Episode 1: Why does construction safety vary depending on where you live? | The Walkthrough

Speaker A: Just before one in the morning on 14 June 2017, a fire started and a fridge freezer on the fourth floor of west London's Grenfell Tower. It burned for 60 hours. 72 people died. It was the deadliest residential fire in the United Kingdom since the Second World War. The fire spread the way it did because the building had been clad in materials that the regulatory system was supposed to have caught and didn't. In the months that followed, the UK government commissioned the Hackett review, led by Dame Judith Hackett and a senior engineer and former chair of Health and Safety Executive. Her report described the entire UK building regulatory system as not fit for purpose, identifying what she called a race to the bottom in which companies competed to do the work as cheaply as possible. Construction is one of the most dangerous industries in the world. That part is true everywhere. Workers fall from heights, get struck by objects, get caught in machinery, get electrocuted. In the us, OSHA calls these the fatal four what changes and changes a lot is how often any of those things are fatal, depending on where the worker happens to be standing. In the United States, the on the job fatality rate is approximately 9.2 deaths per 100,000 workers, or roughly one death every eight and a half hours. In the United Kingdom, the equivalent rate is about 1.65. Same types of work, same kinds of buildings, same materials, but a near six fold difference in whether the worker survives the year. In Australia, the rate is closer to 2.8. Now, these numbers are not perfectly like for like every country measures, reports and regulates work differently. Workforce mix matters, union density matters. Subcontracting models matter, Enforcement budgets matter. So does training, project type, immigration status, procurement pressure and safety culture. But that's exactly the point the work itself cannot fully explain the gap. Falls happen everywhere. Electrocutions happen everywhere. Heavy materials, machinery, cranes and deadlines exist everywhere. What changes is the system around the work? Who's accountable, what gets enforced, what gets documented, what gets rewarded and what gets ignored. After Grenfell, the UK government asked Dame Judith Hackett to study what allowed a flag flawed building like that to exist. Her conclusion was not that one person had failed, the whole system had. She described a culture where too many companies were encouraged to do things as cheaply as possible, work around the rules and treat compliance as a box checking exercise rather than a responsibility. Her review made 53 recommendations. Many of them helped shape the Building Safety Act 2022. The act did three structural things. First, it created a single building safety regulator inside the Health and Safety Executive with oversight of higher risk Buildings from design through occupation. One regulator, one clear source of accountability. Two it pushed accountability upstream. The people who design a building, specify materials, own the asset, or make decisions about cost and scope now carry stronger legal duties for safety. Responsibility does not begin when the work begins. It begins when the decisions get made. 3 It established a golden thread, a continuous record of safety information that follows a building from design through refurbishment, through ownership changes, through the life of the asset. The idea is simple. Safety critical information cannot disappear. The next person making a decision about that building has to be able to find what the last person knew. And today, the UK's construction fatality rate remains among the lowest of major industrialized economies. This suggests safety is not just a hard hat issue. And now another part of the safety story is moving to the center of the mental health in the United States, data places the construction worker suicide rate at more than 40 deaths per 100,000 workers. The on the job fatality rate, by comparison, is under 10. That means construction workers are dying by suicide at a rate that's multiple times higher than they're dying from traditional site hazards. For years, the industry talked about this as a wellness issue, a stigma issue, an HR issue. Important, yes, but separate from safety, that line is starting to disappear. Australia has become one of the clearest examples. Beginning in 2023, Australia's model code of practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work helped formalize a shift already underway. Psychosocial and social risks are workplace safety risks, not just culture problems, not just personal problems, not just something to address with a poster in the break room. Workplaces are expected to identify and manage hazards like fatigue, isolation, traumatic exposure, bullying, job insecurity, poor support, and excessive job demands. And they are expected to manage them in the same basic safety logic applied to physical hazards. Identify the risk, assess the risk, control the risk, and review whether the controls are working. The United Kingdom and parts of Europe are moving in a similar direction with stronger attention to psychosocial risk under workplace health and safety frameworks.

Speaker B: And this idea that it is human error full stop is ridiculous. And a lot of research shows that actually human error is not the issue. The issue is the systematic. And that's why I talk around systematic inclusion all the time. Because if we think about those workers who English isn't their first language or, you know, the prevalence of neurodivergent individuals within the construction industry is like one in four. So actually the way we communicate needs to be more accessible, more inclusive. Otherwise what we're doing is creating the system that means the errors occur. It is not human error. It is the system that needs to be that is broken.

Speaker A: It is also about whether the work itself is organized in a way that burns people out, isolates them, exposes them to trauma, or makes it impossible to ask for help. With skilled labor so short, workers are now in a position of power. Increasingly, they move toward projects where the opportunities, pay and protections are favorable. Um, safety is becoming a part of the value proposition. So is whether the contractor in charge treats workers as disposable labor or as skilled people worth protecting? Insurance markets are paying attention. Protection procurement teams are paying attention. Owners funding the largest capital projects in the world are beginning to ask whether the contractors they hire can demonstrate safety systems that meet not only local minimums, but global expectations. In some countries, accountability is moving upstream. In some countries, building safety information has to follow the asset for its entire life. In some countries, psychosocial hazards are being treated as part of the workplace safety law. In others, much of that still depends on the employer, on the owner, on the contract, on the project, on whether someone chooses to go beyond compliance. And in a global labor market, that gap is no longer theoretical. It's becoming part of how construction competes. Uh, the United Kingdom changed its rules because 72 people died. Australia is changing its rules now because the workforce told its government that the harms it could not see were doing as much damage as the harms it could. Construction has always been one of the most dangerous industries in the world. That part has never been the variable. What is the variable is whether the country a worker is standing in has decided that this work and the people who do it are worth protecting.