Compliance to Health and Safety Measures in Selected Construction Firms in Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract

Non-compliance to safety measures remains one of the factors that endanger construction sites. As one of its contributions to work on enhancing the safety and health of workers and improving project quality delivery, this study examined the level of compliance to health and safety among construction firms in Lagos State, from the perspective of workers. The study adopted a survey research design. The sample size for the study was one hundred and twenty (120) skilled artisans who were randomly selected from among foreign and indigenous construction firms in the state. The research instrument was a questionnaire that collected relevant data, with descriptive and inferential statistics being used for the data analysis. It was found that only 22% of the firms made provision for PPE, in the light of legislative requirements on standards. Moreover, out of three workers, one was afraid to report incidents/accidents while the fraction of workers that wished to report were unaware of the officials to report such matters to. Consequently, a similar percentage of workers was worried that there would be a penalty for reporting safety issues. Regarding contractors' safety policy review, while one out of every three contractors bore their responsibilities under the safety policy, one out of every four contractors was requested to make some amendments. It was thus concluded that workers are not encouraged to report any incident or accident confirming a low level of compliance between the two firms. It is therefore suggested that there should be strict enforcement of measures for improving safety and health practices on construction sites, in addition to motivating workers on incident/accident reporting and specifying the right line of safety actions. Furthermore, risk assessment for work operations should be enhanced to minimise the percentage of work that is halted or executed unsafely.