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A study says surveys of construction executives and employees on CityCenter and other high-rise resorts found different perceptions of safety levels. Twelve workers died in an 18-month period.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 | 2 a.m.
CityCenter construction workers stage a walkout outside of the entrance in June 2008. The walkout was to protest unsafe working conditions that had led to the deaths of several workers.
Twenty-five months after CityCenter construction workers walked off the job to protest workplace fatalities and safety conditions there, researchers have confirmed what the Sun reported at the time: Crowded work sites, accelerated deadlines and other problems had combined to create an unsafe workplace.
The study was based on surveys completed by thousands of construction workers, foremen, superintendents and executives who worked on the $8.5 billion megaresort that opened in December, and the adjacent Cosmopolitan.
The findings were released Friday by the National Safety Council and published in its Journal of Safety Research.
The analysis’ bottom line: Although superintendents and executives generally felt safety measures at the time were adequate, a lower percentage of workers felt that way.
The lesson for the construction industry is that workers’ concerns need to be better addressed, said the researchers, who are affiliated with the union-backed Center for Construction Research and Training, Colorado State University and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Construction of CityCenter, Trump International, Cosmopolitan, Fontainebleau and Palazzo was marred by the deaths of nine construction workers between the end of 2006 and March 2008, when the Las Vegas Sun began publishing a series of stories on the deaths that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the highest award in journalism.
In all, 12 workers would die over 18 months at the Strip job sites, also including Echelon.
Through June 2008, six workers died at City-Center and two at the Cosmopolitan.
The Sun, with stories by reporter Alexandra Berzon, editorials and other content, exposed the high death rate as well as lax enforcement of regulations and a cozy relationship between state regulators and the construction industry. The Sun coverage has been credited with improving safety conditions by, among other things, bringing greater federal oversight to Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The safety council, which credited the Sun for bringing attention to the issue, said the survey identified several issues at CityCenter in 2008, including the top three:
• “A lack of management action,” referred to by 27.8 percent of those surveyed and referring to a lack of appropriate monitoring, enforcement, or action regarding safety and an emphasis on productivity — the tight work schedule and crowded working conditions — over safety on the part of management.
• The “presence of health hazards,” which covers a variety of health-related issues such as toxic dust, lack of ventilation, issues with the heat, a lack of access to water and reasonably clean restroom facilities. This was mentioned by 13.5 percent of the respondents.
• “Unsafe procedures,” mentioned by 10.2 percent of those surveyed, which primarily focused on actions by fellow employees.
“A substantial number of workers identified a variety of hazards, which could have potential aversive effects on their health,” the study said. “The large number of workers who specifically mentioned problems with ventilation, heat, lack of water, inadequate bathrooms and toxic dust in the air led us to conclude that these health concerns were a pervasive problem on these job sites and not simply the complaints of a few workers,” the study said. “Additionally, many workers mentioned that their work areas were overcrowded, which is consistent with the survey results indicating safety problems due to interferences between different trades on the same site.”
The study noted Hispanics nationwide are more likely than other ethnicities to die or be injured in construction accidents, and said language barriers at CityCenter and Cosmopolitan contributed to safety problems.
“Many workers mentioned the language barriers between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking workers. From reviewing these responses, it became clear to us that this was an issue of great tension and, at times, hostility among the workers, which has not been properly addressed at the job sites. This is also an important issue in the construction industry at large, where ethnic disparities in safety and health outcomes for construction workers have been observed and need to be addressed.”
Saying there are more than 1,000 construction fatalities annually in the United States, the National Safety Council said the CityCenter/Cosmopolitan study and related research show:
• General contractors need to demonstrate an organizational commitment to safety and “walk the talk.”
• Training on proactive management skills should be conducted for senior and midlevel managers, engaging them more in safety.
• Supervisors should be encouraged to display constructive attitudes, actions, expectations and communications about safety.
• Employees need to be empowered to become actively involved in safety.
Just another example why workers need unions for protection. It is not only for pay and benefits.
It is to protect their health and safety on the job.
That is why there is a Las Vegas Sun and an RJ. The RJ never would have written these articles protecting union workers and taking the union side.
Why Reid will provide workers protection and Angle will not.
The Unions should e-verify and test for english speaking abilities before allowing membership.
Why are just the deaths on the property mentioned? Why aren't the injured that died after they were takenoff the job mentioned? They may not be a statistic because a statistic dies on the job site, still they died from an injury recieved while working on a construction site.
A moment for all the brothers and sisters who've left us...
All this complaining, why didn't the workers just quit and move on? Plenty of other workers waiting in line for a job. That's how Boulder Dam got built. Safety should be built in to any construction project, and any contractor and sub contractor who is worth his beans will see to it that the conditions exist BEFORE he enters a job site.
OSHA ..... DID NOT DO A DAM THING ABOUT IT !!!
Environ how much are beans worth? I guess it was so-o-o easy to pick up work.
Not enough qualified safety men distributed through out all the jobsites.
The safety classes given to all workers was given in english, not all workers spoke english. Yes there were many problems. The amount of work that was going on in town at that time was the most ever being done at one time ever. The companies that recieved fines for safety violations, how many got away without having to pay fines?
Again, you have to speak english to be an American citizen.
The Unions control this obvious safety and, per the article, job site tension issue.
All the Unions have to do is verify their members are American citizens and more important their members ability to speak, read and write in english.
The Unions complain about job site safety yet add to the problem in Babylon.
What's the REAL story behind this article? Unions didn't cause or could have prevented these deaths.It's almost laughable to even think having a union would have prevented these deaths.Unions are good to make sure safety issues are kept up,workers are not being mistreated and things like that. So what is the real story behind these deaths ?
Its common sense,If your on a latter and it feels unsafe do you keep climbing it?
No you fix the problem.
Saftey is alway first.
Its not the Union or Osha fault its the person with no common sense.
Unions in the private sector still make sense.
Unions in the public sector are destroying the economy.
While working as a union Ironworker and detail foreman for one of the steel erection companies at City Center (May 2008 til Aug. 2009), I had some exposure to most of the health/safety issues mentioned in the article.
And I dealt with the general contractor's safety people almost daily.
In my opinion, getting the job done (and paid for) was the most important thing to the general contractor...the workers' health/safety seemed to be rather an annoyance that had to be dealt with. Those safety people often contradicted each other and spent far more time on paperwork assigning blame, to anyone/everyone other than the general contractor, than they did addressing/rectifying the main issues. Worse, they sometimes appeared misinformed about, even ignorant of, basic and common construction site health/safety standards and practices.
I'm not surprised that the "executives" views differed from those of the workers...in my opinion (and experience), obfuscation was a common tactic among the general contractors various (not only safety) teams when they had dealings with "us". Would it be much of a stretch to believe those teams used that same tactic when reporting to their superiors?