I will be one of the first ones to acknowledge that tremendous strides have been made in safety on construction work sites. When I go around the U.S. and Canada and audit work sites and companies, I can always see that safety of workers has become a big and high priority for many, and it is appreciated.
However, in order for the construction to be done right, workers always are under some risk, and incidents, injuries and deaths still seem to be inevitable no matter what procedures are in place.
[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.
That means we can basically count on about 1,000 construction workers dying by the end of the calendar year. Or about 83 workers every single month, or 18 a week.
It is still very sobering. We all think about firefighters and polic officers as being in harm’s way every day, but maybe we don’t do very well at putting construction workers in that area where we give our respects for sacrifice.
What we’ll look at today are two sections of Mroszczyk’s article, which address hazards in construction work and compares the specific industry with the general industrial community, as it were.
Hazards of the Job
According to 2010 BLS data on causes of fatalities on construction sites, falls (not surprisingly) are the most common cause of death, accounting for nearly one of every three deaths on construction sites. Deaths related to transportation accounts for about 25 percent of the deaths, while “contact with an object” makes up about 20 percent.
In other words, while there are a lot of moving parts on a construction site, nearly three in four deaths are traced to three causes – falling, vehicles and hitting an object of some kind. One example of how to prevent a fall was mentioned in the article, as a case was written about a floor hole at a site, which had not only guardrails around the hole, but protection to keep most people away, and bright orange paint on the guardrails so they can be seen from several feet away.
Then the author referred to a case study from 2007 of an example of what can happen – a temporary worker fell 9 feet to his death when, during his one-day job, he was carrying an armful of debris from a roof across a scaffolding plank used a walkway toward a truck where the debris was to be dumped and eventually transported away.
You can imagine. He was walking on a single plank, didn’t exactly know where he was going and took a bad step, falling onto an asphalt driveway.
Another example can be contact with objects – in this case, a worker being in a trench during an excavation, with the heavy equipment sitting along the sides of the trench with no support or bracing. The fourth source of fatalities (about 15 percent) is called “hazardous materials” – and one example of this can be electricity.
A Fair Comparison?
While statistically it can be easy to compare construction work to general industry work in terms of numbers of fatalities and the like, the situations could not be more like apples and oranges unless they were … well, apples and oranges.
Yes, I will defend construction now. In its defense, the likelihood fo more incidents, injuries and deaths makes a lot of sense when one considers a general industry workplace and a construction site.
First of all, a general industry work site usually has workers with very specific jb functions and tasks that they do, and they are often not doing something meant for another department. They are trained in the equipment and machinery that they will use to do their own specific job correctly. Also, the workers are all generally under one roof and can be overseen by a single or a couple of safety officers. The general industry workplace is usually owned by a single company, so the safety procedures in place for each department are handed down by a single layer of bureaucracy and applies all over the work site. And there is usually very little employee turnover, so there is not as much need to conduct initial training and there is more focus on reminders and re-training.
Now let’s look at a construction site. While a single company may oversee the site, that company often hires contractors and subcontractors to do all the work. There is a mix of full-time, part-time, temporary and day workers ona construction site. No worker has a specific job description; many workers often have to be able to do several things while on-site. Several differeent companies on-site may all have their own safety protocols, and man of them are not able to give the right training to temporary or day workers, and on many sites there may be language barriers between workers and their supervisors. Workers often work at heights and/or outdoors in all kinds of weather conditions, and they often come in contact with dangerous objects or hazardous chemicals or they are asked to drive a vehicle to move materials or quipment that perhaps they may not be actually trained to do properly.
There is a pretty safe bet if the oranges could somehow look a little more like apples, then you may see some of the fatality and incident statistics look more apple-y than orange-y.
Next up – we’ll get into a little more detail about day laborers and their impact on these dangerous numbers in the construction trades.