As was previously mentioned, there are a lot of inherent risks on construction sites, which have come to explain why there are a disproportionate number of fatalities on construction sites compared to general industry work sites.
At the end of the day, even when you take into account day workers and temps on a site as well as weather and environmental conditions and the role they play in contributing to 1,000 annual deaths on construction sites every year in the U.S., much of this comes down to the stakeholders on a site and their individual roles and how they overlap with each other.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Elliott Brown via a Creative Commons license]Every construction project, big or small, has risks to them – even without scaffolding. One key to make a site safer is to know all the stakeholders and make sure they all have a role in maintaining worker safety.
On a construction site, the stakeholders are varied but are all very important.
In Jon Mroszczyk’s article about construction safety in the June 2015 issue of Professional Safety magazine, he takes a section of the article to discuss all of the stakeholders on a construction site and their roles and responsibilities. And he actually mentions one stakeholder that isn’t really on the site at all during construction.
We’ll first touch on those stakeholders about which most people know.
General Contractor
The highest level on a construction site is the general contractor, or GC. As the one who oversees the entire site and the construction project, it is the job of the general contractor to hire the subcontractors to the necessary work on the site. The GC sets up the schedule for what subcontractors should be on the site at what point (e. g. electrical, plumbing, drywall, etc.) and makes sure that the right subcontractors are hired for not only cost but also for quality of the workmanship. The general contractor can and should be so involved in the project that he can micromanage – he is within his duties to suggest that a subcontractor either fire or reassign a worker for doing poor work or not working fast enough for the timetable of the project.
The work doesn’t end there, however. While getting subpar-performing workers off the site can help with safety, the GC should also assume responsibility for an overall safety program on the site, addressing various risks on different days or weeks of the project. From there, the overarching program will have to figure into whatever site-specific safety training the subcontractors are doing for their workers during the project.
This is a key phrase: “site-specific.” As no two construction projects are exactly alike, the GC should always have a site-specific safety program, and make sure that no one works on the site who has not been introduced to the safety regimen for the site. There should be regular inspection of the site and assessments of workers on the site to ensure everyone is working safely within the parameters of the project’s safety program.
Sub-contractors
The sub-contractors, also known as subs, have a little more direct responsibility for the workers knowing their jobs and roles on the construction site, and are the ones expected to put forth the work-specific safety program to fit inside the site-specific program offered by the GC. The sub-contractors are there to oversee their work-specific role on the site, and they are the ones who likely have the biggest challenge with any language barriers and having to find a way through them so that all workers on the site get the right information about their jobs and how to do their jobs safely.
The subs are often the ones who use the temps or day laborers that I wrote about previously. And though these workers are usually on a site just for a day or a very short time, it is vitally important for each of them to get the right safety training before they set foot on a site. Good subs will have safety materials available in multiple languages to accommodate the day laborers or temps and their native tongues. They are not necessarily required to sit them down in training, but they are generally required to provide some level of safety training equal to other workers, at least on a work- and site-specific situation.
Workers
The workers have their own responsibilities to operate safely on a construction site. Why?
Because they’re not kids. They are adults, so they should be able to assume at least some responsibility for their own actions. They not only can insist on training before they work on a site, but they can also insist on the right safety equipment, and they could help and mentor each other to make sure that work- and site-specific safety programs and protocols are being met.
Designers
Yes, even the designers of the building or project can have some stake in safety on the cosntruction site. A relatively new concept called prevention though design (PTD) – about 10 years old – can be a vital way to ensure better safety on a construction site.
Protection through design deals with the concept of going beyond a building meeting all the necessary codes when it is finished; it is about designing and engineering the project so that worker safety is taken in account in every stage of the process. In PTD, many safety risks are assessed early and addressed and mitigated in the design phase, so the workers on the site will immediately be safer the moment they set foot on the site because of the way the project is designed and scheduled, in coordination with the GC.
These kinds of safety designs can include the design professional making specific recmmendations about safety with certain design elements (i.e. a guardrail or protective screen around skylights; guardrails around any holes in floors, etc.)
With this new concept, designers can have a very important role to play in improving safety of all workers on a construction site, even if they never meet them or see the construction site for a single day.
Next up in our series: Looking at some causal factors on construction sites, so we have the power to control them.