Rush is on to make building sites safer

By Alexandra Berzon

Friday, June 13, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The union walkout last week to protest unsafe working conditions at the CityCenter and Cosmopolitan construction sites began to pay off this week as labor safety experts and federal OSHA inspectors started to descend on Las Vegas.

Their mission is to find ways to improve safety and end a string of fatalities that top federal workplace safety chief Ed Foulke said has gone on too long, according to union representatives who met privately with him in Las Vegas this week. Foulke, director of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was in Las Vegas for a safety professionals conference.

Eleven construction workers have died in the past year and a half on the Strip. Eight of those were at CityCenter and the Cosmopolitan, projects that are adjacent and have the same general contractor, Perini Building Co.

Perini has agreed to allow the union safety experts, from an arm of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department full access to the site. That agreement was part of a deal negotiated with the Southern Nevada Building and Construction Trades Council to end last week’s walkout.

As another outcome, the safety experts from the Center for Construction Research and Training will coordinate 10 hours of safety training during work hours for about 4,000 workers at CityCenter and the Cosmopolitan.

Unclear at the moment is whether the unprecedented attention to Strip construction practices can yield changes rapidly enough to have an effect on the projects, which are scheduled for completion in late 2009. The building trades safety team will try to move quickly enough to recommend changes at CityCenter and the Cosmopolitan, said Pete Stafford, director of the safety center.

The safety experts said their assessment could also be of value for future projects in the same mold as the multitowered CityCenter, which, at a cost of $9.2 billion, is unprecedented in the United States.

MGM Mirage, owner of CityCenter, is developing a similarly monumental project in Atlantic City known informally as CityCenter East.

Stafford plans to send a team from the trades council’s safety center to Las Vegas next week to begin the assessment of root causes of problems at CityCenter and the Cosmopolitan. The safety center is associated with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, a federal government research arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We can step back and look at what’s happened and what are the lessons learned, and try to mitigate,” said Stafford, who was in town this week to meet with Perini.

Among other activities, the safety center will most likely analyze injuries to look for patterns and recommend specific actions that could prevent those kinds of accidents, said Jim Platner, an associate director at the safety center. They also may look at safety culture and management systems and make recommendations there as well.

The idea is to ensure there’s concrete scientific evidence behind the recommendations, Platner said.

The reports will be given to the local building trades unions and to Perini. But what happens next is out of the safety center’s hands.

“Ideally, Perini will actually respond to the recommendations, but realistically they’re not going to agree in advance to respond to recommendations they haven’t seen yet,” Platner said.

Stafford said that in his initial meeting with Perini on Wednesday, the company indicated it was open to the safety center’s recommendations.

“They said anything we could do and find that would help them, they were very up for that,” Stafford said.

Ultimately it will be up to the local building trades unions to ensure Perini carries out recommendations. Unions will intervene if they need to, said Steve Redlinger, a building trades spokesman.

“We view this as a starting point,” Redlinger said. “There may be things in this assessment that are uncovered. If they make recommendations we will act on them, and if we need to have another negotiation we will sit down with Perini about additional safety. We are interested in protecting workers as much as we possibly can.”

The first concrete action will be to provide the 10 hours of OSHA-certified safety training for all CityCenter workers who have not already had it.

Some local unions, including the laborers, have already begun requiring that all workers in Las Vegas show proof they have received the training.

Carrying out the training requirement has also been a priority for Steve Ross, Southern Nevada Building Trades secretary-treasurer and Las Vegas City Council member.

“If the contractor is doing its part, it still comes down to the worker,” Ross told the Sun several weeks ago. “I believe workers will be more likely to be familiar with the job site, with the challenges, from going through that class, and they’ll be more likely to wear personally protective equipment.”

Ross plans to push for a state law next year that would require OSHA 10 training for all construction workers in the state. A few states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island, require such training for all workers on public construction projects, Platner said.

Safety experts view OSHA 10 training, which covers general work site issues, including fall protection, electrical hazards, and trenches, as valuable in curtailing injuries and fatalities. Research on the effect of safety training in construction is still preliminary, but at least one published study, conducted in 2004 by a researcher for the safety center, has shown that training can reduce workers’ compensation claims for injuries.

Safety training can not only tell workers how to better protect themselves but should also make it more likely they’ll speak up to management to air concerns, safety experts say.

But they insist that it’s only one piece of the puzzle. More important, they say, is commitment from management to safety as the top priority on a project.

“A whole consistent system that values safety is better, but any kind of training is better than no training,” said Rosemary Sokas, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Sokas has written extensively on training and has studied the safety center’s training programs.

“You want to make sure every single person on a construction site has basic information, the very obvious stuff that everybody should know about,” Sokas said. “But it’s also really important to have the commitment from management made very evident, so it’s not just lip service, so they’re not just saying in the classes that safety is important, but then saying, ‘We have to get this done today.’ ”