Construction industry told to improve safety: 'Put people ahead of price'

The construction industry is being called out for not doing enough to prevent deaths and injuries on the job.

Last Friday five men were badly hurt in a gas explosion at an Auckland building site, and are still being treated in the burns unit at Middlemore Hospital. Earlier this week another man died after an accident on a work site in Mt Eden.

Now WorkSafe, the Council of Trade Unions and an industry health and safety group have put out a joint appeal for companies to do better.

WorkSafe chief executive Phil Parkes said they are fed up with prosecuting safety offenders and not seeing lasting change.

WorkSafe has made 113 prosecutions in the last four years and served thousands of improvement notices, he said.

"The statistics are largely flat. We've seen minor improvements in the construction industry but nowhere near what we would expect.

"There needs to be a significant change in the way the construction industry looks after its people. We've seen the same practice over and over again, and too many people are dying through a lack of care."

The new strategy at WorkSafe involves casting the net far wider within the industry.

"What we're saying is everybody who has influence and control over how construction work is done needs to change the way they do their business."

Instead of relying mainly on site visits, Parkes said that safety groups must change their approach to dealing with the entire chain.

"In practice it means instead of just going to construction sites and dealing with the workers and their supervisors who are actually suffering the harm, we're saying that everybody from the subcontractor, the main contractor, all the way up to the client that commissions the building or the piece of infrastructure that's being built, needs to put people ahead of price.

"What we see time and time again is people further up the supply chain wanting their project done cheap and when they want their product done cheap, that means corners get cut.

"Every time we see this we see risk exported down the supply chain and we see vulnerable workers being harmed or killed at work."

Parkes admits that costs in the industry are rising to record highs due to the pandemic, inflation war in Ukraine and other issues, but worker safety must remain paramount.

"There's huge pressure all the way across the construction industry. I'm not saying it's easy.

"But if people are willing to put price saving or making a profit ahead of caring for people, that's a breach of the law, it's as simple as that."

Parkes said all construction companies are not the same but it's important to raise standards across the board.

"As with all industries there are some really good companies out there.

"There are lots of companies in the middle who want to do a good thing but they just are driven by profit-seeking or driven by cost pressures to cut corners, and then of course there are those handful of companies that just don't care, that exploit their workers and do it knowingly and deliberately."

"We want to influence all of those companies to do better."

Construction Health and Safety also joined with Worksafe and the Council of Trade Unions to appeal for companies to do better.

Its chief executive Chris Alderson said the current situation is dire.

"We're not only killing too many people, but we're also ACC's worst industry from the claims perspective and we actually have one suicide a week in construction as well."

"I think if you look at New Zealand compared to some other countries there's lessons there as well.

Alderson said a level playing field is needed with enforcement of safety standards.

"We hear from a lot of small businesses - which construction's mainly made up from - that the guys doing well out there, which is many of them, get very frustrated when they see people down the road not investing in health and safety to the same level they are."

That is where a regulator plays a strong role, he said, as well as training new workers.

"We've got a construction work force that's going to take us into the future, we need that to be a really good construction work force and we need to invest in them."

The main thing is getting safety records up, he said.

"On average there's around about seven to 10 fatalities a year within construction, so obviously every single one of those is too many.

"But unfortunately though, construction's an industry with fairly low barriers to entry, so you and I could probably start a construction company tomorrow."

Alderson said the focus has to shift from getting the job done as cheaply or as fast as possible.

"Health and safety is just an outcome of good business, and good business is good for everybody."

However, the Amalgamated Workers Union said WorkSafe's push for bosses to do more to protect construction workers is just talk, without changes to bring in a corporate manslaughter charge.

The National Secretary for the Amalgamated Workers Union, Maurice Davis, said talk is cheap, and he has heard it all before.

He said if the government wants buy-in from boards and chief executives, it should introduce a charge of corporate manslaughter.

Davis said the current case against the former Ports of Auckland chief executive over a worker's death will be a good test of New Zealand's legislation.

The Amalgamated Workers Union is New Zealand's biggest construction union.

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