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Home » Blogs » Critical Path » Letter to Construction Workers: What Makes You Safe?
Richard-korman

Deputy Editor Richard Korman, who has edited ENR's Risk Review newsletter since 2012, helps run ENR's business coverage, selects ENR's commentary and op-ed viewpoint submissions and oversees editorial content on ENR.com. He recently completed a fellowship on drone safety with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In 2015 he won the Timothy White Award from American Business Media for investigations of individual surety fraud and workplace bullying. Richard's freelance writing has appeared in the Seattle Times, the New York Times, Business Week and the websites of The Atlantic and Salon.com. He admires construction projects that finish on time and budget, pay before the earth completes its annual orbit of the sun, record zero injuries and assign risk to parties who control an activity or willingly finance the risk.

Risk / Safety Health / Workforce

Letter to Construction Workers: What Makes You Safe?

Mark_Katzman_McCarthy_2007_People.jpg

A worker from McCarthy Building Companies, St. Louis, looks on at the site of the St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. A 2007 Images of the Year winner by Mark Katzman. 

March 10, 2016
Richard Korman
8 Comments
KEYWORDS construction / construction accidents / construction crafts / construction hazards / Construction Safety / construction workers / craft / respect / Safety / Workers
Reprints

To the Craft Workers of the Construction Industry:

There’s a lot of talk these days about the crafts: Will there be enough people? Will they get the work done? Can we train them in time?

And there’s a lot of talk about safety, how construction has to do better and how the key is empowering the workers by treating them with dignity and showering them with respect. So that they’ll know they are considered important, and that management cares, and as part of that culture they’ll care about and take care of each other. 

We're going to be writing about that in ENR, but when I stopped to think about it I had to admit that if you are a mason, a laborer, a carpenter or an equipment operator, I may have met you or your co-worker sometime, or we may have chatted on the jobsite. And I even have a construction worker in my family now that I’m so proud of, my son-in-law, a journeyman electrician.

Still, I don’t know you, really. And I don’t pretend to know your work life from the inside. I don’t know what it’s like to show up at 7 a.m. to pull wire when it's 12 degrees F out there. I don’t know what it’s like when an iron splinter flies up at your face. I don’t know what it’s like to put in six 12s bending pipe on a powerplant or refinery turnaround. I'll never really know.

Now, I have to admit I was skeptical about how far this idea about safety-by-worker-empowerment can go, outside the energy and industrial projects where owners first demanded better safety and the employers and their crews are delivering it. Racking up millions of injury-free hours. Union and open shop.

My feeling is that outside the industrial and energy and elite manufacturing market segments, the conditions vary from project to project, market to market, region to region.

The Safety Difference-Makers

We’ll never know what the safety difference-makers are, from your point of view, unless you tell us, open and honest, without the boss looking over our shoulder. What makes you safe? A job that runs on time? A shop steward who protects you from schedule-obsessed project managers? A safety manager who has real authority to take care of you and train you and equip you and protect you from being pushed to do risky things?

Or is it what the more safety-proud contractors talk of? That they treat you with respect, and ask you never to deliberately overlook a hazard or near-accident, that what you say is welcomed and not resented. That the safe places to work are those where you are never rushed to hang those last few sections of drywall, to swing one more beam into place, when your knees are getting a little tired, and the reach is a little too far, and the light isn't as good, and there's no time to position the equipment properly. That allow you to wait until the morning, until you talked about the hazards, put everything in place, to be sure you can do it safely and do it right. Those bosses, those companies.

We’ll never know unless you tell us, right now, in time for our features for Safety Week in April, starting in the comment section below in this blog post or with an email to me at kormanr@bnpmedia.com.

We’re listening.

Richard

Richard Korman, Deputy Editor

Recent Comments

Truth

Great Article, Keen to Learn More!

Thank you for your article Can you please...

Home Builder Burnout

I would love to add our Director

Richard-korman

Deputy Editor Richard Korman, who has edited ENR's Risk Review newsletter since 2012, helps run ENR's business coverage, selects ENR's commentary and op-ed viewpoint submissions and oversees editorial content on ENR.com. He recently completed a fellowship on drone safety with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In 2015 he won the Timothy White Award from American Business Media for investigations of individual surety fraud and workplace bullying. Richard's freelance writing has appeared in the Seattle Times, the New York Times, Business Week and the websites of The Atlantic and Salon.com. He admires construction projects that finish on time and budget, pay before the earth completes its annual orbit of the sun, record zero injuries and assign risk to parties who control an activity or willingly finance the risk.

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