State of Practice of Construction Site Safety in the USA

Abstract

The construction industry has long been plagued with a high number of fatalities in the USA. Much safety improvements have been made after the USA Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. However, this industry still suffers from a disproportionately high rate of work-related fatalities in comparison to other industries. To provide a holistic view of current construction safety practices and corresponding performance, this paper reviews statistics of construction fatalities and their causes. It then presents efforts led to prevent work-related accidents and injuries by the federal safety agencies and the industry. Additionally, advantages and limitations of current practices in terms of construction safety have been discussed along with promotion of aspects in construction work environment.

Keywords

workplace safety / construction industry / safety strategy / accident prevention / review work

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2016 The Author(s) 2016. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)