[crhulls]

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)

[pandaman]

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.

[logicalexplan4]

Cycling without a helmet may not be statistically safer. See for example "The Ultimate Question: With or Without a Helmet?"

[pandaman]

>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.

[logicalexplan4]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

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.

[crhulls]

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

[s1artibartfast]

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.

[dboreham]

The people with money become liable.

[s1artibartfast]

Thats not a very useful heuristic. There are numerous relationships that effectively shield liability, and many of these make perfect sense.

[jeromegv]

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.

[crhulls]

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.

[newaccount74]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

I think the interesting part of the comparison was the following two sentences.

[newaccount74]

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.

These two things are nothing alike.

[istjohn]

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.

[solveit]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

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.

[ryandrake]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

What does OSHA do in this situation? The roofing worker was fired for safety violation but can find work elsewhere.

In this example it isnt about the company.

[ryandrake]

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?"

[garciansmith]

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.

[crhulls]

Yes I fired the specific worker. It was my own crew, not a 3rd party company.