Inside AGC President's Message

September/October 2009

Maintaining a Collaborative Approach to Industry Safety

The current practice saves lives and shares responsibility

By J. Doug Pruitt

Ray Crase, safety director for Wieland Daveco, a member of AGC’s Shreveport Chapter, demonstrates fall-protection gear for local media during an event in August.

Politically clichéd as it may be, the ability to embrace and adapt to change often means the difference between success and failure. In the construction industry, if you aren’t ready to adopt new scheduling technologies, three-dimensional design programs and the latest in environmental techniques, you might as well hang up your hard hat.

But change for change’s sake alone is rarely a good idea. That’s a lesson the Obama administration should take to heart as it ponders changing its current approach to overseeing construction safety.

Despite 10 years of phenomenal improvements in construction safety, a growing chorus of Washington officials are demanding change. They want to scrap an approach the Clinton administration put in place in 1998 and the Bush administration supported, commonly known as collaborative safety management.

For our industry, the fundamental premise of this system is that finding and fixing safety problems is more important than finding and fining them. These critics seek a return to a previous approach to safety oversight that can best be described as “cops and robbers.” They feel safety violations are just that, violations that merit punishment, fining and possible prosecution. Success, in their eyes, should be measured in fines levied and punishments imposed. This makes for good news stories about “tough” government oversight. The problem is that, in such a system, only federal and state safety inspectors are empowered to find and fix safety violations.

The genius of the Clinton and Bush approach is, instead of just having a few hundred safety inspectors searching for safety violations, it empowered and encouraged the nation’s seven million construction employees to look for and fix safety violations. Having a couple of hundred people focused is good, but nowhere near as effective as having more than seven million sets of eyes working to improve safety.

The plan also allowed construction firms and federal safety regulators the freedom to work together. Under the collaborative approach, inspectors routinely perform “audits” designed to identify and correct potential safety problems. This allows companies to put federal officials’ unique expertise and safety knowledge to constructive use without fear of fines or citations, unless of course they fail to make the suggested improvements.

After switching to a collaborative approach, the construction industry experienced a 47% reduction in on-site fatality rates and a 38% reduction in safety incidents. Meanwhile, the rate of time away from work because of an on-site injury declined 42%, from 3.3 per 100 workers to 1.9.

We use a collaborative approach at my own company because our employees are our most important resource and, simply put, we can’t be successful if our employees aren’t healthy. This approach has helped us improve our safety performance overall.

There’s a natural instinct to break with the past. But replacing a program that works with one that doesn’t isn’t change. It’s unwise, and worse, it’s unsafe.

To make this point, AGC, in conjunction with the Shreveport, La., chapter, held an event to release the safety data mentioned here, as well as announce a new OSHA-supported safety program for Shreveport-area contractors. The event was widely covered by the media, and AGC will continue to explain how the collaborative approach is working to make our industry even safer.