No fooling, five hundred workers get hurt every day on construction job sites--one every two minutes--and, once about every two hours, a construction worker dies on the job.
Construction job sites accounted for almost 200,000 non-fatal occupational injuries among workers in 2016, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published late last year. That's No. 6 on the 2016 BLS list ranking of occupational injuries and illnesses by industry sector.
As the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration notes as well, 5,190 workers were killed on the job in 2016. That averages out to more than 99 a week or more than 14 deaths every day on top of the more than 500 non-fatal injuries a day mentioned above.
At the same time, in this era of labor challenges, shortages, expense volatility, and capacity constraint, that we'd allow the number of injuries and the number of deaths--631 of which trace to falls, struck by objects, electrocutions, and caught in between--to be so high is source of much dismay.
As bad weather begins to give way to better Spring climes, and the need to make up for lost days in the starts-to-completion cycle of projects where there's a swelling backlog of orders, it's all the more important, not only to be more mindful of the health and safety of the people working on our job sites that we have, but to put that mindfulness into practice in all the big and little ways, such as the #safety365 training program the National Association of Home Builders calls out.
NAHB and the Job-Site Safety Institute (JSI) will kick off their first fall prevention training of the year in Raleigh, N.C. at the HBA of Raleigh-Wake County on April 3 at 8:30 a.m.
You can have one at your HBA, too: Both NAHB and JSI would like to invite your association to participate and play host for your builder members, trade contractors, supervisors and workers to attend a free four-hour Fall Prevention in Residential Construction Training.
The operative term here? Free. It doesn't cost you anything to have you and fellow builders in a market participate in this training.
The same can not be said for insurance, which is another matter altogether, and one that--especially in light of initiatives and programs aimed at attracting young people into construction fields as a career--could be considered an opportunity area for commitment, investment, and potentially high returns.
Here's digital career and jobs web site Zippia analysis, originating from Census American Community Survey data, showing the U.S. occupations with the highest levels of uninsured people at workplaces across America.
Construction trades people, as you might have expected, are woefully over-represented in this ranking.
Here's Marketwatch correspondent Jacob Passy's commentary on the matter, which will resonate among supervisors and managers of construction projects:
Part of the problem facing workers in these industries is that many of them are contract workers, meaning work on a shorter-term basis. The construction and extraction industries accounted for 48% of contract workers who were fatally injured on the job, while the installation and repair field accounted for 16% of these individuals.
Other studies have shown that temp workers are at a higher risk of being seriously injured or killed on the job. Part of the problem: These workers don’t necessarily have as much on-the-job experience. Nearly a third of the nonfatal occupational injuries that occur happen within the first year on the job.
This, of course, points up the critical importance of programs such as the NAHB #Safety365 and refreshed tactics and strategies for job site training among workers populating Spring season subdivision and new community projects.
And it gets at the opportunity area home builders as organizations have in a truly effective way to bring more people--qualified people--into the construction trades: safety, health, pride in quality work, decent pay, and worker benefits--even for a workforce regarded as flexible or intermediate employees.
That could transform the conversation around labor shortages and capacity constraints dramatically.
