CONSTRUCTION SAFETY

Abstract

Singapore construction industry suffers from high fatality rate despite numerous efforts input by government. The reason is still unknown by many firms suffering from the same problem. Researchers speculate that it may be due the absence of safety culture. From the Ministry of Man power's survey, deceased workers' data is derived and divided into eight areas namely: age; race and nationality, time and month of fatality, nature of work, Proximity of co-workers, general profile of employer, type of fatal accident and nature of work carried out prior to fatal accident. Detail analysis found that every area is in some way link to the cause of fatality. The main cause revolved around mismanagement by the upper management and human error of the lower management and general workers. From the investigation, it is found out that the government policy may not be holistic and complete enough to cover all parties involved in construction industry. Parties like the client miss out from most of the government policy, which is a major error. In the construction industry the chain of command is a top down approach. The limitation of this research is that it is unable to determine which of the eight areas carried the most weight in contributing to construction fatalities. Hence future studies can look into this area