Implementing occupational safety and health requirements in construction project

Abstract

The probability of the construction accident to happen is high due the nature of Construction work that involves complex activities, methods, machineries, materials and hazards. The occupational safety and health (OSH) law and regulations are mandatory for every construction project to uphold. Responsibilities to ensure the safety and health at the workplace lies with those who create the risk and with those who work with the risk. The owner or client of the construction project has the upper hand in determining the standard of OSH implementation in their project through contract documents. If the contract documents comprehensively spell out OSH requirements and cover all OSH cost, then the issues of contractor not implementing OSH measures could be minimized. The objective of this study is to identify Occupational Safety and Health requirements (OSH) in the contract document of selected construction projects. To achieve this objective, a total of seven contract document was collected from several construction companies. The qualitative analysis was performed to identify the extent of OSH requirements and costs are being mentioned in the contract documents. The finding shows that most of the contract document contains very little emphasis on OSH requirements and budgeting. Only one contract contains, an appendix that spell out about the safe work practices for construction works. The visible allocated budget for OSH requirements for all seven contracts is very minute range from 0.21% to 1.99% of contract value. In order to ensure that occupational safety and health is properly implemented, safety needs must be included in the budget because implementation it is not free, this can be achieved by making it a permanent feature in all bills of quantity of the project.