Leaders of 31 major
construction firms agree that safety should not be proprietary. They are
offering their ideas about how to make the industry a safer place to work by
launching the first annual "Safety Week" on May 4-10, and they
encourage large and small contractors across the country to join them in elevating
and celebrating safety.
These firms belong to either
the Construction Industry Safety Initiative or the Incident and Injury Free
Executive Forum. The companies in the groups can be fierce competitors, but
they also meet regularly and exchange ideas about safety. "We've seen too
many people get hurt," says Robert Alger, CEO of Lane Construction and one
of the organizers of Safety Week. Both groups seek an industry-wide safety
transformation.
The goal is to eliminate
worker injury. These leaders acknowledge that construction still has a long way
to go. A Bureau of Labor Statistics report, released last September, said 775
workers were killed in 2012, an increase of 5% over the previous year. The
uptick followed five years of declines in the number of fatalities, from 1,239
in 2006. The increase was not just a matter of more workers returning to the
field. The industry's rate of fatalities also went up in 2012, to 9.5 per
100,000 full-time-equivalent workers, from 9.3 the previous year.
Consciousness-Raising
Clearly, there are known best
practices that can save lives and prevent injuries. But it takes continual
consciousness-raising to make sure they are uniformly implemented. That's where
Safety Week comes in. Leading companies are reaching out to the entire industry
and sharing safety know-how with the industry as a whole. The group has
launched a Safety Week website at www.safety week2014.com with pages of ideas
and best practices about how to strengthen the safety culture throughout
construction.
The website has step-by-step
planning tips for firms to host their own Safety Week events. "Not
everyone will celebrate Safety Week the same way," says Michael McNally,
CEO of Skanska USA Inc., a program leader. The website offers a wide range of
ideas, such as personal and project-specific commitment pledges to safety,
project visits by company leaders to engage with workers about safety or safety
road shows in which vendors demonstrate safety tools and equipment.
The site features poignant
testimonials, such as one from Jason Surratt, a scaffold erector for Safeway
Scaffolding: "I am writing about your 100% tie-off rule on Gilbane
jobsites. If it weren't for the enforcement of this rule, I just may have lost
my life or been seriously injured!"
Saving lives and preventing
injuries is the mission, and this is Year One for Safety Week. But the leaders
vow that it will "not be one and done." Increase your engagement with
safety. Participate in Safety Week.
Source: ENR.com
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