Work practices construction site

The updated Mayor s air quality strategy addresses various measures which are proposed in the strategy and should be implemented in the near future [7]. This includes inter alia no-idling zones , more efficient freight movements, promotion of smarter travel, lane rental schemes for construction work in congested roads, supporting the uptake of low emission and electric vehicles, hybrid buses for public transport, renewal of the taxi fleet and enforced implementation of best practice guidance for construction sites. 

Rather than discussing the implementation of various regulations or seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of safety management systems against templates of best practice, it considers how people think about safety, what it means to them and how they go on to collectively use those ideas in their everyday work. This could also be deemed an evaluation of construction site safety culture, a notoriously problematic term and one that is discussed in more... 

The term unpacking may seem a little odd. It comes from the way this book has been researched and prepared. It means to pull apart, to challenge, to question and to consider from as wide a variety of perspectives as possible, both academic and practice-based. It therefore lets us take safety apart within the specific construction site context to see what we can find - an ideal approach to help us answer the questions above, allowing us to explore and address them from outside the traditional frameworks of legislation, management systems and best practice. Instead, we can see how these approaches actually work in practice, how they are received by those who have to use them on a daily basis, and how they ultimately contribute to what safety actually is on sites. The way this process has been carried out is discussed in much more detail in Chapter 3. 

The more we reiterate accidents and statistics, even in the negative formats of x hours worked without. .., the more we support the understanding that this is inevitably a dangerous industry, and one in which accidents are just a familiar characteristic of the construction site environment. We could instead do worse than recognise the roots of occupational accidents as a direct result of our work process and practices, rather than inevitable consequences, and therefore start to challenge the way we do things from new perspectives. That we so readily talk about accidents and not safety also helps us understand safety a little better - it is paradoxical, much more easily identified and understood by its absence than its presence, and accidents are the ultimate manifestation of unsafety in practice. 

However, such approaches may simply be misdirecting our efforts towards the allocation of blame and the production of reams of near-miss paperwork, rather than taking a closer look at how we structure and manage our work contractually - to look beyond over-simplistic causal chains and instead focus more closely on the bigger picture - the construction site contexts of Chapter 2. We need to ensure that the hidden influences of time and money, the manifestation of Dekker s (2006) latent defects in our construction industry systems of work, are put in their correct place within the cause and effect chains, and in the way we think about safety. We need to shift our understandings away from the sharp end at the site level, and move them up into the board-rooms where decisions to take a slice off the tender price or a month or two off the programme can result in pressures for speed and productivity that creates an unhealthy context for work on sites. The way this thinking manifests in site practice, examined from the perspectives of the workers themselves, is explored in much more detail in Chapter 6. 

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. 

It is not hard to find this legislative lexicon of safety - the legalese -on construction sites, often within safety documentation and induction materials. The safe systems of work and working environment found in Clauses 2(a) and 2(d) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, respectively can be easily found throughout our safety documentation. They are often either associated with general management practices or focused on specific work tasks such as falls/ fall prevention or excavations, where guidance often makes explicit reference to a safe system of work. ... 

It is therefore unsurprising that away from the formal manifestations of legal requirements in safety management systems and documents, safety becomes much more fluid and flexible. When those who work on sites everyday try to adopt the polarised lexicon of safety with their own understandings of construction site life, it doesn t quite work. Evidence of this can be readily found in site-produced safety documentation (as opposed to formal corporate documents distributed by contractor head offices), such as induction slides, where the site team often try to reposition safe/ unsafe within a wider context examples of practice are given as they were in the earliest legislation, the acknowledgement of variation... 

The segregated entity of safety has no place within practice, and for this operative it even has the power to stop production. Safety has become the practice of just safety itself, and is firmly and clearly positioned as a hindrance to his work. The workforce is on site to work - and to work efficiently - not to work under the restrictions that safety can place on construction tasks, be they work methods designed to reduce risks, PPE to protect, or planning measures that require preparation in the form of records, discussions and signatures. This reveals one of the fundamental shared understandings of the construction industry itself, as suggested by the considerations of the site context made in Chapter 2, that of the fundamental truths of construction site context is quite simply that production is king. 

The distinctions between these two voices create a dissonance in the way the enforcement of safety works. Whilst those at the higher corporate level seek to develop and position safety only positively, through no-blame cultures and realities intolerant of violation to the point of denial, those who manage and participate in construction site practices on a daily basis at site level instead have a version of safety firmly positioned within a reality of rules, violations, enforcements and punishments. Yet this latter approach also has the potential to create an understanding, or rather misunderstanding, that safety is the rules, rather than any wider considerations of safety and practice. In fact, when the safety rules are explored in more detail, their associations with safety become rather irrelevant and the enforcement of safety is much more bound up in issues of discipline and punishment on a societal level, rather than the potential consequences of any safety violations themselves. 

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. 

The corporate iconography of Brand Zero does not simply cascade down onto the construction sites of the UK unchanged and unchallenged the world does not work like that. In fact, significant variation can be found when Brand Zero is actually talked about on site shared understandings shifting within the hierarchical positions in terms of their relationships with safety and practice. 

It is perhaps reassuring to boldly state and accept that safety culture can t be measured, and more fundamentally neither can safety itself. This relieves us of the need to develop ever more complex measures of safety, more convoluted forms and inspection sheets, more detailed policies and procedures, and the bureaucracy that often sits alongside such paper-based approaches that reflect normative concepts of safety culture that don t really work in practice. Instead, this version of safety culture enables us to better prioritise the individual and social aspects that are inherently involved. How people understand safety is important how it is developed, associated and shared by those interacting in the work environment, what they consider significant in their actions and interactions. But we must remain mindful of the fact that this is not something that can be measured either. It is people that contribute and ultimately create the changeable and complicated version of safety culture in practice found on our construction sites. 

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