Health and Safety Management Practices of Small and Medium-Sized Construction Businesses

摘要

Health and safety continues to be one of the central construction issues for government and project participants in the UK due to the unacceptably high level of work-related illnesses and accidents on construction sites. This is also a challenge throughout the world where very small companies dominate construction. Workers in the UK construction industry are six times more likely to be killed than employees of other industries, the incidence of fatal injuries far exceeds the all industry average, yearly 2.8 million work days are lost due to work related illnesses. Eighty per cent of the workload of principal contractors is subcontracted to small contractors who in turn subcontract some of their work to even smaller contractors - subcontracting may continue up to a fourth level. Many construction SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) obtain work as subcontractors and therefore contribute to the disturbing accident statistics of the construction industry. Research on health and safety has demonstrated that the number of serious accidents and illnesses in SMEs are more than those in large businesses and this has serious implications on the operations of SMEs. Additionally, SMEs are constrained by lack of resources and this may make the management of health and safety more challenging. These issues, coupled with the drive to reduce the numbers of accidents and illnesses in construction, underscore the need to develop a strategic approach to the management of health and safety in SMEs. This paper is based on a series of case studies of health and safety award-winning and non-award-winning construction SMEs in the UK. The paper finds that the award-winning SMEs differ from non-award winning ones by the amount of resources available for the effective management of health and safety and their approach to the management of health and safety; namely external networking, involvement of personnel at all levels of the organisation and a strong training culture.