This 3 yr study explored the impacts experienced by workers due to low-bidding on a large infrastructure project.
First, spending on temporary structures was seen to be resisted. Examples included (not) adding gates to ladders or cheap and poorly assembled work platforms, allowing tools to fall through.
For equipment & structures, the trade-offs tried to meet ‘legal compliance’ rather than going beyond this requirement. Legal compliance was seen as a way for management to blame workers in the event of an incident. This echoes other research around ‘compliance cultures’. E.g. Management spend money on certain safety precautions (tool tethers), but workers said they were never consulted on the decision even though they have to wear it and it makes their work difficult to complete.
The administration of a hazard observation system was seen as a waste of time given its focus on “closing out” items and generally full of arbitrary items of little value.
Another interesting observation was around the use of PPE. An incident occurred where a worker had set fire to himself. The HSE Advisors remarked that the worker’s stance during the task was different to usual and they suspected that the purchase of new (but cheaper) PPE may have been a factor.
That is, fire resistant rather than fire proof PPE may have resulted in the worker having a false confidence that he was better protected than he was (which the authors relate to risk homeostasis, or in my mind behavioural adaptation). Or quoting Besnard & Hollnagel (2012), “Technology is not value neutral. Additional protection changes behaviour so that the intended safety improvements might not be obtained”.
Finally, an OHS committee was created but because of high production pressures supervisors couldn’t always release workers to attend. Also the “hierarchal power relations” inhibited effective insights from workers.
Authors: David Oswald, Dominic D. Ahiaga-Dagbui, Fred Sherratt, Simon D. Smith, 2020, Safety Science
Study Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.104535
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/industry-structured-unsafety-exploration-cost-safety-ben-hutchinson
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