Page 34 - Occupational Health & Safety, January/February 2019

CONSTRUCTION SAFETY
The State of Contractor Safety
BY PAT CUNNINGHAM
With each new year, companies across all industries regularly set new goals for improvement and growth. These goals often include increased sales, site expansion, and offering new or improved products and services. However, plans for mitigating associated safety risks of new ventures or processes are an often overlooked aspect in key performance indicators.
These annual goals often include the utilization of contract labor and may add to the complexity of achieving safety goals. Hiring contractors brings spe- cialized skill sets that may not exist in house and pro- vides a flexible staffing model, but doing so also may present new risks.
As host employers rely on contractors to fill la- bors voids, the issue of assessing contractor health and safety performance, as well as potential risks they bring to a work site, is a growing interest among host employers.
The aim of this article is to look at the history, pres- ent state, and future potential state of contractor man- agement within the United States.
Looking Back
In the 1980s and prior, the approach of many host em- ployers throughout the United States was to operate with contractors at “an arm’s length away.” This meant that if contractors were not impacting the safety of host employees, contractors were left to police their own safety. The first noticeable change to this think- ing came with OSHA’s 1999 “Multi-Employer Policy,”1 which outlined that, at multi-employer work sites, more than one employer could be citable for regula- tory violations. The OSHA policy was a wake-up call to host employers that the practice of “an arm’s length away” was no longer viable.
Born from the need to screen contractors, many host employers worked to establish written programs
28 Occupational Health & Safety | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019
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