This draws on case studies in construction (high hazard buried gas pipelines) and elite sport to examine how risks are shifted to individuals at the bottom of contracting supply chains.
In providing background on the topic, it’s said “Despite decades of research demonstrating that accidents are a function of organizations … individuals still bear the brunt of responsibility in practice” (p1502). Considering this, use of contracting arrangements with aggressive and competitive tendering and shifting of risk “create opportunities to scapegoat less powerful individuals when things go wrong” (p1503).
Accidents are readily attributed to errors by frontline personnel and downstream contractors, which leads to intense focus on compliance with procedures as the modus operandi for managing risk. This view, which sees effective risk management as manic rule following may result in an “overly compliance-based approach” (p1504), where errors are described in normative terms which “often portray workers as irresponsible because they failed to follow mandated procedures” (p1504).
Contracts are one way of transferring risk downwards – used to manage foreseeable risks and push these penalties onto less powerful stakeholders. Another element of risk shifting relates to “responsibilisation”. This is where individuals are increasingly made more responsible for taking actions to ensure their own safety, where failing to do so more readily associates them as noncompliant and thus culpable.
It’s said that the complicated set of formal procedures and systems, used as primary risk control mechanisms, are central in risk shifting. Namely, they are often “written ‘to assure that responsibility/blame is placed on the workforce, not placed on senior institutional actors” (p1505).
The CSO (case study organisation – an organisation involved in a large-scale infrastructure project and its construction partners) as above has a complicated management system and contractually requires its construction partners (CPs) to align their safety systems to the CSOs “high proceduralised system”.
Under the CSOs system, procedural compliance is central to worker safety, but at the same time risk reduction is said to be conflated with enhanced productivity (such as the disrupted schedule and delays with striking underground assets).
Interviews with stakeholders in the CSO highlighted risk shifting down to the CPs, with one person noting that CPs are “the ones with the ultimate responsibility to protect those assets” (p1507). CP/individual performance was couched in normative terms, like being overworked, lazy or incompetent. Although the focus was on the lack of capabilities of the individuals, it’s telling that it avoided focusing on the upstream/structural factors contributing to those normative frames (e.g. if individuals are overworked – then perhaps the CSO are awarding or approving unrealistic project schedules with inadequate staffing allowances), if people are apparently incompetent – then perhaps recruitment processes are underbaked and under-resourced.
It’s said that as a result, “efforts to improve performance focus only on enforcement of rules” (p1507).
To contrast the views of the CSO, many of the CPs (contractors) pointed out the structural factors like poor payment rates, tight project deadlines and other contractual limitations. A major issue was how tenders were awarded, which focused on the price of direct activities but not factoring in ancillary tasks to support the work, like volumes of safety paperwork etc.
[E.g. An example these authors used in a previous paper was around how contractors were paid by metres of pipe in the ground rather than paid for undertaking potholing activities to identify buried assets. Trades-offs prompt contractors to lean out the number of potholes in order to meet payment schedules, increasing risk of striking assets.]
Another issue besides the payment rates not properly accounting for cost of complying with highly proceduralised frameworks is intense power imbalances. This may put contractors in a position where they underbid on tenders in order to keep the business afloat.
In concluding this section, they aptly state that “although the CSO interviewees articulate risk to worker safety as a key concern, the governance process put in place to manage that risk is ineffective” (p1508). Safety is espoused as critical, yet contracts incentivise working quickly and making trade-offs damaging to safety, particularly focused on those lower in the supply chain and “rendering them blameworthy”.
The example in elite sport is then covered. I’ve skipped most of this section but it’s argued that athletes in the modern elite sport framework operate similarly to construction contracting. Athletes are incentivised to win but also reprimanded for drug use. One example was about mandatory training required by the Australian anti-doping agency. The training primarily focused on what rules athletes had to follow and the sanctions with drug use/not following rules.
As some athletes noted though, the training gave them little in the way of providing them information on health impacts of drugs, what supplements they could take that were not illegal, info around unintentional drug use and other more meaningful things to athletes. Rather than providing them more practical information, the training focused on how they would be “held accountable for violation”. Similarly to construction contracts, it’s argued that risks are shifted to individual athletes.
Conclusion
In wrapping up the findings, it’s said that both contract workers and athletes are concerned about their own safety but also “shoulder their respective sectors’ business risks in a way that is disproportionate with the rewards that they receive when compared to senior institutional actors” (p1511).
It’s said that although safety is espoused as critical, the governance frameworks are better structured to shift risks down to those with the least resources to manage the issues and the systems are better structured to protect “their reputation, not on protecting their contract workers from harm” (p1511).
Further, it’s argued that while following rules is often equated with managing risks, the “practical outcomes render safety a secondary concern” (p1511). Practically for contractors, this means “producing large volumes of paper-based safety management systems in order to meet contract requirements, describing actions that they are not paid to perform” (p1511).
Finally, it’s argued that:
- Top-down compliance-based approaches shift risks to the lower supply chain and leaves contractors “poorly equipped to manage the task of balancing performance and health/safety in a competitive environment” (p1511)
- Risk shifting allows powerful upstream actors and regulators to “condemn noncompliant behavior by frontline workers as stupid and irresponsible or, in the case of athletes” (p1511)
- Normatively framed explanations allow “implicit moral claims”, which at times suggests that “workers deserve what comes to them – the ultimate shifting of risk and responsibilization for safety outcomes” (p1512).
Authors: Vanessa McDermott, Kathryn Henne & Jan Hayes, 2017, Journal of Risk Research
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2017.1313764
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6901645912574193664?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_updateV2%3A%28urn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A6901645912574193664%2CFEED_DETAIL%2CEMPTY%2CDEFAULT%2Cfalse%29
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