Not sure if I’ve already posted this, but this study draws on qualitive data from 36 face-to-face interviews with personnel from a case study organisation (CSO), which is involved in large-scale infrastructure projects working around buried assets like high pressure gas pipelines.
The study looks at how, specifically, contractual arrangements with subcontractors, economic pressures and blind adherence to compliance can reduce safety during excavation work around high pressure gas pipelines.
A key idea is that of ‘risk shifting’, being the way that organisations (like principal contractors or clients) transfer the responsibility of managing risks down the contractual chain. An issue here is that subcontractors are paid by metre of trenching or pipe in the ground and not for preplanning activities like locating buried assets (eg potholing).
Results:
The risk governance strategy used by the CSO for managing damage to buried assets is to insist on procedural compliance from their contractors/subcontractors. CSO were found to place a high value on complying with rules. In this procedural view, safety around buried assets was equated with procedural adherence & compliance activities, with the CSO’s role to ensure contractors stick to their own processes with audits & inspections.
Despite this, the authors note that “the responsibility for compliance is clearly shifted to sub-contractors down the supply chain” (p5). CSO interviewees ultimately saw the responsibility & accountability around compliance resting with contractors etc. where they “[devolve] responsibility for safe work systems and processes down the [supply chain]” (p5). This is said to represent a clear example of “responsibilisation”, where workers have an increased responsibility for taking actions to ensure their safety and balancing safety requirements with other conflicting goals.
The shifting of risk down the contracting chain creates a double bind for contractors etc. Contractors indicated that in some cases “it is not possible to follow the imposed rules and meet other critical business objectives such as making a profit” (p5). Further, the uncertainty around the cost of compliance with CSO safety & project systems “is borne by the people at the bottom of the chain” (p5).
Although safety by the CSO is equated to simply following rules & compliance, emphasised by contractors is that poor project payment rates are problematic and make it difficult to meet project objectives. One contractor noted that they may spend considerable time & money potholing as required by the CSO & rules (in some cases spending entire days or weeks) and in the process only being compensated for pipe in the ground. When the contractor asked the CSO for compensation, “they just weren’t interested … in paying us to do excess potholing” (p5).
Notably, the contractors were well aware of the risks of working around buried assets & for potholing, but the problem is that they aren’t compensated for that and in their view, sometimes onerous & over the top requirements.
The paper discusses how risk shifting, legitimated by contractual mechanisms, “can become a normalized part of labor relations” (p6) & how compliance activities are shifted down the chain and borne by the contractors. Contractors, in turn, “face the dilemma of balancing contractually required but potentially time-consuming safety activities, enforced via compliance with rules, against financial incentives to work quickly” (p6). These goal conflicts create precarious employment situations & make it difficult for workers to voice their safety concerns.
Tendering is also seen as driven primarily on price & on compliance activities like audits or safety personnel. Some interviewees believed that the increasing sums of money spent on safety were being spent not in the right places & didn’t allow for a competitive tendering environment, where it ignores the onerous cost of compliance activities. Indeed, for contractors/subcontractors, the conflict of balancing profit & compliance leaves them with a dilemma that is “invisible and unreasonable” (p7).
The focus on driving compliance activities & equating compliance with safety is that is can contribute to a “bureaucratic culture”, where “compliance with procedures and completing the associated paperwork are valued above actual field practices that may more effectively reduce risk” (p9). Further, payment arrangements encourage contractors to work quickly, giving them less time for safety-related planning & potholing activities (which they are often not compensated for).
It’s argued that adherence to overly compliance-based approaches to safety do not achieve the best outcomes. In reality, safety results from formal & informal practices and adaption of rules. An overreliance on procedures can “create a context in which individuals forget, neglect or avoid anything that is not formalized” (p7). It also creates a situation where compliance with rules “becomes the aim rather than a means to a goal” (p7).
In one example the executive manager of the CSO allocated responsibility for accidents to individual workers & their actions, where the correct response is for people to follow the procedure. In this way, the safety strategy diverts safety responsibility away from management and on to workers.
Overall, despite contractual & payment terms perhaps being amongst the most critical factors determining asset strikes, it seems to have little attention paid to it within CSO management systems or contracts. Further, risks are shifted down the contracting chain to organisations & individuals who are least resourced to manage those risks.
Ref: McDermott, V., & Hayes, J. (2018). Risk shifting and disorganization in multi-tier contracting chains: The implications for public safety. Safety science, 106, 263-272.
Link to the study: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2016.11.018
Link to the LinkedIn review: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-bite-risk-shifting-disorganization-chains-ben-hutchinson/
SafetyInsights.org 