Construction Industry Safety and Health

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During the demolition of a building, a complaint was lodged with UK Health and Safety Executive inspectors, who visited the site and found a worker stripping slates from a fragile roof without any safety measures in place to prevent a fall, or mitigate any potential life-threatening effects as a result of such a fall.

A crew foreman – the person responsible for safety at his job site – died as a result of exposure to toxic fumes, an accident that was investigated by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Division of Safety Research (DSR), through its Fatal Accident Circumstances and Epidemiology (FACE) Project.

OSHA’s new regulation regarding confined spaces in the construction industry goes into effect August 1, and construction companies and contractors are getting ready for it.

Fall protection on residential construction sites has long been the subject of controversy, according to Pete Stafford, Executive Director of the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR).

The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently renewed their alliance, signing a five-year agreement that will focus on construction safety, temporary workers and hazards within general industry.

by Secretary Tom Perez- I am a big believer in basic fairness: if you play by the rules, you should have the opportunity to succeed. That’s true in life and also in business. The vast majority of employers understand this principle and abide by it every day with measurable success. But I think we can all agree that those businesses that break the law by cutting corners at the expense of their workers should not benefit from taxpayer-funded federal contracts.

The Obama administration’s move to crack down on federal contractors who violate labor laws and to ensure that employees of contractors retain their access to court for certain disputes has won approval from Public Citizen, a nonpartisan public advocacy group.

One fatality is too many, but there’s good news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the U.S. workplace fatality rate set a record low in 2013, dropping to 3.3 deaths for every 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.

Nine contractors at the Oasis Park Square residential development in Doral, Florida learned a hard lesson when OSHA inspectors visited the work site in November 2014.