Foreseeing countermeasures for construction safety violations in South Africa

Human failure (errors and violations) studies from South Africa and the Sub-Sahara Africa region is limited. While non-compliance (violation) is cited as a causal factor in reported incidents and accidents, counter-measures are lacking in how safety research is understood in South African construction. Through research methods that include a questionnaire survey, interviews, and observations, many perceptions of site management and workers were collected. The textual and statistical data were descriptively analyzed. Routine and situational violations outweigh other cited non-compliances in the studies where participants opined that main contractors are mostly responsible for safety violations. The results suggest that such contractors rarely monitor compliance by either their employees or their supply chain partner. The lax attitudes of contractors that spur violations on is a negation of the ethos of compliance-based safety and construction regulations. Both site management and workers blamed each other for safety violations. More telling is the observation that most workers have no idea of what constitute safety violations and their causes. The shifting of blames for safety violations imply that inspections alone are insufficient to remedy the state of affairs. The paper thus argues for the deployment of countermeasures that improve risk perceptions, comprehension of safety violations, and the awareness of their consequences on construction sites. There is also need to embed early warnings and the likelihood of being caught by concerned stakeholders in a construction project safe working procedures (SWPs).