2019 Hard Hat Safety Awards: Even with recent strides, industry looking for ways to improve its record

Listen to this article

By Nate Beck and Chuck Slothower
BridgeTower Media Newswires

Industry experts say preventing injuries and accidents simply comes down to instilling a habit of taking safety seriously. And although the construction industry has made strides in reducing the rate of jobsite injuries in recent years, preventing mishaps takes constant work.

The costs of complacency in the construction industry can be disastrous, said Greg Sizemore, vice president of health, safety, environment and workforce development at the Associated Builders and Contractors of America.

Contractors put themselves and their workers at risk when they choose, for instance, to let substance abuse slide or neglect to train workers in the use of new technology. Nor are government mandates likely to be of much help, Sizemore said.

“I firmly believe the next great leaps in safety are not going to be a new rule in policy or a new regulation,” Sizemore said. “It’s a paradigm shift that leadership is going to drive. From there, you’re going to have to transform that culture. Safety, performance or your safety record will be tied to the lowest safety performance that you’re willing to accept as a leader.”

Safety improvements

Over the past several years, injury rates in the construction industry have been trending downward. Last year was no exception.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ yearly report on workplace injuries and illnesses, released on Nov. 7, the construction industry saw its rate of nonfatal injuries fall to 3 for every 100 workers in 2018, which was down from 3.1 a year before, even as the total number of nonfatal injuries in 2018 increased less than 1%.

The industry’s nonfatal injury rate has steadily dropped in the past five years, going from 3.6 for every 100 workers in 2014 to 3 last year. Even so, the nonfatal injury rate is still higher than the average for all employers, which was 2 for every 100 workers last year.

Undeniable progress

Despite such sobering reminders, some in the industry caution that the improvements of recent years should not be overlooked.

Craig Zeigler, training director of the Wisconsin Laborers’ District Council, said the industry’s recent record is strong evidence that employers have made safety a priority. Part of this can be seen in training numbers. This winter, he expects to see yet another increase in the number of contractors that send employees to the laborers’ training center near Madison.

“From what we’ve seen here, contractors and our members are really buying into what training means,” Ziegler said. “That is driven by contractors. Contractors are requesting that their members, when they are laid off, come to the training center and take safety seriously.”

Ziegler said enrollment at the training center has grown nearly three-fold in recent years and has been consistently breaking records. Workers come both to learn a variety of new techniques and obtain certifications.

Ziegler said workers are particularly eager to learn about new federal standards that were adopted to curtail exposure to silica dust, which can be inhaled and cause long-term ailments. Also popular is specialized training instructing workers on how to seal off sections of hospitals or other health-care centers to prevent contamination.

Although contractors may be improving their records, keeping jobs sites safe still requires vigilance, Sizemore said. He recommends companies carry out daily “tool box talks” to make known their safety goals for specific jobs. Firms must also watch safety data closely to ensure they can catch developing problems before they get out of hand.

“The day you think you’re done with safety is the day you’re going to have an incident,” Sizemore said.

Tech to the rescue?

Some contractors are turning to technological innovation to cut down on paperwork and phone calls to supervisors. For instance, Coffman Excavation, a big contractor in Oregon, has begun placing QR codes in every helmet distributed to crews.

When activated by a smartphone or iPad, the QR code opens a menu providing access to a wealth of documents. These include plans showing utility locations, incident-report forms, confined-space worksheets, work forms, quick cards, guidelines from the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration, excavation guidelines and information on slopes and soil types.

“All of our superintendents and foremen have an iPad they carry,” said Scott Brawner, employee health and safety manager at Coffman Excavation.

QR codes were invented in the 1990s, and their use has spread widely. The square black-and-white codes contain more information than standard barcodes.

Coffman recently altered so that they now can be filled out digitally, Brawner said. Among their benefits, the forms have cut down on routine calls from job sites to Coffman’s managers. “There’s a lot less unimportant phone calls, because the men and women are able to answer these questions for themselves,” he said.

The QR code was developed by a recent college graduate, Tim Brunson, whose father, Patrick Brunson, has long worked in the Portland construction industry. Coffman will provide the QR code to anyone who asks about it. It has also become popular with contractors through the SafeBuild Alliance, a construction-safety nonprofit group.

“We’re certainly saving a lot of trees this way,” Brawner said.

Coffman, which has about 250 employees and can boast of having Intel among its prominent clients, also uses QR codes to disseminate company policies, such as those governing vacation days and drug and alcohol use. In these efforts, the biggest obstacle has been resistance from people who have been in the industry for a long time, Brawner said.

“I will say the most challenging part is getting the superintendents and foremen who have been around for a long time to embrace their electronic device,” he said.

Brawner himself came to the industry with some familiarity with QR codes. Before starting in construction in 2016, he had worked as a firefighter and paramedic, a field in which the technology is commonly used.

Regulators such as Oregon OSHA are putting more information online, too. The state agency has released online training videos dealing with general fall protection, ladder safety and fall protection safety specific to roofing.

The agency spokesman Aaron Corvin said that of all safety violations, violations of fall-protection standards are the most common. In 2018, the agency identified 443 fall-protection violations, including 322 “serious” violations. Those resulted $902,990 in fines.

Drug abuse

As more states allow the use of recreational marijuana, and the opioid plague continues to roil many parts of the country, substance abuse remains a significant contributor to jobsite injuries and accidents.

Drug use is a serious concern in the construction industry. According to a study from New York University, published in late October, construction workers are more likely than people in any other occupation to abuse cocaine and opioids, and the second-most likely –behind service workers – to use marijuana.

The industry’s relatively high injury rate – caused both by accidents or repetitive, strenuous work – often leads construction workers to attempt to treat themselves with drugs, according to the report.

Yet another complication is the fact that there’s no reliable way yet to test for marijuana use, said Sizemore of the ABC. There’s nothing like a breathalyzer test that can be used to learn if someone is high at any given moment, meaning it can be nearly impossible for employers to tell if a worker is impaired while on the job.

According to the ABC’s annual Safety Performance Report, one-third of all jobsite injuries or accidents are related to drug or alcohol use. Companies that test for drug and alcohol use were 60% safer than those that did not, according to the organization.

Employers in other industries are still trying to understand the implications of various states’ decisions to legalize marijuana. Marijuana has been legal for recreational use for years in states such as Oregon, Colorado and Washington, and Illinois and Michigan recently voted to legalize it. Despite these changes, Sizemore said the construction industry should not modify how it treats use of the drug.

He suggested companies adopt a “zero-tolerance” policy for marijuana and other drugs. The risks are too great, he said, for employers to allow the use of the drug at all.

“There is no daylight between that and the fact that I want everybody to go home at the end of the day,” Sizemore said.