Investigating health and safety problems in relation to training and recruitment of workers on construction sites.

Abstract

A sociological aspect and further literature of the construction industry tend to characterize its labour market as hazardous, if not the main source of accidents and requiring reforms through formalization(Irumba, 2014) Poor H&S record can give rise to poor project performance which is commonly observed in the construction sector. The need to improve health and safety at construction sites has been a subject of several years of research(Buckley et al., 2016). However, industry data suggests a growing degree of casualism in construction, in the sense that employers and the self-employed have become a significantly large population of the overall workforce (Manap et al., 2018). This has led to a significant challenge in the health and safety of the employees on sites in Uganda due to the exposure of employees to a hazardous environment. Inadequacies in health and safety enforcement by the work personnel including training and induction of workers in the sector have led to social set back in the country’s construction industry. This is because the construction industry is a very accident-prone sector as the resulting accidents can have dire consequences(othman et al., 2011). In the year 2010, over 313 million non-fatal injuries at wok were recorded globally leading to at least four days off from work(Bellingham et al., 2004). Every year, 350,000 deaths are due to fatal occupational injuries, but 270 million non-fatal injuries occur (Sagynbekova, 2018). The accidents occurring on site, injuries and fatality rates are 3797 and 84 per 100,000 workers respectively according to the spatial analysis of construction accidents in Kampala, Uganda (Irumba, 2014). But the rate of reporting accidents to the authorities was found to be considerably low (about 24%)(Okwel et al., 2019). Furthermore, the reports from Uganda’s ministry of gender labour and social development (MoGLSD) show construction injuries accounting for 13% of all occupation injuries in Kampala in 2003 and were the third contributor of injury events(Manga et al., 2021) This therefore shows the rate at which the Ugandan construction industry is prone to accidents and also how much the workers are put at great risk while working at the sector.