General contractors are always looking for ways to reduce their overhead and increase their profits. Sometimes, they look at their investments in their workers’ safety as expenses ripe to be cut.
That’s the wrong approach to take with worker safety — and I would also suggest it’s a poor business decision.
Business-savvy contractors know that a safe workplace is good for their bottom lines. Fewer worker injuries and fatalities leads to fewer families losing loved ones. From a business perspective, that means fewer workers’ compensation or third-party liability claims, which lead to fewer legal bills, fewer insurance premium hikes and a better reputation among workers, the industry and the local community.
As the managing partner of a large workers’ compensation law firm, I’m happy to see that over the course of my four decades practicing in this area of law, workplaces have generally gotten safer. Twenty years ago, during construction of a 30-story high-rise, you could expect workers to lose their lives and many others to become catastrophically injured. Those numbers would be higher if the construction project was a sports stadium.
Today, it’s a different story. It is now the norm for no workers to lose their lives at a large construction site, and only a few, if any, to suffer serious or catastrophic injuries. Likewise, decades ago, you would rarely see someone working at a tall height who was tied off. Today, that worker would almost certainly be tied off if they are on a union jobsite.
A Culture Motivated by Good Business Sense & Led by an Empowered Safety Director
These improvements in safety, especially in the Philadelphia area, came about because an increasing number of contractors, working alongside organized labor, discovered that changing their approach to safety is a good business move. They’ve found that investing time, effort and money into changing their cultures around worker safety bore fruit.
A culture built around safety will be driven by a safety director who’s empowered to build a safety program that educates workers, while also holding themselves and the workers accountable. The money invested in a safety director and their program is the smartest money a contractor can spend.
A safety director could start turning around a safety culture by assessing potential risks and identifying hazards workers are likely to face. Then, they could develop and regularly update the contractor’s safety manual, which outlines the contractor’s safety policies, procedures and protocols. They could also establish site-specific safety plans and implement permit-to-work systems.
Next, they could build training and education programs to support this emerging culture of safety. This includes developing baseline training programs for every level of worker when they first join the company, conducting regular meetings and ongoing training, and ensuring that both the baseline programs and ongoing training reflect the latest technologies, regulations and best practices. To support these meetings and trainings, the safety director could implement communications campaigns using email newsletters and other tools to explain and reinforce safety updates and best practices.
Once they’ve built this safety infrastructure, the safety director could next tackle compliance and worker accountability. On the compliance side, they could create site audit and inspection procedures, develop and implement emergency response plans, and create procedures for investigating safety violations and taking corrective actions when they occur. As for worker accountability, the safety director could develop a way for safety performance to be factored into workers’ evaluations so that workers who regularly refuse to follow safety guidelines are punished for it, while their colleagues who regularly follow them are rewarded for doing so.
For example, in Philadelphia (where I’ve lived and practiced law my entire life), the Philadelphia General Building Contractors Association and the Philadelphia Building Trades have worked closely for decades to make sure contractors adopt best practices for safety that keep union members safe and alive. By regularly coming together amicably with the goal of each side hearing where the other stands on safety and what they’re willing to do to ensure a safe workplace, contractors and the building trades both walk away as winners.
Volumes have been written about safety directors and safety programs at contractors, so this overview will not do the subject justice. Suffice to say, a contractor’s culture of safety rests at the feet of ownership first, then empowering a safety director to create that culture so workers stay healthy and alive, and the contractor’s costs associated with workers’ injuries stay low.
Unfortunately, OSHA Is Rarely a Motivating Factor for Safety
Conventional wisdom would say that contractors need not be motivated by the bottom line in order to build a culture of safety, because they should fear the stick wielded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). But OSHA’s penalties and fines are rarely a deterrent to sophisticated contractors.
That’s because they aren’t large enough to make a dent in those contractors’ bottom lines, even when a worker loses a life because of an OSHA violation. Plus, OSHA doesn’t have the personnel to adequately monitor anything close to a reasonable number of active construction jobsites. Even if it did, it’s doubtful every OSHA inspector would be well-trained enough to find all violations and to see through contractors’ attempts to cover up violations. If OSHA’s penalties and fines were true deterrents,
you would see half as many injuries on construction sites because of the strong financial motivation contractors would have to avoid them.
That said, an OSHA violation serves in a personal injury lawsuit as almost a prima facie (or “on the face”) claim for
liability. Thus, in a personal injury lawsuit where an OSHA violation occurred, that violation could bring with it significant financial ramifications for a contractor outside the context of OSHA penalties.
Investing in Safety & Adding a Bit of Empathy Pays Dividends
When contractors invest in their workers’ safety, those investments pay dividends. Lives will be saved, injuries avoided and the costs of business will come down.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that while contractors are businesses, there’s no reason their leaders shouldn’t approach their workers’ safety with empathy. In this context, a little empathy can make a big difference.
When a worker is injured on a jobsite, they shouldn’t be ignored or treated like they don’t exist. Leadership should check in with them and see how they’re doing. They should make sure the injured worker is getting the medical treatment they need.These efforts can go a long way with the worker and their family, but they also go a long way with the contractor’s workers since they will see exactly how their supervisors treat their injured colleagues — and whether that treatment is worth risking their safety for.
When there’s a workplace injury, if a contractor creates an adversarial, hostile environment, they’re turning up the heat — which often results in the injured worker and their family taking a scorched-earth approach to their legal claims stemming from the injury.
Contractors who think cutting corners with safety and empathy will reduce their costs of business will come to regret their short-term thinking when one of their workers is catastrophically or fatally injured on a jobsite. When that tragedy occurs — and it will — the costs of defending a workers’ compensation claim or another legal claim, the costs of resolving those claims and the costs of the inevitable increases in insurance premiums will sink in. At that point, they’ll realize how much better off they’d be if they invested, ahead of time, on building a culture of worker safety.
Contractors are often motivated by monetary outcomes. That motivation should lead them to build a culture of worker safety. Doing so will benefit both their workers and their bottom lines.