The new safety plan for building sites announced yesterday is an important and overdue step towards reducing deaths and injuries in the construction industry. The remarkable boom in this sector in recent years has been accompanied by an unacceptable rise in the number of serious accidents. Last year 18 workers died and about 2,300 were injured; in 1998, 22 workers lost their lives. The accident rate is close to twice that for the State's workforce as a whole.
The growing anger at the failure of some firms and sub-contractors to observe statutory safety rules found expression last September in a workers' march to the Dublin headquarters of the Construction Industry Federation. In return, some employers' spokesmen have accused workers of neglecting their own welfare and claimed that unions would not support employers attempting to discipline workers who ignored safety rules. In addition, workers' representatives have blamed the Government and its various agencies for failing to enforce regulations and penalise rogue employers.
Given this background of acrimony, it is heartening that the new Construction Safety Plan is a partnership between the CIF, the trade unions and the Health and Safety Authority. As Mr Tom Kitt, Minister for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairs, said yesterday: "Safe working practices are not, and cannot be, owned by the State or solely by an individual employer; they must be jointly owned by the employer and the workforce."
Key elements of the plan include the compulsory appointment of a workers' safety representative on all sites with more than 20 workers; basic one-day safety training for all construction workers; and a doubling of the rate of HSA site inspections by the end of this year. There will also be training courses for site managers and supervisors and mandatory skills certification for high-risk workers such as crane and machine operators, scaffolders and roofers. Already, union activists have expressed concern that thousands of casual workers, many of them recruited abroad through agencies which are not members of the CIF, may not be fully covered by the plan. In some cases, the task of ensuring that workers understand and follow safe practices may be compounded by language difficulties. The size and seriousness of this loophole - and perhaps others - will become apparent in the coming months.
It is important also that the current review of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act (1989) results in bigger fines and penalties for those who flout safety laws. The most recent report from the HSA - covering occupational accidents of all kinds - showed that the total fines imposed for 49 convictions came to only £45,675, or £952 per case. Given the level of profits in the building industry, and the temptation to cut corners, such penalties are hardly a deterrent. There have, however, been welcome signs recently of a change of attitude among both prosecuting authorities and the judiciary. For now, satisfaction at the delivery of a concerted plan must be coupled with a determination to see it put into action. The boom in construction is set to continue, but, in the words of Mr Kitt, "it cannot happen at the cost of the lives or health of those who work in the sector."