Industry Consensus

Goals Bring Together New York Construction Competitors

by Katherine S. Robertson

The genesis of Build Safe NYC - the project site safety initiative unveiled in November by leading New York construction managers - came over beer and common angst shared after work by safety directors from three rival companies.

They found themselves discussing how New York City is known for pushing the construction envelope - building bigger structures and erecting them faster than in other parts of the country, said Ray Master, safety director for the Northeast region of New York-based Bovis Lend Lease, who was one of the three present at those early sessions.

At the same time, Master said they recognized that the city has lagged far behind the rest of the nation and the world in terms of onsite safety standards.

All three safety directors were from locally based companies whose corporate owners came from foreign countries, and each of those corporations stressed the need for safe job conditions in their global operations, said Michael Handler of New York-based Turner Construction. New York City has long been the problem child, he said.

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So Master, Handler, and Robert Licopoli, formerly with Skanska USA Building of Parsippany, N.J., started to think about solutions.

"Having struggled with bringing our standards up as individual companies, we saw that this seems to be an industry problem in New York City," Master said. "How do we get everyone together to raise the standard?"

A big hurdle was battling the perception in the broader construction community that New York didn't have a problem, Handler said.

"We always think we do things better and safer in New York, but accidents are on the rise," he added. "We needed to get all the general contractors to come together and develop some standards."

To tackle the long-festering problem, Master said they decided it was critical to start with the biggest construction management and contractor firms operating in the city, encouraging them to pursue uniform health and safety standards. He said that because the largest local companies - Bovis, Turner, and Skanska, along with New York-based Tishman Construction, Plaza Construction, and StructureTone - together handle a large percentage of projects in the city, enlisting their endorsement could make a big difference.

The offshoot of the after-work brainstorming was a goal to establish safety standards that would apply evenly across all of the companies. Master and Handler said as the ideas began to take shape, the group of three reached out to their counterparts at Tishman, StructureTone, and Plaza for discussions and negotiations that resulted in a 10-point plan unveiled last November at an annual safety conference sponsored by the Building Trades Employers' Association of New York, a citywide contractors organization [see intro feature].

The plan is not final yet, with details being hammered out for a formal agreement due this summer, Handler said. A memorandum of understanding that the CEOs of the six large firms will sign sums up the plan as a partnership to implement "activities aimed at significantly improving the New York City construction industry's safety performance to the benefit of construction workers, the general public, all construction stakeholders and the City of New York."

The united front supporting the initiative by CEOs from New York's major construction managers and contractors - several of whom gathered at the safety conference - makes clear that the topic is on everyone's mind, said Louis Coletti, the BTEA's president.

"It shows how much more critical safety has become," he added.

It also was a seldom-seen show of solidarity for the industry, said Patricia Lancaster, commissioner of the New York City Department of Buildings. Brought into the process last year, Lancaster's office was asked to provide input for the initiative after it was already in development.

"Very rarely do the largest, more powerful CMs come together like this," she added. "They wanted to vet with us so we could be an ally. You have to give them a lot of credit. Getting something like this done in New York is a trick."

Lancaster said she regards Build Safe NYC as an industry-driven complement to her office's stated efforts to beef up safety inspections. She said while her agency can enforce regulations, it takes the participants to reshape the culture.

Setting a New Tone for the Industry The final document will likely contain "nothing in it that should be earth-shattering," Handler said. "It's all good, practical things. A lot of companies do it anyway."

Indeed, its significance may not be in the individual standards as much as the long-term impact it could have for the city as it gears up for a building boom, with more than $20 billion worth of work expected to hit the streets in 2006, Coletti said, citing data compiled by the New York Building Congress. The sheer volume of work could open the door to new contractors - and workers - who don't understand or enforce the type of safety programs needed for the city's vertical construction environment, he added.

"The issue of safety becomes critical as we enter an unprecedented growth market over the next five to 10 years," Coletti said.

The other significant aspect of the agreement is that it favors cultural change over a regulatory solution, Handler said. It also standardizes many individual safety points that had varying internal applications at the companies.

"What was happening is that the standards were different in every company and the standards were different on jobs," he added. "Everyone had their own rules."

Handler said the standardization of these rules not only makes compliance less challenging, it improves productivity and cost-effectiveness because workers, who hail from union halls around the city, would not need to be retrained each time they start new projects for different contractors.

"These are not our employees," Handler said. "They may work 20 jobs in the course of a year. We all have a vested interest in this."

In getting to a final document this summer, it will take effort to flesh out the details, Master said. For example, issues such as drug-free worksites, fall protection, and hard hats are hot-button topics for some unions and are likely to be subject to negotiations.

The key is reaching out to all stakeholders - including labor, subcontractors, the design community, regulatory agencies, and professional organizations - so that the entire industry is focused on safety, Master said.

"We know we have a problem and we know we have to fix it," he added.

The building department's Lancaster said the stars might be aligned to lock in real across-the-board cooperation for greater site safety. She said the unity exhibited by the industry in favor of a new citywide building code over the past several years was a positive sign for the chance of a broader safety consensus.

"Maybe there's enough juice left to make this happen," she said.