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AMERICAN SOCIETY

OF SAFETY ENGINEERS

1800 East Oakton Street

Des Plaines, Illinois 60018-2187

847.699.2929

FAX 847.296.3769

www.asse.org

April 2, 2013

Delegate Brian K. McHale

House Office Building, Room 350
6 Bladen St.

Annapolis, MD 21401

RE: ASSE Support for HB 1486

Dear Delegate McHale:

On behalf of its more than 550 members who live and work in Maryland, the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) is pleased to support your bill, HB 1486, to require the Maryland Department of Labor to develop and adopt a safety questionnaire and a safety rating system that the state’s public sector employers will use to help ensure that bidders for public sector construction projects can demonstrate a meaningful commitment to the safety and health of their workers.

Founded in 1911, ASSE is the nation’s oldest and largest safety, health and environmental (SH&E) professional membership organization. Our members work with employers in every industry and across the globe to help see that workers can go home safe and healthy to their families each day. Within ASSE, members belong to seventeen practice specialties. One of the largest and most active is the Construction Practice Specialty whose members help lead the industry’s understanding about how best to manage contractors and

subcontractors on construction jobs in the public and private sector.

The importance of prequalification of contractors and subcontractors in managing the safety and health of workers on construction sites is widely understood by ASSE’s members and is an assumed best practice among the best construction employers. Contractor prequalification is an integral element in the well-established ANSI/ASSE A10.33 Safety Requirements for Construction & Demolition Operations (https://www.asse.org/shoponline/products/a10_33_2011.php) voluntary consensus standard, developed through a process that brings together employers, practitioners, labor and other stakeholders in a process that establishes the most up-to-date safety practices.

Consistent with the prequalification requirements found in A10.33, our members have written often on the importance of prequalification as a best practice in managing contractors and subcontractors, including the following:

·  In the article Safety Risk Management of Subcontractors: What Is the Standard of Care? published in ASSE’s journal Professional Safety, the author writes, “With the increasing level of safety diligence, the risk of a subcontractor’s accidents will not be reduced until a specific, significant level of influence is achieved, first through the prequalification process, then with the effective safety oversight.”

·  “The first step is to review the prospective contractor’s qualifications,” is how the author of “Who Is Responsible for Safety” begins a detailed discussion about how best to determine a contractor’s ability to work safely and to meet the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s standards.

Further, research backs the value of prequalification in managing safety and health in workplaces, as found in the 2008 study Contractor Safety Prequalification: Current Practices and Prospective Models (http://www.orcehs.org/wiki/display/orcehs/Contractor+Safety+Prequalification):

According to the lead researchers Philips and Waitzman, host employers are able tomanagethe safety and health of their own workforce while in a sense they mustbuythe safety of their contract workers. They do this through the prequalification process and by selecting contractors that are likely to perform safely on the job.Their extensive literature review shows that safety pre-qualification can be used as part of a strategy to reduce the liability concerns that have hindered promotion of safety in the host-contractor relationship.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the nation’s resource for research in how to keep workers safe, has endorsed the practice, as indicated in a Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) Program recommendation (http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/face/stateface/ma/00ma061.html) that specifically investigated a public sector construction accident. In the report’s recommendations aimed at avoiding similar incidents, NIOSH wrote

Local and state government agencies should review at a minimum the bidding companies' work practices and safety record on both their own past jobs and other private and public jobs. In this case, the state agency, which the roadway work was being performed for, has an application to prequalify contractors for bid submission.

The value of prequalification as a safety practice is well established. Important also is the impact this measure can have for Maryland’s citizens. Often heard in legislatures across the country is the call for government to act more like business, a call intended to move government towards cost-effective management of limited resources. Taxpayers should enjoy a return on their investments in services and benefits in the same way shareholders expect dividends from their investment in business. Businesses and federal agencies routinely require prequalification of contractors and subcontractors in their contracts for construction projects. The taxpayers of Maryland deserve no less.

ASSE’s members applaud you for both representing through HB 1486 taxpayers’ best interests as well as the interests of workers who will benefit from this requirement that contractors and subcontractors already know how to meet.

Sincerely,

Richard A. Pollock, CSP

President

cc: Ronald LeClair, President, Chesapeake Chapter, Baltimore

Brian Hughes, Delmarva Chapter, Salisbury