We are now in the third part of a series of blog posts about John Mroszczyk’s article in the June issue of Professional Safety magazine about safety on construction sites. He made the point about the importance of continuing to address safety because of the disheartening and tragic numbers of deaths in the construction trades, and looking at a comparison between the construction trades and general industry to account for the discrepancy in numbers. (Spoiler alert: Consttruction trades have very different risks than what is found in general industry. But maybe that’s a “duh.”)

Two of the significant risk factors on construction sites that are not prevalent in general industry are those variables that should be considered in a separate topical discussion – day laborers and temporary workers. Many construction sites have these very-temporary workers who are willing to put in a hard day’s work with a hammer, saw or mortar to help a contractor get work done quicker with less money paid out in benefits and salary.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Elliott Brown via a Creative Commons license]Scaffolding like this is important in construction work. But so are day laborers and temporary workers, and each have their own risks that contribute to 1,000 construction-related deaths on the job every year.

Day Laborers

These laborers just want to work and earn a day’s living. The construction trades seem to be the ones with the most open arms for these temporary laborers, but while the trades have plenty of their own risks, these workers add another layer of risk that affect not only them but often more experienced workers on the site as well.

When it comes to measuring safety and incident rates and the like, these day laborers are truly a phantom or shadow work force; they usually have informal arrangements, are usually pick up by the day and they usually do not work at the same site on consecutive days or even multiple days in the same week; and because they are usually so badly “needed” on a construction site, many workers are not given the proper safety training that other formally employed workers have. The focus is on putting them to work as quickly as possible.

It is estimated that about 40 percent of day laborers get some safety training. There is no word about where this training came from – were these workers trained at a job before they became day workers? Did the contractor who hired them for the day submit them to safety training? This is unclear, and it tends to lead me to suspect that the number is misleading and may actually be lower when you consider that there is safety training and then there is effective safety training that applies to the job at hand.

In other words, there may be some workers who got training when they worked full-time years ago for some contractor, but many contractors will have different safety protocols and guidelines in regards to working on construction sites. So what training they might have had before may not be as relevant in the current environment or for the current contractor.

Anyway, if we assume the number is reasonably accurate, then that makes this statistic even more alarming: It is estimated that day workers suffer an injury rate that is five times higher than the average rate according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Temporary Workers

Temporary workers, or temps, are also a high-risk group, though they may not really need to be. The big difference between temporary workers and day laborers are that temps can stay on a job site for several days or a few weeks at a time because of formal agreements between the temporary staffing agency that has the laborer in its system, and the host employer who uses the laborer’s skills on the site.

With a staffing agency needing that laborer to show up to work and be productive, and of course the employing contractor wanting the worke to do well and help the company get the job done effectively and quickly, it would seem that temps would have the opportunity to get at least some of the safety training that seems to be lacking for day laborers.

But that does not necessarily seem to be the case. Temps are often not subject to much training, or it is often confliccting training since temps will be kown to work several proejcts a year for several different employers. And depends on the kind of work he or she is doing, the training will be different according to the employer and the project. What seems to be obvious here is that the staffing agency has skin in the game when it comes to workers, yet many of them do not offer at least some basic safety training for those its assigns to construction sites based on their existing experience. These agencies seem to just assume that as these workers are laced in fields where they have experience existent already, that there is little need to ensure these workers have at least a bisc background in safety.

Of course, temp workers are pretty common in general industry as well , but as was explained in an earlier blog post, there are very distinct differences in work environments to help explain the higher safety risk of temps on construction sites than those in a general industry work site.

Next up, we’ll take a look at the bigger picture and get into some of the most common factors that lead to deaths on construction sites.