Safety saves in many ways

Safety saves in many ways

by Clair Urbain

With June being National Safety Awareness Month and one of the busiest months for construction activity, it’s important we all stop and think about ways we can do our jobs more safely.

The phrase “Safety Saves . . .” has become so overused, it’s become a cliché. But it is so true . . . safety DOES save.

Be selfish for a minute. Safe work habits benefit you the most because if you do something unsafe and get hurt, it affects you the most. The worker who doesn’t use the fall protection harness and tumbles off the edge of a project bears the greatest burden of the incident. That’s why safe work practices must become a part of everyone’s everyday thinking and working.

Safe work habits also benefit your fellow workers. Most of the time, we truly enjoy working with others on the jobsite and it’s a good bet your fellow workers enjoy working with you. An unsafe action can lead to injuries or can even kill fellow workers. No one wants that hanging on their conscience. And believe it or not, if you hurt or killed yourself on the job, you’d leave behind some very sad associates.

Safe work habits also help your employer. Whether you are self-employed or work for a contractor, a good safety rating and record affect insurance rates and can mean the difference between getting more jobs or losing money on the ones underway. Even in the competitive world of construction, the money saved by shortcutting safety will cost dearly in a multitude of ways.

Safe work habits help our industry. It’s no secret that the construction workforce is getting older and we need to find young, able-bodied and hard-working people to fill the ranks. The riskier the job, the smaller the pool of prospects there will be from which to choose. The safer we become, the more attractive the world of construction will be to the labor force.

Safe work habits help our country’s economy. Companies have been moving jobs to other countries for a variety of reasons, and managing the costs of injuries and fatalities is definitely one of them. Managing those costs becomes a moot point if they don’t happen in the first place. Again, it comes back to each and every person’s responsibility to work safely.

Over the years, this magazine has developed many articles that can help promote safety and has developed them in ways that makes them easy to be used in safety training. Although the majority of readers claim they keep past issues for future reference, we’ve made it easier to locate them by archiving them by subject matter on our Web site, www.ContractorToolsAndSupplies.com. Go there to get helpful information as well as links to manufacturers plus other sources of information on safety.

Published in the May/June 2003 issue of Contractor Tools and Supplies magazine.