Contractor Safety

Contractor safety is an area that deserves much attention. My experience as
Safety Coordinator at a Thermal Electric Generation Station taught me that it
is well worth your time and effort to clearly communicate in advance what your
expectations, rules and policies are. We went from doing very little pre-work
with contractors to developing a _Site Orientation_ video that is shown to all
contract employees when they entered our site. In addition to this we wrote
specific contract language addressing certain aspects of our safety policies
depending upon the nature of the work being performed. I worked very closely
with our Contract Department and reviewed bid submissions of the contractors
safety policies, OSHA 200 logs and attended pre-bid meetings.
Depending upon the scope of the work performed and the number of contract
employees we would sometimes require that the contractor supply dedicated
safety people for us to interface with. We went to great effort to maintain a
certain degree of separation in how we addressed safety problems as the jobs
progressed, taking issues to contractor supervision instead of addressing
directly to contractor employees (unless the situation was one of eminent
danger). This was done to avoid the interpretation of directly supervising
the contractors employees and changing the relationship to one of being their
employer. We found that a great number of small contractors had either
inadequate or nonexistent safety policies and again went to great lengths to
avoid training any contractors inanything other than certain procedures that
were necessary to the performance of their jobs (ie. Site Specific Tag Out,
Evacuation, and Emergency Response)
Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and reflect my meager
experience in the vast world of Safety.