Chris Williams, Associated Builders and Contractors director of safety, says that he was attending an Aug. 22 Occupational Safety and Health Administration construction-safety advisory panel meeting at which the agency's chief, David Michaels, announced the industry fatality data.

Willliams says, "Since 2006, we're still down 37% in fatalities—that's the good news. The bad news that we're still above zero. And one is unacceptable, let alone 775."

He adds, "We need to look at the root cause of why these numbers go up and bring them back down."

Williams says that fatality data are "lagging indicators" and adds that companies should "look at leading indicators to start to prevent some of these incidents from happening." He says, "I think that's one of the biggest steps forward ... we can take [as an industry]."

In studying workplace fatalities and injury and illness rates, Williams says, "We're looking at past performance. We need to start looking at near-misses [and] how we treat hazards on the jobsite so that these fatalities don't happen." A focus should be on "how can we pre-plan around a hazard, how can we eliminate the hazard before we even start construction," he adds.

Williams notes that, at the OSHA construction safety meeting, officials discussed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's new ladder-safety mobile ">app, on which the construction industry worked. The app was released in June.

Williams says, "That's the kind of technology that we as an industry need to be focusing on to get out to our members and companies as a whole so they can use them ... as preventative measures."

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in a statement that he is encouraged by the reduction in overall occupational deaths. But he added, “Job gains in oil and gas and construction have come with more fatalities, and that is unacceptable.”

Perez noted that OSHA has launched several targeted initiatives, including an effort to prevent construction falls, which accounted for 36% of the deaths in the industry last year.

AGC's Turmail says, "We will be approaching OSHA and really seeing if there are ways we can expand, instead of restrict, the opportunities for collaborative approaches to safety and really look at how can we  get the safety professionals at OSHA to be able to come through and work with our members so that we can improve workplace safety.”