Chris Alderson: How CHASNZ is keeping our builders safe
CEO of Construction Health and Safety New Zealand (CHASNZ), Chris Alderson is passionate about making building sites safer across the motu. He explains how funding from ACC will help make sure our construction workers return home safely every day.
I have lots of memories over 11 years of working for Fonterra but there’s one that will never leave me.
I can still picture exactly where I was when I heard one of our sub-contractors had been taken off life support. News like that leaves an indelible mark on you.
Even more powerful was walking through the accident site with the family and then going to the funeral, seeing the children who will grow up without a father.
You make certain promises to yourself in those moments that shape your actions and behaviour for the rest of your life. But you never get past the regret, guilt and questioning what else you could have done.
Ultimately, it becomes a strong moral driver in how you view health and safety and worker rights going forward. If there’s a silver lining to tragic events like these, it’s that it drives you to never allow this to happen to anyone else.
Creating a better New Zealand
That’s why I’m so passionate about my current role as CEO of CHASNZ. We work to help create a better New Zealand by making our building sites safer across the motu.
Injury statistics in the construction industry aren’t where they should be and it’s not just about the big stuff you see in the papers. It’s the everyday injuries that people suffer and struggle on with that are equally debilitating.
People come into the construction industry bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in their 20s, then they get an injury to their back, knee, shoulder or neck, which then crops up again every couple of years. By the time they’re in their 30s, they’re old before their time – that’s not right.
Obviously, building is a physical job and you can’t get away from that. And, from a risk point of view, it’s a very volatile environment. If you think about the risk in a warehouse or factory, it’s the same risk all the time. It’s the same machines, the same people in the same area, making the same product.
But, on a construction site, things are changing all the time. If you dare to close your eyes for a minute and open them again, something will have changed.
That’s why we need to have more investment in our people, particularly around hazard and risk awareness. It’s about knowing what the right way to work is, rather than just getting the job done come hell or high water.
Most of the reasons people get injured are because something’s not there that should have been there, there might not have been the right equipment, or there might not have been enough people to do the job. Individuals can still get good results with health and safety on a daily basis but they’re up against it if we haven’t planned properly.
Empowering our people with knowledge
That’s where the work we’re doing at CHASNZ can come in. We’re trying to put really simple tools and resources into the hands of construction workers, particularly those running small businesses.
These are people who can’t afford expensive health and safety resources, so we’re trying to be there to give it to them for free. We provide them with tools and resources around risk management, hazard management, and simple health and safety management systems that can help them set standards in that area.
Another thing we’re doing is working with the trades to understand how their people can work more effectively, for longer and more sustainably. As I mentioned earlier, there are often problems with the musculoskeletal profiles of our workers – so we need to find ways for them to avoid injury but still work really effectively.
This mahi has resulted in one of our flagship programmes, ‘Work Should Not Hurt’. In this programme, we’ve tried to capture the collective knowledge of each of the trades and go, ‘Here’s some stuff we can take from those who are really experienced and give it to those who haven’t had the benefits of that kind of investment in themselves. Let’s see if we can get them up to speed’.
We want to target the younger workers, and most of them are receptive. Our message to them is, ‘Your biggest asset isn’t your Ford Ranger, it’s your body’.
If you’re starting out as a sole trader and you’re sitting on your couch for 30 days because you’ve bunged your shoulder, then that’s not good. It’s not good for you, your business or your mental health – so let’s do all we can to avoid that.
ACC provides essential support
None of our mahi in this area would be possible without the support of ACC, who recently pledged further funding to us for another three years.
CHASNZ isn’t a membership-based organisation and we don’t ask for money for our tools and resources, so we couldn’t provide them without that support.
A lot of other organisations, for good or bad reasons, end up being membership-based and are therefore quite influenced by the priorities of the businesses that actually pay the membership fees.
So having an organisation like CHASNZ that has an independent view of how harm happens and needs to be controlled is very beneficial for the New Zealand construction sector.
It’s a good model, and ACC is basically the one who unlocks that model.
Treating workers with dignity and respect
If I could give any advice to any other industries or organisations who are looking to improve their health and safety standards, I would say it’s about welfare and treating your workers with dignity and respect in the first place. If you’re not doing that, it’s very hard to then have a conversation about health and safety.
If your workers have got nowhere to be dry, have no toilet facilities or nowhere to eat, then that needs to be looked at first. It sounds ridiculous but, unfortunately, there’s so many businesses where workers don’t have all that. And there’s some poor labour practices out there as well.
So make sure you get your house in order first of all and that you’re ethically aligned to what we’d expect in the 21st century from a New Zealand employer. After that, it’s about identifying and prioritising where the risks are in your workplace and getting your people geared up to manage those risks.
Everyone has the right to go home safe and well at the end of each day, and we’re trying to make sure that’s the case in the construction industry.
More information
You can learn more about Construction Health and Safety New Zealand and the work we’re doing to improve health and safety standards in the building industry on the CHASNZ website.
