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Austin Report Probes Construction Hazards

July 11, 2009 7:00 AM

 

ABC News On Campus reporter Xorje Olivares blogs:

A month after a scaffolding accident claimed the lives of three immigrant workers, construction continues at a high-rise student apartment complex near the University of Texas at Austin.

After the June 10 deaths, the Austin-based organization Workers Defense Project released a report detailing the dangerous working conditions facing those in the Austin construction industry. The group, which promotes fair-working conditions for low-wage employees, spent nearly two years surveying 312 workers and conducting extensive research with the help of university faculty.

According to the report, titled “Building Austin, Building Injustice,” more than 50,000 Austin residents work in construction. Using data from the American Community Survey from 2006, the project found that an overwhelming majority of these workers are foreign-born Hispanic males, with non-Hispanic whites coming in a distant second.

While the number of workers continues to increase, the number of work-related fatalities has declined steadily over the past decade, yet still remains high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nearly 5,700 workers nationwide died on the job in 2007, with 528 coming from Texas, making it the state with the largest number of work-related fatalities in the country.

The construction industry, in particular, had the highest number of deaths for any industry in Texas, accounting for 142 fatalities, leading the Workers Defense Project to estimate that a construction worker dies every two-and-a-half days. Preliminary data for 2008 is expected to be released this August. 

 “It is not fair to make [workers] go to a job where their life is on the line,” said Lauren Cox, the research coordinator for the project. “This is not just work for them anymore, it’s a matter of life and death, and to ask a person to go to a job when the safety guidelines are not being considered is really inhumane, in our opinion.”

The report found that 15 percent of construction workers personally knew someone who had died on the job. Also, one in five workers surveyed said they suffered a work-related injury that required medical attention. However, almost half of them reported not being eligible for worker’s compensation insurance, which Texas employers are not required by law to provide. More than 200 workers said that they were in need of safety equipment, including goggles, hard hats, gloves, and breathing masks, with some of them having to provide their own.

Family members of one of the workers killed in last month's accident, for instance, are suing the project contractor, Greater Metroplex Interior, accusing the company of negligence for failing to provide adequate safety equipment. Neither the family nor Greater Metroplex would comment on the case, citing the pending litigation.

“Safety should be first,” said Phil Thoden, the President of the Austin Chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America, which provides business services to more than 400 commercial contractors in the area.  “Our goal should be no fatalities—it’s as simple as that.”

AGC offers bilingual classes throughout the year for general contractors and workers, many of which are geared to raising safety awareness and understanding. Although several companies do have on-the-job safety training, AGC provides classes that use federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards, and applies them to real-life situations. One such class lasts up to ten hours.

“I always tell my classes that everything that OSHA has in the construction standards was paid for in blood,” said Larry Connelly, AGC’s safety director. “We use history to find out what went wrong.”

Yet, Connelly acknowledges that much may be lost from the classroom to the jobsite. Workers Defense Project found that 64 percent of construction workers had received no OSHA health and safety training. Some of them even told the group that they had never heard of a federal agency that investigated safety violations. One worker recounted being sent home when OSHA investigators came to his jobsite to see if they were in compliance, only to return the next day with still no safety equipment.

OSHA announced last week that it would increase the number of safety inspectors on construction worksites in Texas through next month, something that the Workers Defense Project lauded as a step in the right direction. The United Nation’s International Labor Organization recommends that 1,023 OSHA inspectors are needed to adequately investigate the number of Texas workers. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, says that in 2008, the state operated with only 77 inspectors to cover more than 10 million workers.

“I think that it is something that is important,” Cox said. “That [people] know that their city is built on a foundation for good workers, and not a foundation of poor-working conditions.”

July 11, 2009 in safety | Permalink | Share | User Comments (0)

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