Very few people will question the inherent hasards of construction work.
Dangers are everywhere when working on a construction site – from working at heights to working with various heavy equipment , in confined spaces and oppressive heat and humidity. While much has been done in the last 30 years to make construction work safer, it is true that the incident and fatality rate in the construction industry far outpaces the overall fatality rate across all industries.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Elliott Brown via a Creative Commons license]Scaffolding like this is important in construction work. But it is also one of many hazards that contribute to 1,000 deaths every year in the construction trades, which account for three to four times the fatality rate compared to the percentage of the overall workforce that is in the construction trades.
Pretty consistently from 1992 through 2012, BLS data indicates that the construction trades made up about 5 percent of the total workforce. However, the construction trades during this time accounted for between 15 and 22 percent of all worksite and work-related fatalies during this period.
To put this into another perspective – 83 people every month in the construction trades are killed, or nearly 20 every week.
And by some indications, this is actually an improvement over past years. There is a piece of good news here – construction deaths as a percentage of the construction workforce has actually dropped over the last 20 years, from 20 percent in 1992 to less than 14 percent in 2012. This is partly due to improvement in safety as well as a growing construction population.
But still – 1,000 people in the construction trades die every year. And this is actually an improvement?
Why does the number still seem so high? Well, there are always inherent risks embedded in construction work – working from heights, working with various tools and heavy equipment, among just a couple. But one of the other key factors, which this article will look into more (and, of course, I will write about in a future post), has to do with the workers and for whom they work.
On any given construction site, you will have workers from several different companies on the site at the same time.. There can be plumbers, electricians, welders, masons, carpenters, heavy machinery operators, roofers – and they all work for different contractors, builders, developers or subcontractors. And every business has their own safety protocols and guidelines for workers on a site. But what you do not usually see is a site foreman instilling a uniform safety protocol to be followed by all who work on the site.
And as you might imagine, that could lead to some issues. Think of it like several airplanes flying, each of them communicating with different air-traffic control towers, and none of the towers can communicate with each other, so they don’t know what other planes are in the air and where they are. Too many workers are answering to their own guidelines, without taking into account the other workers on the site at that time, can be its own hazard.
Yes, in construction it is possible that just showing up for work could be a hazard without the right strategy, tactics and communication in place.
We’ll delve deeper into this issue with several future posts that will break down various sections of Mroszczyk’s article. We’ll begin with the next post by looking at the various hazards on construction sites and make aa comparison between construction jobs and those in other industries.
Grab your hard hat.