Safety Culture Among Subcontractors in The Domestic Housing Construction Industry (P1/2)

P1/2

This was a very interesting ethnography of the cultures, norms, values, beliefs and practices within the domestic housing industry in Australia. Ethnographic data was gathered from 150 subcontractors (subbies).

There’s way too much in this to cover so I can only provide a surface summary. I’ve divided the summary into two posts.

N.B. This was published in 2010, so it’s possible some of the findings (particularly relating to views around legislation or how builders operate) may have changed since then.

Findings:

For an overarching description of survey results, for answering the question “how did you learn to work safely?”, subcontractors indicated the following higher preferences: common sense at 25%, mistakes over the years at 13.3%, stories from others 13%, and lower preferences: correct gear at 1.9%, and both OHS courses and school at 1.3% (respectively).

Their learning was said to be trade specific to their tasks and the work they perform – not generic, where they have learned to work safely through the involvement with their trade and doing their work.

Subbies place enormous trust in their own common sense to inform judgements and decisions – being essential to their success as subbies to constantly make accurate practical judgements to suit the work context. It’s argued that common sense is related to “reflective practice” and “critical reflection” by learning from their work.

If subbies know something will hurt them then they will “devise a practical and effective method of either eliminating the hazard, or minimising the harm it can cause” (p4), where behaviour is a result of heuristically making iterative judgements about hazards. These facets, where safety is intrinsically linked to their work (and not a subset of work) are how they define common sense.

Compared to this view, subbies view legislation as the government’s way of deciding what is dangerous or not – whereas subbies see danger because of their own intrinsic knowledge gained from years of practice. They have a “distrust of safety courses that attempt to privilege paper/procedural knowledge over practical, embedded and embodied safety knowledge” (p4).

Regulatory inspectors were perceived as “authoritarian, dogmatic, petty and unfair” (p4), seen to be more interested in fining people. This was believed by subbies to not result in safer workplaces but rather paperwork compliance.

Whereas subbies saw the hazards they face as mostly predictable in their own trade, they conceded that the interrelationships between other trades imposed safety concerns for them. Despite construction requiring cooperation, it’s an industry structured for independence and individual resourcefulness said to be at the expense of others. The author provides examples of how numerous trades may work in their own self-interest at the expense of other trades.

Builders, that coordinate the subbies, were seen as the central player in creating safer workplaces; requiring the builder to be well organised, planning ahead and effectively communicating.

There were some common perceptions shared across the trades:

·        They unanimously disliked paperwork

·        Financial risk was perceived as more important than personal safety

·        Accepted that building work was hazardous to their body, but accepted this perceived fate and continued

·        Reluctance to spend on safety was connected to their very tight profit margins from competitive tendering.

For the learned helplessness of their health, most subbies highlighted manual handling and musculoskeletal injuries as the dominant issue. Self-employment though created a norm to “soldier on” through injuries and chronic disability. All the subbies >40 years of age in this sample had some kind of chronic injury from excessive or repetitive manual handling; 6 of 11 interviewees were trying to find a new career because “this job is killing me” (p5). One issue here was said to be the limited room for vertical career advancement.

In all, these factors in their view mean that “that they must face the unrelenting hard physical labour for their whole working life and this necessarily degrades the body” (p5).

In this sample the subbies didn’t respect safety legislation that didn’t address the things that matter to them. Noted is the technical approach taken by regulatory inspectors is a barrier to small businesses. They are also “suspicious of rules that do not seem to help their lot” and don’t believe the legislation really addresses their core safety concerns anyway. They also wonder how the legislation will actually reduce the manual handling hazards to their bodies.

Many subbies resisted safety rules because the rules weren’t seen as making their life better – just more complicated. Safety in its current perception, structure and practice has real problems. To quote the author, “Safety is now the demon that will punish you if you are caught” (p7).

The author argues that “OHS is becoming a sphere of tension that is at the intersection of subjectivities, power, and the production of knowledge” (p5). The perceived “disempowering enforcement strategies” used by the regulator are seen to threaten the self-concept of competency and knowledge as understood by subbies. A common theme was for regulatory inspectors to be seen by subbies as a kind of Gestapo.

 Part 2 tomorrow.

 Author: Wadick, P, 2010, Structural Survey