Sparky,
I hate to give you the answer. It's a Harvard business school textbook answer, and NO ONE bemoans that style of business which has permeated the industry more than me.
1) The employee is given a handbook. In the handbook are lists of safety rules, or in lieu of the handbook, there is a company safety manual. They sign that they received and understood, if that takes several hours of training, so be it.
2) the jobs I'm on are truly large projects, and each general has a minimum 1/2 hour safety meeting weekly where new rules, violations, and expectations are discussed. Sometimes twice a week.
3) EACH new sub, or shift in work, starts with an AHA ( Activity Hazard Analysis)where the contractor sends a rep to explain what hazards are involved, and what they've done to abate them, such as PPE (personal protective equipment) or machinery.
There are "stop" programs employed, where supervisors, QA/QC inspectors, Safety inspectors have cards, walk up to the employee and tell them "stop" and issue the card with time/date/type of violation, and WHO. 3 minor violations ya don't work here no more, there are time constraints on these, so at some point they are cleared off your record.
Of course, PPE and the meetings are on the contractor - completely. Yup, that includes steel toed shoes. Incentive.....you get to keep your job, and contractor is allowed to work here, coz guess what....a contractor gets enough violations, HE don't work here either, or starts paying lots in fines, and we will provide safety training for you and yours.....and we're very expensive.
Hope this helps, like I said NOBODY bemoans this worse than me. Does all this....crap help?
Theres 3 kinds of lies. 1)lies 2) damned lies and 3) statistics. I can't tell you (really I can't) how many fatalities I've been in the middle of, or the fringes of in the last few years. Ya can't prove this junk works any better to me.
It all comes down (to me)
1) Is the foreman (super) knowledgeable on safety matters?
2) Does he care about his men?
3) Does the company back up his decisions?
I do think every company of any size at all should have someone keeping an eye on all the foreman to insure that they aren't doing stupid things from a safety standpoint. It's the right thing to do, and from an economic standpoint it saves a lot of money in insurance fees, but to arbitrarily require PPE just because, gets a bit prohibitive.
OK, that's my rant for the day, hope that even comes close to answering your question.
