First U.S. Construction Industry Safety Week a Success
Words: Dan Kamys
American Infrastructure, a heavy construction company and materials supplier, joined 30 other national and global construction firms to create and celebrate the first U.S. Construction Industry Safety Week with the goal to inspire everyone in the industry to be leaders in safety. Safety Week 2014 took place May 4 - 10.
More than 80,000 hard-working men and women are injured on construction jobsites across the country every year and 775 are killed, according to the Safety Week 2014 website.
"At American Infrastructure, as well as the other industry leaders participating in Safety Week 2014, we believe one injury is too many and make the safety of all of our employees our top priority," said American Infrastructure's Chairman and CEO, A. Ross Myers. "We hope that Safety Week will not only increase awareness within our own companies, but also encourage other construction firms to make safety their number one focus."
The 31 companies, which are part of The Construction Industry Safety (CISI) group and the Incident and Injury Free CEO (IIF) Forum, created Safety Week 2014 with the mission to:
- Thank their workforces for supporting safety and recognizing their efforts to be injury free
- Increase the awareness of the importance of being committed to safety, every day
- Inspire all companies to share best practices and to work together to strengthen the industry's safety culture
- Celebrate the need to be injury free
- Conduct on-site safety awareness activities to support education
American Infrastructure established an award-winning Home Safe Tonight initiative to foster a culture of safety throughout the work environment. It is not just a set of standards and policies requiring compliance, but a mindset of intolerance to any level, frequency, or severity of injury. Home Safe Tonight is a philosophy that is driven from the top and filters down to all employees across the organization.