(enr.com 11/26/01)
By Janice L. Tuchman in Tarpon Springs
 |
 HENSHAW (Photo by Janice L. Tuchman for ENR) |
At the first annual meeting of the
Construction Users Roundtable, John L. Henshaw, the new director
of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told
owners that he wants to engage industry leaders in a dialogue
around safety and health, bringing the issue from "the
side lines to the front lines."
Henshaw, who was appointed to his post last June, said he
recently met with all regional administrators and their deputies
to set priorities. They include "strong, effective and
fair enforcement; outreach, education and compliance assistance;
and voluntary programs and partnerships."
Henshaw's OSHA wants to do more than set standards and impose
fines. "We want to work with industry groups like CURT
to sell the value of safety and health," he said, going
beyond cost avoidance to the "value of human capital."
OSHA also wants to focus its limited enforcement capability
on those employers who only respond to that kind of action.
"Our job is not to continue to cite. It is to convince
employers to comply. Like codependency in the drug culture,
we are allowing companies to use fines as a cost of doing
business. To me that's repugnant," Henshaw said.
Coming from a 26-year career as a safety
professional, Henshaw said that by working through compliance
assistance and partnerships, his goal is to change the slope
of the decline in injuries and fatalities and make it go down
even more steeply.
Henshaw could be accused of preaching
to the choir at the CURT meeting, where the 270 attendees
clearly had safety consciousness as a priority. CURT leadership
takes the position that all injuries are preventable, and
it plans to promote the owner's position in safety legislation.
The national conference in Tarpon Springs, Fla., Nov. 12-14
showed that the group has clearly risen from the ashes of
the Business Roundtable's construction committee and has also
undergone a transformation (ENR 5/15/00 p. 15).
"We're going beyond the old chemical and process sectors
and bringing in members from commercial, high-tech and public
sectors," said Steven B. Satrom, CURT president and a
general manager at Air Products and Chemicals Inc. Without
the restrictions of the old committee–being a member
of the Business Roundtable for example–"we can be
more representative of the industry as a whole, including
contractors, contractor associations and labor."
Satrom said the group does not intend
to duplicate the efforts of existing groups, like the Construction
Industry Institute, in research. "We are going to focus
on the reasons we were founded, to lend the owner's influence
to the construction industry," he said. He includes best
practice sharing, promoting safety and promoting leadership
excellence in construction.
In its first 18 months, CURT's board
of trustees has functioned as a committee of the whole. More
work soon will move to standing committees. CURT now has 37
owner members and 11 associates. It will add more associates
as it adds more owners, but it wants to keep the groups in
proportion. CURT also provides the "glue" that links
40 local user councils together, providing a forum for them
to come together and share concerns, Satrom added.
Construction efficiency also was clearly a hot button for
CURT attendees, who packed the breakout sessions on "lean
construction." Gregory A. Howell, managing director of
the Lean Construction Institute, Ketchum, Ida., believes that
the group's theories and concepts could lead to improvements
"that rival those experienced in manufacturing."
Howell said current practice confuses scheduling with project
management. He compared a construction job to a highway at
rush hour. A few erratic drivers can cause a traffic jam,
but if all drivers move at a steady speed, everyone gets home
faster.
Similarly, on construction sites, productivity improves "if
we can get the variation out of the work flow through planning,"
he said. The obstacle is "systemic lying where I say,
‘I need you Thursday,' and you say, ‘Yup I'll be
there.' But I know I don't really need you, and you know you
won't really be there," Howell said. Efficiency comes
down to "eliciting reliable promises and declarations
of completion of activities that release work to others."
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