-farm workers are considered temporary or contract laborers, and the number has been growing. With that in mind, and the 2011 BLS data from which to refer, OSHA and the ASSE have been working together on OSHA’s Temporary Worker Initiative, designed to improve safety numbers of all temporary workers on work sites. The ASSE has participated by introducing a webinar through its Virtual Classroom titled Temporary Worker Safety, presented by Thomas Marrero Jr., who is the national safety director for Tradesmen International.
The point of the webinar is essentially to bring some clarification to the safety responsibilities of workers between the staffing agencies that provide the labor and the host employers who actually put the laborers on the work site. Once this is covered, the expectation is that the education will resonate with everyone involved with temporary workers, and that Grand Canyon-sized gap can be filled in so temporary workers are provided with the same safety as their full-time brethren on the work site.
You can click here for more information about the OSHA Temporary Workers Initiative, and click here to see the ASSE virtual classroom and to see various webinars, including the one about temporary worker safety. Even with temporary workers, safety really should be a permanent part of any work site, regardless of the workers on that site.