In my experience it's the workers, and it's machoism amongst the workers that creates an intentionally anti-safe culture where such cultures are permitted. Where I live they remove the angle grinder guards off and use 'safety squints' when welding. A friend had people working on his house, when I visited I made them stop their work and put the recently removed angle grinder guards form their new tools back on. I also and got them a chepo welding helmet. Not long after I left that day they took the guards back off and a young worker cut off a 1/4 of his hand and had to be rushed to hospital. My friend had a 'let them do what they want to do' attitude to the workers which thankfully has now been replaced with a 'safety first' attitude. Unfortunately too late for the kids hand.
This sort of stuff can't be done bottom up as there is huge social pressure to demonstrate manliness to peers through risky activity. Only strict top-down edicts where such digressions are severely punished can take away that pressure; i.e. instead of using safety equipment it's because they're a sissy it's because their mean old boss is a sissy and they're forcing them to use it.
While OSHA can be a bit onerous it really does help to have an organization with teeth pushing safety culture. Instead of the conflict between the workers and their bosses 'stupid rules' it's the 'stupid rules' of some 3rd party.
I second this. My day job is tech but I redid a rental property. I told the workers to wear a harness on the roof. I didn’t cheap out and bought nice comfortable equipment.
They told me they were wearing it, but I came by unannounced and there they were on the roof with no harness.
I asked the supervisor what was up and they were doing the same thing to him. They would put it on then take it off as soon as no one was looking.
It was Latin machismo - the social pressure was so strong to not look goofy in a harness. The second time I saw this happen I wrote a firm zero tolerance letter which I translated to Spanish and hand delivered.
One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him.
(Not saying that reckless bosses aren’t an issue, especially in these trenching incidents where the safety equipment didn’t exist)
Is this "Latin machismo"? Look at the cyclists on the streets, I don't know where you live but everywhere I've been in the US at least half of them are without a helmet. It just appears that most people don't believe that things that have not happened to them are real. They don't grab a hot skillet only because they have done that and found that it's quite painful. They don't wear a helmet or any PPE because they have not experienced the things it's supposed to protect them from.
>Cycling without a helmet may not be statistically safer. See for example "The Ultimate Question: With or Without a Helmet?"
I believe you wanted to say "may be statistically safer" because the article you referenced tries to infer that helmets cause more accidents even though significantly reduce the number of fatal/serious ones. What if construction workers also want to be "statistically safer" in this sense?
It's trivial to see that PPE that prevents fatal and debilitating injuries is going to increase the total number of injuries as a person, who otherwise would have died or stopped participating in the dangerous activity forever, can go on and accrue more minor injuries.
That could be, my point is that people can not be wearing a helmet because they think it is better not to do so from a safety perspective. They could be making a deliberate decision that they think is in their own best health interest.
I'm curious how liability works in this situation and when it ends? It sounds like you were operating as a general contractor. Were you paying the roofers salary or did you have a business to business relationship?
Relatedly, someone was telling me what workers insurance is 1% of construction costs for large infrastructure like building hospitals.
I’m technically an owner builder. I have a workman’s comp policy that ranges from 10-40% of payroll depending on the task. For a residential project I can definitively say insurance is way more than 1% of total cost. Eg for the sake of round numbers, let’s say labor is 50% of the total. If I take the absolute lowest percent of what I pay for insurance, we already are up to 5%.
This is separate from liability insurance for say negligence if I got sued. I hope my umbrella policy would cover me here but I found in my situation it is a bit confusing. An insurance broker struggled to give me clear answers
That doesn't surprise me. I imagine that construction labor is a lower fraction of expenses for very large projects, as well as real risk, and overhead.
In the conversation, they told me that their #bigco was able to save X hundred million a year by creating their own insurance company and requiring all of their contract builders to use it.
You are proving this is a management issue. You took steps to address the issue. Fired people who didn’t listen. The fact they thought they could do it without consequences means they never got into trouble by management at other job sites. If your industry has a culture of not following safety procedures it’s only because bosses don’t enforce it.
Sure, in theory you are correct, but it misses the nuances of human reality.
Flipping back to my day job, a counter example is security people covering any edge case so that everything grinds to a halt or lawyers over processing everything and stifling creativity.
The same people that might grumble about something being a management issue sometimes also complain about bureaucracy and process when things go the other way.
There aren’t simple trade off free answers to this stuff.
Telling people to wear a harness is not "covering every edge case so that everything grinds to a halt". It's just ensuring that the bare minimum is being done to prevent workplace deaths.
I think it's a misleading argument because it compares things that aren't alike.
On the one hand, we have management telling workers to use safety equipment that basically everyone agrees is necessary. That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, it's about preventing people from cutting corners.
On the other hand, we have clueless interns sending questionaires to vendors, who then tell their own clueless interns to fill them with some buzzwords, just to be filed away without anyone actually looking at the completed form, in order to check some compliance checkbox somewhere.
Yes, a top-down safety culture entails some level of bureaucracy and process overhead. That is the price that must be paid for jobsite safety. No one is saying there's a free lunch.
If safety is cheap but overcoming culture is expensive, at some point it becomes misleading (wrt ethics of participants, not correct course of action) to say the problem is that management doesn't care enough to spend money on safety, even if management is the only lever we have to fix the issue.
That depends on what level of the RCA you are looking at it. It can be simultaneously true that workers dont want to wear them and bosses dont enforce it. Understanding both facts is important for risk reduction.
There were still no real consequences. At least today, that crew has a several month long waiting list and will just shrug and walk over to the next job. You really need to get OSHA involved and for it to start costing companies money.
Unless I read it wrong, OP fired the whole company/crew, not individual workers.
The company is responsible for workers that are improperly trained or out of control. If the supervisor can't enforce workplace safety rules, then the supervisor isn't doing his job, and if the company does not have process in place ensuring the supervisor is doing his job, then the company needs to be fined, too.
I can't believe we have this attitude of throwing up our hands and saying "Aww shucks, ya just can't convince those darn individual machismo men to do their job right. What can ya do?"
OP wrote "One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him." He fired the offending worker, not the whole company. Though in general I agree regarding supervisors.
While OSHA can be a bit onerous it really does help to have an organization with teeth pushing safety culture. Instead of the conflict between the workers and their bosses 'stupid rules' it's the 'stupid rules' of some 3rd party.
OSHA standards are quite a low bar in general. An organization that is simply "OSHA compliant" is definitely not taking safety seriously. Moreover, OSHA is often far down the list of regulatory agencies that companies are worried about. For example, killing a protected bird species is far more likely to incur 6-7 figure fines and/or land management in prison than a workplace fatality.
That said, the situation with OSHA isn't particularly concerning. Most major companies are aggressively safety oriented. Even ignoring the legal liabilities of injured workers the fact is that, in the long term, unsafe working conditions are often less productive and potentially extremely damaging to capital investments. To illustrate, an accident at an oil refinery could easily run into the hundreds of millions in damage, in addition to an equal if not greater amount in lost production. The costs of settling lawsuits and/or fines for safety violations are trivial by comparison.
Nowadays, the greatest risks to U.S. labor is not from the likes of Kiewit, Union Pacific, Rio Tinto, etc. It is the small and under capitalized businesses. So, what can be done? Such businesses are already walking on a financial tightrope. If OSHA were to properly scrutinize such businesses even their limited fines would present a significant stress. Some people might retort that if a business can't operate safely than it shouldn't be operating at all, which is a fine. The downside is that all of those services will become substantially less competitive and more expensive.
There’s a huge difference between avoiding PPE because you’re macho, and the company avoiding structural reinforcements in a trench. This whole thread is sidetracked on PPE. When someone chooses to do angle grinding without a guard, or chooses not to wear a helmet or goggles, they’re putting their own safety in danger. It’s dumb, but very different from the company making that decision for you. Companies should perhaps be partly liable when they don’t require and monitor PPE use, but they should be fully liable when the construction plan puts everyone at risk. That’s the company making bad/illegal safety choices for the workers, not the workers making their own bad decisions. Not installing trench boxes is like the company disallowing PPE on the job.
I’m sure there’s gray area in between personal bad decisions and company bad decisions, but if a mining company were to operate a mine without reinforcing the walls, a mine collapse is 100% on the company, whereas if workers stop wearing masks while working and they get black lung after being provided masks and being told they’re mandatory, then it’s a bit more reasonable to say the workers made bad personal decisions, and the company didn’t do enough to enforce personal safety practices.
Trench boxes are the same as mine cable reinforcement - something the company is fully responsible for. Pointing at workers and/or talking about PPE safety culture just isn’t very relevant.
I don't think the angle grinder guard issue is cut and dry. I sometimes operate mine without a guard in conditions where the guard prevents me from seeing the point of contact, which for me is a more severe safety problem. When I can't simply rearrange the work I remove the guard and take extra care. Such complex work environments should not be regulated inflexibly.
They never put the guard back on, you’ll never see a guard in use here. That’s why they consider it ridiculous to use one because no one else does. Never-mind the constant stream of people going to the hospital. Plus they use oversized grinders where smaller ones would be fine and safer even if slightly slower. And they take the guard off from the start so there is no guard while they’re still leaning.
I had a ‘see me’ for an exemption policy while I was there and they didn’t need one. They really were not doing the kind of work that needed it.
Seems like a decent use case for an endoscope. I've never used one with and angle grinder, but seeing into places where other tools are cutting/drilling when the tool is blocking the view has been great.
I've used those in the past. The nice thing about the endoscope is that it has a light. They also tend to fit in smaller places and can even be taped to the tool.
its not just seeing what you're doing, the guard really does limit your ability to control the contact with the work. i'm all for PPE, including full face shields when working with cutting disks, but the guard is actually a real hindrance.
the most common injuries I have with grinder are:
a) using a sanding disk and buffing off some skin
b) running a cutting disk into my hand
c) getting the grinder caught into my clothing and pulling it into my torso
d) getting grit in my eyes
(c) is pretty nasty and isn't helped by the guard. (d) is trivially preventable by using fitting safety glasses. (a) and (b) result in cuts that are potentially bad, but not permanent.
for me the real issue here is using grinder that are in excess of 5". sometimes thats necessary, but the idea of throwing around an 8" cutting disk with a > 1hp motor without a guard just makes me frightened thinking of it. i had a job where they insisted i use one and i just walked off. and cutting tools with blades, i.e for masonry. thats asking for real hurt. or those insane little chiansaws. just no.
Most PPE has very real tradeoffs. Respirators are uncomfortable, especially in hot weather. Safety glasses get dusty and smudged. Gloves limit dexterity. Mortar mixer grates make it difficult to clean unmixed sand and mortar from the sides. Safety harnesses take time to donn and doff and limit mobility. It's rare that the safest procedure is the quickest and cheapest.
As a society, we've decided that we are willing to pay the price to keep our workers safe on the job. But it only works if our regulators are effective and make the costs of noncompliance greater than the costs of compliance.
Safety equipment can introduce new dangers too, both from correct use, and from refusal to use it
For example a hard hat might be fine, people generally are happy with that - they see the benefit, they see things falling, job done.
but then you add a ton more stuff which has decreasing benefit and increasing cost to use (in terms of comfort as well as time and dollars) and eventually the worker says “fuck it” and doesn’t even wear the hat.
there is always a balance to be had. We do the same in domestic life - we make motor cyclists wear helmets, but not car passengers. If we made all car occupants wear a helmet we would reduce head injuries for occupants in car crashes. But that would be ridiculous.
Had the pleasure of cutting concrete pipe with a 16" saw at my first job. That thing was scary as hell. Needless to say no one pulled the guard off it though.
This is not only a us problem for sure. Made two workers who where cutting pavement stones at our house wear safety glasses after i saw them cutting the stones with no protection. I don’t want it on my conscience if one of them goes blind due to a flying stone split.
This sort of stuff can't be done bottom up as there is huge social pressure to demonstrate manliness to peers through risky activity. Only strict top-down edicts where such digressions are severely punished can take away that pressure; i.e. instead of using safety equipment it's because they're a sissy it's because their mean old boss is a sissy and they're forcing them to use it.
While OSHA can be a bit onerous it really does help to have an organization with teeth pushing safety culture. Instead of the conflict between the workers and their bosses 'stupid rules' it's the 'stupid rules' of some 3rd party.