Is Safety Third?
Josh Welp, M.S., CSP, CHST, CRIS
OSHA Compliance Expert | Business Partner | Growth Mindset | System Safety Resiliency | Helper | Achiever
I have made several recent visits to a construction project where one of the activities included a second tier subcontractor using pneumatic nail guns to nail down the roof deck. While my most recent visit included positive safety observations, the two previous inspections noted a common trend and that was all of the nail gun operators had disabled their safety springs. Removing this device can lead to serious safety problems such as unintended discharge.?Statistics show that nail gun injuries have resulted in paralysis, blindness, brain damage, bone fractures, and death.?This led me to issuing the company a safety notice, not an individual reprimand. I know why workers tamper with the safety spring, but I was curious to know their response so I engaged in several conversations to understand their sense making.
As aforementioned, both workers had safety springs in their nail guns on my most recent visit so I gave them positive feedback. Putting people at ease and offering positive feedback will typically allow people to be more outspoken because they feel more psychologically safe. The workers said they remove the safety springs because they can nail faster without it, and it is less strain on the shoulder/arm (ergonomics issue) because they have to put less force down on the tool to make contact with the surface. I also learned that this trade partner gets paid by the square foot (peace work). So naturally there are goal conflicts (production and money) competing with safety here (safety didn't prevail). One of the workers said they got reprimanded due to my previous company safety notice. So I asked him, when you leave this project, are you going to remove the safety spring from the nail gun? He said probably and then smiled at me.?
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I believe that a company's culture drives values, behaviors and results. Maybe safety is not a value for this subcontractor.?Their pattern of behavior would indicate that. When Mike Rowe, guest host of Dirty Jobs, recently said “safety is third”, it got me thinking. Perhaps a general contractor cannot permanently change the subcontractor workers’ safety behavior; only the person doing the work can.?In other words, a worker (third person) has to care about their own well-being. There are plenty of safety platitudes in companies today like safety first, zero incidents, zero harm, zero at-risk behavior, etc. This sounds like a nice target but the majority of workers don't believe zero is possible. I have conducted plenty of safety surveys that support this claim. Based on his experience, Mike Rowe further indicated that constant messages of "Safety First" in the workplace makes workers complacent. If only all workers were a brothers/sisters keeper. James Reason said, "You cannot change the human condition, but you can change the conditions under which people work". In other words, I cannot permanently change subcontractor safety behavior, but I can put controls in place so they can have the capacity to fail safely on any of my projects.?We have great safety systems in place, but at the end of the day, maybe safety is third to a lot of construction workers.?What do you think???
Revit Modeller in Electrical Industry
3 年I read an article several years ago. At the time, it was listed as 8 Myths of Construction Safety. It has been updated to 13 in this version (see link below). When I read it, I started viewing safety differently. https://www.irmi.com/articles/expert-commentary/debunking-the-13-myths-of-construction-safety
Revit Modeller in Electrical Industry
3 年Safety is all about education, but sadly dealt with ignorance. As an apprentice electrician, I was told to suck it up, stop being a baby and do the work. Who told me this? The people training me. Those who were supposed to know better. I worked on live installations, and often without supervision. When my ladder slipped, I fell 27 feet, and spent 6 months wearing a back brace. I lucked out in the end (no permanent disability). After that I refused dangerous task's and because of this attitude I was let go. I found out several years later that one of my teachers got burned in the face because he bypassed safety and worked on live equipment. The danger in modifying a safety on a tool (as in this article) is not just what it can do to you, but more about what it can do when someone else uses that tool. At my brother's shop, they removed one side of the safety for the sheet metal press to allow the experienced user to cut with one hand instead of two. My brother's son was not aware of this when he worked there one summer, and it cost him two fingers. I know of many people who paid the ultimate price for safety, as did their families. You will never be able to enforce safety. You can't inspect every job, and the fines are too small and meaningless. The best way is through education with ads and videos that show graphic visuals of what happens when you bypass safety. A person might be scared of losing their job if they speak out, but they need to understand that they won't have a job if they are in a hospital or dead.
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3 年I think if general contractors continue to look the other way and hire subcontractors who pay employees on piece work instead of paying them a fair wage and treating them like employees, this issue will never improve. Subcontractors classifying all of their employees as "independent contractors" and paying them by the piece typically means the people doing the work will receive no training, are not covered by workers compensation insurance, and will rarely be provided with the right tools, planning, or support. General contractors enable this behavior by looking the other way and hiring these subcontractors because they want lower prices.