Home Search Sitemap Contact Bookmark

Free Dissertations - Construction Dissertations

The Upshot Is A Personal Disenfranchisement Of The Individual Construction ...

The upshot is a personal disenfranchisement of the individual construction worker. Their interests are whittled down and concealed. More could be done, but there is no money; events are regrettable, but regrettably unavoidable.
The CDM regulations aim to redefine the interests of the health and safety of the individual construction worker within this complex web of competing interests, and to ensure that the ideological protects which are talked about in theory, are delivered in practice.
The CDM regulations therefore aim to reengage traditional paternalistic government interventions and make them more effective and of more value to the individual construction worker. There is arguably no stronger moral impetus than the saving of life and this is perhaps the ultimate ideological aim of the CDM regulations.
On a more practical level, it cannot be denied that costs have been imposed due to the higher standards which are expected in terms of health and safety. To maintain standards such as these may involve the creation of more jobs, and the actual physical transformation of some construction systems of work (Olomolaiye, P.O. and Ogunalana, S.O. (1989) 2) (Olomolaiye, P.O., Wahab, K.A. and Price, A.D.F. (1987) 5-10) (Parnell, J. (2003) Ch. 1) (Perloff, J. (1981) 338) (Pheng, L. and Teo, J. (2003) 4).
These systems, due to the fact that they are more complex and also due to the fact that they have developed more recently makes the costs involved in their management and implementation higher. The regulations have also created more duty-holders (Gilbertson, A. (2004) 14), and this more focused approach to the implementation and supervision of health and safety mechanisms has arguably increased the costs associated with the industry.
Perhaps it is a fallacy to attempt to attribute the measure of cost effectiveness to such a complex industry, which necessarily overlaps with other actors and agencies, whose role may be defined as quasi-construction industry related (Olomolaiye, P.O. (1988) 6) (Olomolaiye, P.O. and Ogunalana, S.O. (1989) 2) (Parnell, J. (2003) Ch. 1). The reality is that it may not be appropriate, in the first place to attempt to approach an evaluation of the success of the regulations in such terms. It is also the case that such evaluation may not be a useful exercise since the difficulties involved in conducting such an evaluation, may inevitably make any evaluation, a mere exercise in the subjective opinion forming. Such an exercise would more appropriately be classified as an opinion, rather than the conduct of an evaluation.


Thanks