Health and Safety Management on Construction Sites in Saudi Arabia - Dissertation Example

The construction industry has a record for being one of the most unsafe environments to operate in. (Grimaldi and Simonds, 1984) This argument is corroborated by the fact that for an average construction job in the United Kingdom, one worker is lost every three days. (Allan, 2001) It must be taken to note over here that such losses result even though there are standards of safety performance on constructions sites that are enforced. Similar to much of Western Europe, the United States has the OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to prescribe minimum construction site safety standards. While this may stand true for more developed nations, however, nations such as Saudi Arabia are still trying to tackle a high construction rate coupled with a low safety assessment and enforcement methodology. Overall, there is no single governmentally sponsored safety assessment and enforcement system within Saudi Arabia for the moment. (Fullman, 1984) Though there has been a move forward by the creation of the “Saudi Building Code National Committee” but as yet work within the safety and health portfolios remains scant and as yet experimental. (Mena Report, 2006) The lack of coherent safety assessment and enforcement schemes implies that there is still much ground that needs to be covered as per the Saudi safety standards in general and construction safety standards, in particular, are concerned. Hence, the need for research into current safety practices arises based on the concerns noted above so as to have a baseline available before policymaking on safety begins. The proposed research aims at plugging some gaps in the current research base so as to expand horizons. The other question now is the methodology that ought to be applied in order to conduct meaningful research.

As related in a previous proposal, the current research will be geared to answer the following questions:

• To what extent can safety management be applied on construction sites for construction companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?
• What are the core differences in safety rules and regulations between Saudi and Britain?

Furthermore, site safety surveys will also be carried out to ascertain the actual position on the ground. The reason behind self-initiated site safety surveys is based on the fact that certain construction companies in Saudi Arabia have next to no safety standards in practice and thus their workers are not educated to deal with such surveys. It must also be kept in mind here that a sizeable proportion of construction industry workers operating within Saudi Arabia are of foreign origin and will only respond to their mother tongues and regionalized dialects. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that most of these foreign workers are often uneducated and can therefore not be expected to respond to English. (Mouawad, 2008) Personal interaction with these workers on the ground is necessary to discover the actual perils they have to deal with by utilizing a concerned supervisor of any particular construction company. (Jannadi and Assaf, 1998)

Matters are further complicated by the fact that there exist few research records of actual safety surveys for construction sites around Saudi Arabia. Industrial managers and other professionals within the Saudi construction industry themselves feel that the Saudi safety system needs to be updated in order to deliver results. (Omani, 2008) Another major contention is the fact that construction site deaths are not only frequent but also publicized beyond borders which earn Saudi Arabia a bad name and discourage foreign workers from coming in to work. (Husain, 2011)

Saudi Arabia is currently faced with a growing population of young people who will need employment within the next decade or so due to a high birth rate within the last few decades. The current government is poised in expanding work opportunities in record time to rise up to this challenge. For this task, myriad construction sites have sprung up throughout the domain of Saudi Arabia. (Mouawad, 2008) Given also that Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia, most construction companies and their head offices are based in or around Riyadh while a lot of construction activity proceeds in this region. (Millington, 2009) Initiating contact and obtaining permissions from construction companies of all sizes and backgrounds can be highly simplified if Riyadh is used as the base of operations for these surveys.

The construction industry in Saudi Arabia is growing at an unprecedented rate but there is a dire lack of safety regulation. Lack of initiative in terms of safety regulation has produced patchy pieces of research that are often ill-connected or absent altogether. Sources of secondary research are unable to fulfill the objectives of this research. In order to fulfill the initially outlined objectives of the research proposed, it is suggested that the researcher be allowed to conduct primary research in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for various reasons outlined above.