Health and safety costs of workers in construction tenders

The Labour Ministry is formulating new tender procedures and regulations to include worker-safety costs into construction costs that could impact on the planned increased pace of infrastructure development.

Sri Lanka’s construction industry is tipped to boom with a number of large government investment projects lined up, on top of ongoing tsunami reconstruction activity. The industry is also able to provide large employment opportunities in both rural and urban areas. The construction sector is already one of the country’s largest employers providing work for around 300,000 people.

However, the construction industry is also noted for its ‘killing’ work conditions. The poor health and safety practices also contribute towards making even skilled employments look like low status jobs, despite the good income earning potential.

“Around 20% of fatal accidents reported to the Department of Labour are from the construction industry. However, as a majority of cases are not reported to the Department of Labour, we believe that the incidents of fatal accidents should be much higher. Besides, a large number of persons also suffer from occupational injuries and other hazards,” said the Minister of Labour Athauda Seneviratne, at a national construction seminar organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recently. Last year for instance, the Labour Department was only notified of 52 work related deaths from among all the industries in Sri Lanka. Out of these 52 persons that died due to accidents at work, 18 were involved in construction activity.

The Labour Department says these deaths and injuries could have been avoided. For instance, out of the 18 persons that died while working in building activities, nine deaths were due to falling from heights. The Labour Department says such death dealing accidents are easily avoidable if proper safety procedures are practiced.

Small price for life
To uplift the industry standards and its image, the government is now trying to increase the safety standards in construction activities through new regulations. Under the proposed new regulations the costs of providing adequate health and safety for construction workers will be built into tender prices. Including safety costs will be mandatory for all government construction projects.

“We will include this as a condition when the government offers tenders. At the moment contractors quote their price for a project without including the cost of health and safety. The tender documents that are used are from ICTAD (Institute for Construction Training and Development). So we have now asked ICTAD to include safety costs in the tender documents. This way the contractors can assess the cost of providing safety standards and claim that cost. This will apply to private sector building projects as well,” explained the Commissioner of Labour D. S. Edirisinghe.

To push safety standards, the government says it will favour companies with good track records of worker safety, when it awards contracts in future.

“It is also expected to consider past performance of safety of contract companies when awarding major government tenders,” said Minister Seneviratne. “Potential clients and investors do take into account the good safety track record of a company before committing their business to the company. I therefore urge all of you to place greater emphasis on construction safety,” he said.

The safety regulations will also extend to sub-contracting agreements. This is because although Sri Lanka has around 2,400 registered construction companies around 100 large scale, specialised operators, a majority of the construction workforce is informal. Only 20% of the workforce belongs to the permanent employee cadre of construction companies with most working under labour contractors.

The new health and safety regulations will also include standards and procedures on setting up scaffoldings, trenches, lifting equipment, temporary wiring and personal protective equipment. Construction workers are exposed to hazardous substances, heavy manual work and high levels of dust noise and vibration. Many construction workers develop back pains and muscle injuries from lifting heavy loads and many are under constant stress, due to fear of falling from heights.

However, at this point the construction safety regulations are still in the formulation stage. Therefore, until the regulations are ready, the Labour Department says it will start paying inspection visits to construction sites to check on safety standards.