Safety in numbers

By Rebecca Goozee, Deputy Editor

For all the wrong reasons, Dubai’s labour camps hit the headlines in April following the release of a British documentary detailing hideous living conditions for workers. Since then, the region has gone into overdrive, hitting back to prove that living and working conditions are a number one priority for the industry.

Home to some of the most ambitious buildings on earth, Dubai is renowned for its impressive infrastructure and non-stop construction, with 24-hour construction going on all year round. But while the developments are perceived as increasingly glamorous, the work that goes on behind the scenes, and just who does it, is not at all attractive.

Little was known about the foreign immigrants that make up most of Dubai’s labour force, but all this changed after the BBC Panorama documentary was broadcast in April. The British documentary showed an undercover reporter investigating labour camps belonging to Arabtec and United Engineering Construction, a subcontractor of First Group, alleging that the labourers were made to live in overcrowded condition, with poor ventilation, a lack of clean water and raw sewage flowing though the camp.

“We sneaked into the camp to be met with the smell of raw sewage. Sewage had leaked out all over the camp, and workers had to create a network of stepping stones to cross it and get back to their accommodation blocks,” stated the BBC in the documentary.

Improving guidelines
While the UAE has since instigated a series of legislative measures to protect the rights of labourers, with inspections of accommodation and workplaces, serious damage has been done to the region’s worker welfare reputation, and the smear seems set to continue unless measures are strictly enforced, and done so in the public eye.

That said, many in the region are optimistic that welfare in the region can and will drastically improve from what was seen on the documentary. Elias McGrath, Group Administrator of Build Safe UAE, a not-for-profit organisation aimed at improving the health, safety and welfare conditions of all construction industry stakeholders, is one of the upbeat ones. “There has been a lot of action since the negative press was generated, a lot of positive movement,” he explains.

“Fortunately for us, Build UAE work with a lot of good contractors and good developers that promote very high standards of welfare, Unfortunately, when such a publication is promoted internationally about the conditions of a particular labour camp in the UAE, the guys that have invested a lot of money to do the right thing and keep their camps well maintained, also get affected, which isn’t right. What we want to do is promote the good guys and that’s something that we will continue to do. Unfortunately, there is a minority that isn't doing the right thing, but that happens with everything, with construction sites, with labor camps, and so on. So we want to show what the good guys are doing and then provide guidelines to improve what the bad operators are delivering.”

Formalised in January 2008, Build Safe UAE is designed to promote greater standards of health, safety and welfare throughout the UAE. McGrath explains that the main objective behind the organisation is to develop a statistics database to understand the most significant issues that are faced within the realm of welfare. By establishing a statistics portal it has been possible to break down the barriers of intellectual property and competitive advantage regarding health and safety, which have been prevalent in the region for so long. “We’ve pushed the concept that ‘there is no intellectual property associated with health and safety’, and from the 88 members that have already joined we’ve seen improvements,” says McGrath.

Organisations have been willing to share with one another, continues McGrath, from best practices whether it be a driving policy, a permit system or a safety management plan to a safety alert system, these are all examples that truly contribute to saving lives. “The industry was crying out for statistics, and through our simple database we have been able to provide that. We’re also hoping to grow that through 2009,” he says.

Impacting the workforce
So how do these changes to the industry impact on the direct workforce? It is still a challenge, answers McGrath. “We initially needed support from senior management before we could get to the workers themselves an get there feedback on the changes that were happening, that’s the way that things happen, everything is done from the top-down. But the great thing is that once we get the senior manager committed, his message is lived and breathed by the organization that he leads, so unless we have his buy-in, what the worker thinks won’t make a difference.”

Getting support from senior management means that collaboration with them becomes easier to develop was to collaborate those messages to the workers themselves. McGrath explains that this is currently happening, the 88 senior managers who have already joined Build Safe UAE are currently infiltrating messages down and senior management support is becoming more and more apparent. “In the next few months we’ll be conducting feedback, and we’ll be going through site supervisors to see what more needs to be done by finding out what the key issues are and action them in the near future,” explains McGrath.

Andrew Broderick, Health, Safety and Environment Manager for Aldar, joined the Build Safe UAE initiative earlier this year. He agrees that one of the main challenges facing the health and safety sector in the region is leadership. “A health and safety officer will be on site to give technical knowledge, advice and guidance, but unless the senior manager is also on site to support that then the health and safety are aspects are lost. A health and safety person can write a million reports, but unless the project manager takes it on board and actions those reports, health and safety can be lost.”

Broderick goes on to explain that Aldar joined the not-for-profit organisation in order to engage with stakeholders and really push the idea of health and safety as an imperative into the construction sector. “We don’t want a policy to simply sit on a shelf – we want it to be an active document that is used by the project managers right the way down through to the person on site.  It’s not all about beating people with a stick when it comes to a policy, we want to educate and train to make sure that people are aware that they need to implement health and safety, that it has benefits, it reduces costs and speeds up production.”

A couple of years back Broderick brought a health and safety training company on board that helps Aldar train and educate the workers over a two-day period to ensure that workers are educated to the highest standard possible. Since joining Build Safe UAE, Broderick has become even more focused on ensuring that the contractors, and consequently the labourers that work on site, are educated correctly. He’s found that workers are extremely responsive to training, and are keen to learn.

“Most workers come from Asia and they come to the UAE with a promise of onsite training. These guys aren’t used to the vast and technical construction sites here, which can be a big problem. And rather than full training, they simply receive a very basic safety induction that addresses site-specific hazards. SO say they have a steel fixer, for example, working 50 stories high, they don’t talk about this person suffering from hypertension or vertigo, these things just aren’t addressed and it can leave the worker feeling isolated. We try and push these areas, and the Build Safe initiative is really highlighting the areas that need extra efforts from the contractors.”

Looking to the future
Moving forward McGrath is keen to work on two key objectives. Firstly, after reviewing 2008 data it has become apparent that falls from height have been the most significant trend. McGrath is keen to action some soft of safety campaign on falls from height by understanding the lessons from each case and develop a key focus group with key individuals from various construction stakeholders to prepare some practice guidelines for the industry. “Once that’s finalised, we hope to share that freely with the wider industry to promote better practices and promote the true importance of erecting fall screens, edge protection and clipping into harnesses for example.”

McGrath is also keen to emphasise that more communication is needed. His second objective is specifically around communicating alerts. For every near miss, lost time injury and fatality that takes place, McGrath believes that an alert should be automatically developed to document the lessons that took place and then implement effective measures to prevent that accident from recurring, as well as share that information with the wider industry. “Because we’re all delivering the same parts of construction activity, whether it be a trench excavation, a concrete pour or a working at height, we’re all doing the same thing, and therefore, if one of our construction stakeholders experience an issue, it should be communicated for the common benefit.”

Objective three would be developing guidelines for health and safety in construction, continues McGrath, followed by guidelines for labour camp accommodation and welfare. “This is a big project in itself,” admits McGrath, “But on top of that we want to communicate the message to the whole region, for the greater benefit of the construction industry.”

So far Build Safe UAE has encouraged the industry, and in particular key individuals who have expertise in labour camps, to submit information and work in conjunction with the organisation to prepare a best practice document on labour camps. The document is currently 80 percent complete and McGrath is confident that following discussions with the UAE Ministry of Labour it will be used to develop their regulations further. “What it is essentially a guidelines document from the time that a person is looking to lease, buy or develop their own labour camp, and it provides them with the best practice guidelines, from camp layout to ablutions, amenities, kitchen setup, fire escapes, space ratios – anything you can think of in relation to a labour camp.”

Looking at worker welfare it things are without doubt steadily improving, with the Panorama documentary a catalyst, bringing this important issue to the publics attention. The various governments and taking notice of the initiative and demonstrating that they want to be involved with such an important issue.  Seeing the Build Safe UAE initiative growing from strength to strength can only be a good thing.

“Things are improving, improving, improving,” concludes Broderick. “We were just waiting for something like Build Safe UAE to come along. And I’m so glad it has because it’s really pushing these issues to the top of the agenda. To be a health and safety professional, you’re always promoting best practices and safe systems of work, so to have this now and to see it even more is the best possible scenario.”

Case study: Aldar
Although the labour camps in Dubai have been depicted as having horrendous living conditions, Broderick is keen to highlight that not all labour camps are the same: “We have 40,000 workers on a project like Yas Island, so we needed to look at accommodation in a responsible way. We decided to build our own worker accommodation so it reduced production downtime and travelling times, which also meant we were reducing resources and our carbon footprint.

“We’ve seen nothing but success from our worker accommodation. We have internet cafes, basketball courts, a cricket pitch with a stadium for 12,000 people, a gym, pool rooms, cinemas and its all worked. We even went as far as having our own catering on site. They built enormous industrial kitchens to cope with 40,000 workers. We’ve obviously looked feedback and we’ve interviewed the workers there – they all seem extremely happy with the situation.

“The Ministry of Labour came out and did a surprise visit and he awarded us a grade A and said that we were the benchmark to follow.”