Engagement and Enforcement

Getting the man and management into the game and working for safety because they wanted to rather than because they had to. 

Unpacking Construction Site Safety, First Edition. Dr Fred Sherratt. 

Nevertheless, principal contractors must strive to maintain safety throughout their sites, despite this problematic context and hierarchical structure of safety on sites. 

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However, engagement and enforcement are not mutually exclusive and, when unpacked, it can be suggested that through these two different voices of safety, different realities are developed and again incoherence and inconsistency of safety can be found sometimes rules are made to be broken, punishment is a necessary evil, whilst engagement can prove problematic in its impact, raising far more complex issues of the ownership and responsibility for safety on sites. 

If we sit back and just think about how complicated safety is -how it is different for different people, how it shifts and changes in its relationships with work, whether it is embedded with in practice or left to stand alone, or even pushed off to one side with all the other non-productive aspects of construction management, whether it has a fixed state or is far more intangible and shifting with time and space, whether it is linked more closely to management and control, engagement and enforcement, ownership and responsibility - we can start to get a better idea of how complicated its management should perhaps be. 

Althou there were substantial incres es in inspections and subsequent enforcement actions in the sector between 2000 and 2002 (516 inspections leading to 3 prosecutions in 2000, increased to 726 inspections d 28 prosecutions in 2001, 435 inspections and 85 prosecutions in 2002 increased to 314 inspections in 2003) it is not possible to determine how many of these made reference to wood-dust exposure or involved OELs in any way. Given the existence of the general inspection strategy described so fer, and the known reluctance of nmny inspectors to engage with technical a ects of the risk evaluation of the use of h ardous substances, it seems likely that very few inspection and enforcement actions will have done tiiis. However, exposure is likely to be quite high in many cases. 

Decides also that all States, in accordance with their national procedures, shall adopt and enforce appropriate effective laws which prohibit any non-State actor to manufacture, acquire, possess, develop, transport, transfer or use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their means of delivery, in particular for terrorist purposes, as well as attempts to engage in any of the foregoing activities, participate in them as an accomplice, assist or finance them ... 

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