WHEN it comes to safety issues on construction sites, the figures say it best.
In 2008, nine people died in work-related accidents, while four have died so far this year. There are approximately 99,000 construction sites on the island and a mere 31 Labour Ministry safety inspectors to monitor them. Fines for those contractors who are caught violating safety procedures are paltry. Just last week two Limassol building contractors were only fined just over 2,000 and just under 1,200 respectively for serious safety breeches such as failing to assemble safe scaffolding.
In theory, safety is a major priority right from the planning stages of a construction project.
According to a member of the Architects Association, in order for building permission to be granted to any contractor or developer, “there must be a safety handbook provided in the initial application for building permission. It must be specifically designed for the project that is being proposed, in addition to the given safety precautions that will be in-built into the finished design of the architect.”
The contracting company then assigns subcontractors and supervisors to each project. They are supposed to organise the work being done and ensure that safety regulations are being upheld. These supervisors should be provided with safety guidebooks and instructions alongside the architect’s plans which serve as the blueprint for a project, and should expect to find themselves playing host to a Ministry of Labour inspector.
On paper then the guidelines look good, but the practice can be very different and often undermined by lack of staff, human negligence and greed.
Understaffing at the Labour Ministry for safety checks is chronic. According to ministry statistics, there are 29-30 thousand construction sites in the Nicosia district, with around 99 thousand in the whole of Cyprus, agricultural projects included. In Nicosia, nine thousand of these have passed through initial stages of inspection and approval by the ministry. In contrast, there are a grand total of 12 site inspectors working on a daily basis in Nicosia, which constitute a part of a group of 31 that operate throughout the island. This translates into 3,200 sites for each safety inspector.
This massive disparity is a problem that the ministry acknowledges and is attempting to solve; however, the spike in construction that overtook Cyprus after EU accession has not been followed by an analogous enlargement of inspectors.
The next variable to consider is more fluid than a statistic yet equally pertinent in terms of its contribution to lapses in safety. It is the optimistic assumption made by the ministry that contractors and site operators will unilaterally undertake the enforcement of the health and safety regulations.
“We are actively engaging in the dissemination of information that will hopefully be used by contractors in ensuring proper safety regulations are being followed,” said Demos Demosthenous from the Labour Ministry.
This follows a bottom-top logic that the ministry believes is in the best interests of contractors to follow. However, in reality, as so often, logic can be easily supplanted by passivity, greed and sheer ignorance. For example, in 2006, it was reported in the Cyprus Mail that a safety inspector had been physically assaulted by a contractor on a site in Limassol, after he had repeatedly expressed concern about the lacklustre safety of the site.
The most obvious fact to indicate that regulations are not always followed are the numbers of illegal workers, without legal rights, hired to work on building sites. If contractors are willing to hire illegal workers to cut costs, or because there is a shortage of skilled workers in the legal workforce, then other shortcuts to optimising profit are virtually inevitable.
Adrianna Kosimba, from the immigrant support group KISA, said that incidents of illegal workers being injured at the work place often go unreported, and are settled out of court because of the shared interest of both worker and employer to keep under the radar of government regulators.
“If an illegal worker, who has a resident permit, is found to have been working illegally, then they can face fines or even a three year prison sentence. The same goes for the employer,” she said. “If the worker is also residing in Cyprus illegally, then they will probably be deported.”
Arash, a steel fixer from Iran who has been working in Cyprus legally for the last 11 years and has been a Cypriot citizen for the past five, possesses a shocking list of tragic stories of co-workers being injured and intimidated by their employers.
From his experience working on a large array of construction projects around Cyprus, he believes that “70-80 per cent of projects have no safety”.
“The bigger companies like J&P and Lois usually have excellent safety on their projects, but other smaller ones do not,” he said. “There are many illegal workers, and when an inspector is going to come the ‘mastros’ (a Cypriot term for supervisor) will get a call warning them first. The inspector comes in the beginning of the project and then never again.”
Even though Arash is legally working in Cyprus, he said he still gets lied to about his social insurance.
“But this is nothing compared to what some of my friends who are illegal go through,” he said. “I have one African friend who had his finger cut off in an accident, and then was warned by the mastros not to say anything to the police. A Pakistani friend was killed because he was working on a site which used wooden instead of metal scaffolding, which broke. When I was working in Iran on oil rigs, we had ten times better safety than here in Cyprus.”
Side Bar
According to the Government Statistical Service, there were nine deaths in 2008 in the Construction and Renovation sectors, and a total of 1199 reported accidents. This number constituted roughly 50.5 per cent of all accidents in the work place. In 2009 so far, there have been four fatalities.
A recent story in the Spanish headlines about an illegal worker from Bolivia shocked the country. He had his arm cut off by a kneading machine and was dropped off alone 100 metres away from hospital. His missing arm was thrown into a bin by the bakery’s owners. The arm was not found until a day later, at which point it was too late to reattach it. The Spanish government has vehemently condemned the ‘barbaric’ actions of the bakers, saying that if found guilty, “they shall feel the full weight of the law”.
