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Contractor safety is important at E.I. du Pont Nemours and Co. (DuPont). DuPont has about 28,000 contractor employees at its facilities doing everything from construction to maintenance to cafeteria services. And DuPont is not alone. According to Bob Krzywicki, senior consultant for DuPont Safety Services, contract employees could make up as much as 30 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2010.

So how do you manage the safety of employees that do not work for your company? That's the question that many safety managers are asking themselves, admits Krzywicki.

During a discussion during a safety media day in Washington, D.C. last week sponsored by a number of safety companies including DuPont, Krzywicki listed the causes of unsafe behavior among contract employees. They are:

• Adversarial owner/contractor attitudes.
  
• Discrepancies in approaches to safety.
  
• Lack of communication. "You need to communicate your expectations" about safety on your site, said Krzywicki.
  
• Overlooking subcontractors. "Don't just talk about or to the prime contractors," advised Krzywicki. "Don't overlook the subcontractors."
  
• Comanagement. "Maintain proper relationships. Jointly audit. Jointly manage safety programs," suggested Krzywicki. If you try to strong-arm contractors into doing things "your" way, without trying to build a good relationship, you end up with the first cause of unsafe behavior: adversarial owner/contractor attitudes.

"By overcoming these factors," noted Krzywicki, "owner companies and contractors can work together more effectively, productively, and safely."

So how does DuPont handle contractor safety? The company applies its safety principles to contract employees and maintains contractor safety as a core value of the company. DuPont holds contract management responsible for unsafe acts committed by contract employees and expects safe behavior from contractors and subcontractors.

Krzywicki offered these guidelines to build an effective contractors safety program:

• Establish safety as a key factor in hiring and managing contractors.
  
• Set clear safety goals and expectations during initial contract negotiations.
  
• Expect the same high level of safety performance from contract workers and company workers.
  
• Emphasize and enforce operational discipline in all outsourced operations.
  
• Evaluate the safety performance of outsourced operations regularly; provide feedback for improvement.
  
• Recognize safety successes by contractor organizations.

"We like to dictate the rules, because if we don't do it, the contractor will, and we might not like the rules they play by. And in the end, the harm comes back to us," said Krzywicki.

He said that companies that hire contract employees should remember one important factor: that if an employee is injured on its property, that worker might not be able to sue his or her immediate employer due to workers' compensation laws. But he or she can sue the property owner as a third party. DuPont has even gone so far as to provide some contract employees with workers' compensation insurance in order to limit its liability.

"From a moral and spiritual standpoint, we don't want injuries to happen to any employees: contract or our employees. From a financial standpoint, a contractor injury can cost us more than an injury to our own employees," Krzywicki revealed.

By Sandy Smith