Analysis of COVID-19 Concerns Raised by the Construction Workforce and Development of Mitigation Practices

Abstract

The coronavirus outbreak has created a global health crisis that has disrupted all industries, including the construction industry. Following the onset of the pandemic, construction workers faced and continue to face unprecedented safety and health challenges. Therefore, construction employers established new safety precautions to protect the health and safety of the workforce and minimize the spread of the virus. The new precautions followed the advice and guidelines offered by different health and safety agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). With construction projects resuming operations, it becomes important to analyze the coronavirus-related health and safety concerns of construction workforce and understand how the new safety procedures can assist on jobsites. Existing studies mostly focused on interviews and surveys with construction companies to understand the impact on project performance and supply chains. However, no study has yet to analyze the United States construction workforce. This paper fills the gap by providing a qualitative descriptive analysis of the COVID-19 complaints data gathered by OSHA from construction jobsites. Information gathered by OSHA includes the jobsite location, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) of the construction company, the type of the complaint (i.e., formal or non-formal), and a thorough description of the complaint. N-grams were employed to analyze the complaints, detect trends, and compile a list of the most frequent concerns reported by the workforce. The analysis of the complaints data identifies safety practices that were most violated, highlights major safety and health concerns for construction workers, and pinpoints geographical areas that have seen a surge in complaints. The study also synthesized the existing research corpus and compiled a list of 100 best practices that construction employers can adopt to mitigate the concerns of the workforce. The findings of this study provide insights into the safety and health trends on construction sites, lay the foundation for future work of academicians and practitioners to address the concerns faced by construction workers, and serve as lessons learned for the industry in the case of any future pandemic.

Factors affecting the delivery of optimum health and safety on construction projects during the covid-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe

“…Although some facilities are required as part of general H&S regulations, the COVID-19 pandemic amplified their importance. The results are consistent with previous studies, which show that reluctance by contractors to provide adequate site facilities (Chigara and Moyo, 2014;Hatoum et al, 2021) can create unhygienic site conditions which adversely affect the general H&S of construction workers (Chigara and Smallwood, 2019). This finding highlights the need for construction employers and other stakeholders to invest in the facilities required to ensure site hygiene in line with general and COVID-19 H&S requirements.…”

“…Also, the lack of on-site facilities compromises hygiene and increases the risk of workers' exposure to COVID-19 infection. This finding is consistent withHatoum et al (2021), whose study established that employers did not provide handwashing facilities on construction sites.…”

“…This factor reveals that lack of monitoring and compliance enforcement with H&S provisions affects the ability to work safely on construction sites during the COVID-19 pandemic. The importance of enforcement to ensure optimum H&S during a pandemic is supported by previous studies in South Africa (Amoah and Simpeh, 2020), Jordan (Bsisu, 2020) and USA (Hatoum et al, 2021), which revealed that lack of worker compliance affected the implementation of COVID-19 safety measures at the construction sites. In China, Zheng et al (2020) observed the existence of practice gaps among construction practitioners relative to compliance with COVID-19 safety measures, such as wearing face masks and maintaining social distance.…”

“…During another study in China, Zheng et al (2020) established that lack of knowledge and compliance with some COVID-19 safety practices such as social distancing and use of face masks were the contributory factors for the spread of COVID-19 in the construction industry. In the USA, Hatoum et al (2021) analysed workers' complaints data from OSHA and concluded that inadequate enforcement of general and COVID-19 specific H&S provisions, inadequate provision of PPE to workers, inadequate provision of handwashing facilities, inadequate disinfection of the workplace and inadequate wearing of face are the major H&S concerns during the pandemic. During another literature-based study, Stiles et al (2021) A growing body of knowledge shows that the COVID-19 pandemic and responses affected H&S through its disruptive effect on the economy, supply chains and organisational/workplace settings.…”

Coflex: Flexible Bracelet Anti Covid-19 to Protect Construction Workers

“…This latest study also analyzes the social aspects related to these issues, highlighting how facilitating social interaction among users and keeping personal information securely are keys to success in the dissemination of these devices. In this international context, the research project "CoFlex" (a flexible bracelet anti covid-19 to protect construction workers) represents the implementation of a wearable technology already defined by some of the authors [8] 1 , who had set the requirements that the system should have met based on their high experience in the field and following recent literature studies [9,10]. CoFlex is under development and is part of the so-called "4.0 solutions" for the protection of workers' health and safety at work.…”