Safety on site

Yet there is also one further consideration to be made to provide a fully holistic picture of safety on sites the wider social context of safety will also have influence. Alongside the pressures of construction work and the immediate hazards within the working environment, what people read in the papers on their way into work, the jokes they tell in the pub, and the stream of posts popping up on their smartphone feeds will also contribute to and shape how people think about safety, and the wider ideas of safety and society should therefore also be acknowledged. 

However, such approaches have to fit in with existing shared ideas of safety on sites, drawing on what safety already is to help... 

Although accidents are just one of the ways in which we construct safety on sites, they help create a shared acceptance of a reality in which accidents will happen. It is in this reality where safety improvements are sought. But this is not a context which readily supports a shift to a safer industry. Indeed, an inherent fatalism has often been identified within industrial workforces which can play havoc with organisational safety targets, particularly those around zero - currently the biggest number in construction site safety- and one which is explored in much more detail in Chapter 8. 

Alternatively, this could actually be the manifestation of the ideal version of safety on sites - it has become something completely inherent in construction work, and so does not need to be separated out from the business of operating machinery or tools. As CDM 2015 desires, safety is now embedded in the r/ght skills and training for the work. However, whilst this would be an ideal scenario, the fact that practice dominates the discussion, along with payment for this practice, suggests further exploration of this relationship between safety and work is needed, and this is duly examined in Chapter 6. 

The role of site management in the enforcement of basic PPE can also be seen in the ease with which it is used when we are talking about safety on sites. PPE is often the easiest thing to grasp, as this supervisor does when talking about unsafety ... 

Yet it cannot be assumed that any particular safety will cascade down the management and supply chains to the sites and then manifest, unchanged, as safety in practice. In fact, it is very unlikely that this is ever the case - the establishment of safety in the office does not necessitate its emergence on our sites. A better understanding of the complexities and incoherence of safety within the site environment is needed, and the rest of this book now seeks to explore safety on sites through the shared understandings of those who work on sites every day. Rather than measure policy or evaluate management systems, exploration is made of actual practice, and how people consider and position safety within their lived realities of the construction site environment. 

And as result it is often stated that construction is inherently dangerous, that our sites just are unsafe. This historically accepted truth underpins shared understandings of safety on sites, and the way in which safety works in practice is not helping to support any challenge to the contrary. 

This has therefore contributed to a shared understanding of risk within the construction site environment as something time-consuming and irrelevant. This is reinforced by the continued prioritisation of safety on sites through safety management systems as explored in Chapter 4, and as a result the constructs of risks and hazards further diminish in the dialogue. 

However, both of these contradictory positions - safety as the dominant discourse with risks and hazards reduced to bureaucratic noise and risk as the dominant discourse itself disassociated from safety in practice - have arguably limited the inclusion and integration of hazard and risk within wider understandings of safety. Despite the prominence of hazards and risk within guidance documentation and (ideally) practice, they are not always so coherently partnered with, and positioned alongside, safety on sites. 

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

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. 

The different levels of management found within the construction site context, and the different ways in which they implement and construct safety on sites create what can be termed a hierarchy of safety. Through the relationships that develop between the violators of the safety rules and those tasked with their enforcement at various levels of management, further considerations of how the responsibility for, and ownership of, safety works in practice can be explored. 

Indeed, the more abstract zero of the workforce can also be found amongst the managers and supervisors, who often try to position the numbers and targets within their own lived experiences and understandings of safety on sites. For example, to consider Brand Zero as ... 

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