Have you ever wondered about the tightrope walk that subcontractors do, balancing on the edge of safety in high-hazard industries? Our exploration into the world of subcontracting safety is eye-opening and crucial, as we dissect the factors that leave these workers more vulnerable to workplace accidents. This episode serves as an investigation into the findings of the paper, "Behind Subcontractor Risk: A Multiple Case Study Analysis of Mining and Natural Resources Fatalities," by Charan Teja Valluru, Sidney Dekker, and our own Andrew Rae.
Safety isn't one-size-fits-all, especially for subcontractors who navigate multiple sites with varying rules and equipment. This episode peels back the layers on the practical safety management challenges subcontractors endure, revealing how transient work complicates the integration of safety protocols.
We scrutinize the institutional oversights and fragmented safety systems that often overlook the needs of these critical yet vulnerable players in the industry. Our conversation isn't just about identifying problems; it's an urgent call to action for better practices and a safer future for all involved in subcontracting work.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
"Subcontracting itself is also a fairly undefined term. You can range from anything from large, labour -higher organisations to what we typically think in Australia of a small business with maybe one to four or five employees." - Drew
“All of the normal protections we put in place for safety just don't work as well when there are contract boundaries in place.” - Drew
“the subcontractor may be called in because they've got expertise in a particular type of work, but they're in an environment where they don't have expertise.” - Drew
Resources:
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David: You're listening to The Safety of Work Podcast episode 115. Today, we're asking the question, why are subcontractors at higher risk? Let's get started.
Hey everybody, my name's David Provan. I'm here with Drew Rae, and we're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to The Safety of Work Podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it. Today, we're going to be talking about subcontractors.
For many organizations, particularly in high hazard industries, subcontractors form a portion, maybe even a large portion of their workforce. From memory, Drew, I don't think we've done too many episodes on safety research associated with subcontractors yet. Before we dive into this episode, I thought it'd be good to get your perspective on where you see the current state of safety research in relation to subcontracting.
Drew: Sure, David. Hi, everyone. It's always been assumed that subcontractors are at higher risk than other workers. It gets talked about a lot in the academic literature. I think it's fairly widely assumed across industry. But it's fairly hard to pin down or prove that it's the case, mainly because subcontractors tend to do different work to other employees, so it's hard to disentangle what's due to the subcontracting relationship, what's due to the nature of work, and all the usual problems of reporting that make it hard to count who is at higher or lower risk.
Subcontracting itself is also a fairly undefined term. It can range from anything from large labor hire organizations to what we typically think in Australia of a subbie, a small business with maybe one, four, or five employees. Technically, one large organization subcontracting to another large organization is also subcontracting, even though all the employees are permanent in both organizations. So it's a bit hard to disentangle exactly what we mean.
It can be hard to do solid research, because commercial contracts tend to act as a stopping point for research projects. Let's say I get hired by a parent company to research, then I can't go and talk directly to the employees of the subcontractor. Typically, the smaller a subcontractor is, the more that they're getting paid by the hour, so any time they spend talking to researchers is time that they need to be paid for by somebody, which means that we tend to do more research in big organizations than we do in subcontractors.
David: Drew, the research paper that we'll introduce and discuss shortly, the literature review there talked about different theoretical perspectives on why subcontractors might be at higher risk. There's a social science like individual perspective, maybe there's something associated with the workers themselves. There's the systemic theorists that actually look at some of the systems breakdowns or potential breakdowns which can create or increase risk with those types of arrangements. There's the complexity theorists that are really looking even more broadly as well.
I thought maybe because the paper we're going to talk about today is from a PhD that you supervised, I thought maybe you might want to just talk a little bit about that broad body of research, and then we can go and introduce the paper for today.
Drew: Okay, I won't go too deeply into it. You pointed out the main three categories there. The social science approach mainly doesn't focus specifically on safety. It focuses on the whole area of precarious and contingent work. The idea is that these are people who are in vulnerable situations because they don't have secure employment. Those vulnerable situations makes them, for example, less likely to report injuries, less likely to speak up, more likely to get told to go and do dangerous work, and less able to say no if they do get told to do it.
The system approach more looks at things like financial pressures, the idea of contracting relationships, which create the need to be constantly making progress and constantly delivering and not having time to spend on nice to haves like safety. The complexity goes into issues such as things like communication and management of competency.
Once you have multi organizational arrangements, you no longer have one nice clean safety management system, and you no longer have one nice clean reporting system. You don't have a long term management of things like culture and competency. All of the normal protections we put in place for safety just don't work as well when there are contract boundaries in place.
David: Drew, I find this fascinating. Having worked in industry for a long time, and I still hear it a lot with the companies that I get to spend time with, there is this feeling that contractors are high risk. You were fortunate to supervise, I guess, Charan's PhD in this space. Do you want to maybe introduce him and then this paper, and then we can get stuck into it?
Drew: Okay, I'll give a bit of background of the whole PhD just to put this paper into context. This was a scholarship that actually came out of a subcontractor fatality. After the fatality, there was an enforceable undertaking. Part of that enforceable undertaking, established a scholarship to look at subcontractor safety.
Because this is such a hard topic to research, basically what Charan did is he wrote four papers, each looking at the issue from a different angle. In one paper, he ran a workshop of principal contractors and subcontractors to talk about the issues in focus groups. In another paper, he was out in the field talking to people as they're at work. In this particular paper, he was looking at fatality records, looking at actual cases where subcontractors had been killed to look at whether there were circumstances in those fatalities that were linked to the fact that they were subcontractors.
I'll just give the background as we usually do. The authors are Charan Valluru who is the PhD student, now Dr. Valluru, myself, and Professor Sidney Dekker. The title is Behind Subcontractor Risk: A Multiple Case Study Analysis of Mining and Natural Resources Fatalities. Pretty much the paper does what it says on the theme, a journal called safety. We've done a number of papers coming from safety, it's an open access journal, and the paper was published in 2020, so pretty recent.
David: Drew, you mentioned the perspective of the different papers. This study really tries to take the perspective of the subcontractor and explore the ways that the subcontractors viewpoint interacts with safety management systems and processes. There were six fatality investigation reports that I guess met the criteria to be included and to be reviewed, all associated with fatalities occurring to subcontractors on mine sites in Queensland between 2004 and 2014.
Drew, do you want to talk a little bit about the analysis method? You start with six fatality investigation reports. Where do you start? How do you do that kind of analysis?
Drew: Okay. Using accident investigation reports as data is always a bit of a problem. This is probably the rawest and most authentic way we have of actually investigating safety or unsafety. Charan came out of these archives in a bit of shock from just reading all of the details of these accounts. The trouble is the data's already been filtered through the original investigators, so whatever training they have and whatever frameworks they're using tend to get reproduced in the reports.
When people just take whole bunches of accident reports and summarize them, what you tend to do is reproduce the frameworks that the investigators were using to do the analysis. To get around this, we got reports where they weren't specifically looking at subcontracting issues in the original investigation, and then we used the frameworks that came from the literature. The framework of the contingent work, the framework of breakdowns of systems, or the framework of long term safety mechanisms, aren't working well.
Coming at right angles or sideways to the original investigation is a good way of getting something new out of raw data. It particularly helps in this case because they weren't published reports, and that means that there was more original data there available in the files that Charan could look at. Once things have to be publicly published, they tend to get highly sanitized. Lots of the extra stuff gets removed, and it becomes harder to get anything new out of a report that's already been overanalyzed.
We're looking at in depth at each of these six cases and looking for anything that resonates with that literature that matches those existing explanations, and then diving deeper anytime we sort of see that resonance occurring.
David: Are we ready to talk about the findings?
Drew: Yeah, I think we can just go straight into the findings.
David: I'll introduce the four high level findings, and then we might speak about each one of these in detail as was done in the discussion of the paper. It seems that this research identified themes that matched two pre existing theories and frameworks, these two being that institutional safety mechanisms do not cope well with the variability introduced by subcontractors. The standing safety management systems and safety management activities don't match the context of subcontractor work.
The second is that expertise in the work doesn't necessarily translate in expertise in the safety of that work. A contractor knows very intimately in detail, has lots of experience with doing their work, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know how to do that job as safely as they could. Do you want to say anything initially about those two?
Drew: No, I think we're going to take a deep dive into all four of these soon.
David: The other two were more new categories, so patterns in this research that weren't well previously explained or in the existing literature. The first was around communication, not flowing to the subcontractors from the layers above them. There's a couple of different aspects to that communication, which we'll talk about.
The second is that the safety work activities are viewed differently by subcontractor staff compared to principal contractors and operators. Some of the things that the customer is expecting the subcontractor to do has a different meaning to the client than it does to the customer and gets treated differently. Are we ready to dive into the first one then, Drew?
Drew: Sure. Our first one is about the institutional safety mechanisms. I guess the overarching theme behind this theme is that the way in which some of these things look from a client or principal contractor is very different when you look at them backwards in the other direction, meaning that they don't work as well. The classic example of that is a subcontractor might be only on site for a short time, but they're on many sites for that short amount of time.
It's something like an induction, which is really useful for someone who's coming on site for an extended period of time. It becomes 18 different inductions that are not as meaningful to someone who has to sit through every one of them. That can get worse when there are actually different rules occurring at different times on different sites. Not only do you have 18 inductions, you've got to remember that page seven of them was the actual key difference and suddenly switches when you go to a different site. What else can we say about that one?
David: For me, a company formal safety management arrangements, safety management systems, formal safety activities, when you're on a site and you get to know how that all works, it can feel very obvious, easy to understand, and easy to use. It's designed more for the ongoing management of that site.
When you're a subcontractor and you then come onto that site, and you look at all of this stuff that's being done, induction over here, checklist of form over there, and this meeting that you have to attend, it doesn't make necessarily that much sense. I think in this research, what was interesting was even not involving subcontractors in a lot of those activities, like you said, oh, I'm just going to be here for one day, so you don't need to do the induction or something like that, you've got arrangements that don't work or arrangements that aren't applied.
Drew: Yeah. I think we have an assumption that we don't tend to talk about a lot with safety management systems. We know that not everyone reads the safety management system. In fact, we know that hardly anyone reads it. We know that people tune in and out during training, inductions, and pre starts. But the assumption is that if you're on the same site or with the same company for an extended period of time, it just seeps into the way everyone works.
Even if you don't read it on this particular day, even if you weren't listening on that particular moment, you get a general sense of the way things are done the way things are supposed to be done. It creates a routine, a structure, and a regularity to work. Those mechanisms don't apply when people are only getting short, sharp exposures. They're highly reliant on hearing every word in the induction because every word might be important. It can't just be the case that they're going to hear that same induction over and over, they're going to hear different ones at different times in different places.
David: We even see in some organizations that the subcontractors can't access certain documentation, certain systems, and aren't involved in certain activities. It's not that it isn't applied or it doesn't work, it's just that they physically can't get involved in those safety management arrangements.
Drew: Yeah.
David: Let's move on. The second one then is that this expertise in work doesn't translate into expertise in safety. Do you want to overview that one?
Drew: Again, the theme behind the theme here is that most of the subcontractors that are involved in these fatalities had started off as very, very small, one or two people organizations and had grown. As they grown, whereas a large organization will have lots of specialization, in that small organization, lots of people are doing many different tasks. The owner of the organization does the books, sometimes they're driving the forklift, sometimes they're doing the training, and sometimes they're doing the supervision of other people.
There's lots more multitasking going on and a multi expertise, multitasking. It's far more often that a supervisor will need to step in and be the extra person doing a task, which takes them away from being a supervisor into being a doer because there's less defined roles and less opportunity to pull people from elsewhere in the organization.
The other thing is that the subcontractor may be called in because they've got expertise in a particular type of work in an environment where they don't have expertise. The classic thing there is electricians down coal mines. They're there because the coal mine needs an electrician, but they're not used to working in a coal mining environment.
They're not used to other hazards. They're not even necessarily aware of the electrical safety hazards, how those change, when you're in a coal mine. They'll often be at danger doing specialized work just because the environment has changed the safety of that work.
David: Yeah, I think there was another example in one of the accident reports around operating a certain type of equipment. It's one thing to say, yes, I've operated a loader before, but not necessarily operated that loader on that site, so unfamiliar roads, unfamiliar equipment.
I think in one of those fatalities, there was actually a functioning emergency brake that the operator, we can only assume, didn't have any knowledge of the emergency braking system on that particular piece of equipment. Yes, I've got general expertise in loader operations or something like that, but I may not have site specific expertise that's relevant to managing the risks for that specific task on that specific site.
Drew: That example of the loader is really quite representative. A subcontractor may often have to use equipment that's supplied by the principal contractor. They're just switching from whatever equipment happens to be available. Very often, they're less likely to own their own equipment, so they may in fact hire the equipment for that particular day to do that particular job.
When you're hiring equipment, you're likely to get a slightly different model for the equipment that you had last time. It does basically the same job, but it's got the brake in a different place, a slightly different function, a slightly different feature, or a slightly different tipping point. That regularity that you get when you're with a large company owning its own equipment, all the equipment is the same, breaks down when you're in a subcontractor who are hired specifically to create flexibility. They then become those sufferers of the flexibility that they're there to create.
David: The third theme from the research, Drew, is titled communication does not flow to the subcontractor from the layers above them. We'll talk a little bit about communication.
Drew: This is probably the most boring and least surprising finding from the study. I think the one thing to drive home here is just how hard this is. Getting information to subcontractors requires explicit effort, because there are so many barriers that can just stop it falling in. This is information like disruption changes to site conditions. Our normal way of distributing information about site specific conditions is maybe at our pre start briefing, but the contractor only comes in for two hours in the afternoon has not had the pre site briefing.
This tends to get worse as we have more players on site and more people coming in and out. I suspect myself that maybe there's a sweet spot when people are fully aware that they're going to have lots of subcontractors, they explicitly set systems up. As you get the first couple and as that number starts to increase, that's when communication really starts to break down.
There are other types of information like previous incidents that have gone wrong and safety alerts that might come down from a regulator. They're far less likely to reach subcontractors. They come centrally through the company's central management systems. They appear on the intranet, they get handed out through the company email. The subcontractors aren't on the mailing list, they aren't on the intranet.
They're not going to see that unless it's specifically handed to them as a piece of paper or sent specifically to them as an email. There's just got that less awareness of what's going on, both things that have gone well and things that have gone wrong. that might be important for managing their own safety.
David: Yeah, Drew. I think one of the incidents associated with that changes. There was an industry wide alert from the regulator a year prior or so about that sequence of events and the risk. I guess the large mining companies or in this case, the clients, set up to receive that information to update their processes, to communicate it. But that information isn't received directly necessarily by the subcontractors. There could be an assumption that everyone knows that you deal with this risk in this way, but you can't have that assumption with subcontractors because the information just doesn't easily flow to them.
I think also that the amount of complexity with communicating, like you said about how hard this is, is because you've got site managers, you've got procurement managers, you've got engineers, you've got the subcontractor management structure itself. Like you said, it's just an endless opportunity for information to not get to the person who's doing the work.
Drew: Yeah. The very idea of an industry wide alert, you've got to stop for a moment and think, okay, how do we identify everyone in that industry? Even in this imaginary perfect world where every single company that did mining got an alert about mining, the subcontractor that was killed was not a mining company. They were a vehicle maintenance company. They're only going to receive that alert if it comes first to a mining company, and that mining company makes a point of telling all of their subcontractors. There are always multiple layers. Whenever there's extra layers, there are extra chances for things to be lost.
David: Even that becomes point in time, because even if you made the effort to communicate with all of your contractors, then three months later you engage a new contractor with that deliberate effort to go back and look at that scope and what might this contract not know that we should provide them, we're starting to get in this conversation now beyond what I've seen companies being able to do in this space. Maybe we can deal with that without making practical takeaways.
Drew, the fourth thing then is this theme of safety work is viewed differently by subcontractor staff compared with the operators or principal contractors. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Drew: Remember, there are two conformations of existing theory and two new things that came out. Communication was one of the new things, technically new, but not that interesting. This particular one though, I think, was really insightful.
Safety is generally not a core operational task. We would like to say that safety is central and important. But the fact is that if the safety work doesn't happen, it doesn't actually prevent the work from happening. That ratio and calculation is different for a big long term organization and a smaller flexible organization. We hire subcontractors because we want short term thinking, otherwise we would just do that work ourselves as permanent employees long term.
When you're working on shorter time frames with more flexibility, then doing non core work has a much proportionally greater cost. Because of that, that means that things that would seem to be, oh that's just a little bit of extra for safety, but it's really important. For a subcontractor it becomes, that's a really big burden, it's not that relevant or important.
It's actually, what counts as reasonable to expect people to do becomes quite different depending on what time scale you look. We might talk about this in practical takeaways. It's really quite challenging that it becomes very, very important then that everything we ask subcontractors to do is of value and very, very important to make sure that there is some financial way of paying them for that value. Otherwise, it may seem a little bit strange, but it's not worth their while to care about safety, because caring about safety would be just such a big burden compared to the other work that they need to get done.
David: Yeah, I agree. Drew, there's this general expectation that all of the safety things get done. There's a couple of examples in the case studies. One was specifically, I think, about inspection and maintenance record keeping for safety, about equipment checks, and things like that, which didn't really impact the subcontractor on the given day because the equipment works or it doesn't work but just the time that it would take to complete all of that record keeping that the client wanted.
From a contractor's perspective, we're not getting paid to maintain these records, do all these checks, and follow your management systems. At best, you get a very efficient superficial compliance activity performed, which I think to this theme looks very different to what the client company is intending from that activity.
Drew: Just to drive the point home, it's not just about reluctance to do things that are of obvious value. Record keeping is more valuable for an organization that has got a horizon of a couple of years. Once you're looking a couple of years ahead, records become vital. If you're doing jobs that are only of a couple weeks, then keeping records isn't of that much value to you. It's a value to the larger organization, not to the small organization doing the work.
Another core example here is safety management systems. There's a minimum cost to establish and maintain a bare bones safety management system. I don't know exactly what it would be, it might be half an employee per year. If you're in an organization of 10,000 people, you might go well beyond that minimum cost and having a whole person working just on your safety management system. Maybe having a couple of people is still only half a percent of your workforce.
If you've got ten people, there's no way you can devote half a person just to your minimum quality safety management system. Of course, it's going to be taking shortcuts, having records not filled in, and having procedures that aren't there, because even the bare bones thing is an overhead that you can't afford.
David: I think in one of the examples in this research, the subcontractor like you mentioned earlier, was small and was working under the client safety management system, and then the client decided that, well, you're getting a little bit big now, you should probably have your own safety management system. Like you said, they went and got a consultant to give them something off the shelf.
The client had to keep rejecting this system as not being complete, not being adequate. I think it was a mismatch of expectation of expecting that company to create something equivalent to the quality and depth of a very large mining organization as a very small contracting organization. I just don't think that was going to work.
Drew: No, particularly not if you wanted to do systems to be able to talk to each other, to be able to share communications, and report up and down. You expect that subcontractor to work for other companies that have got other management systems that they have to interface with as well.
David: Drew, anything else you want to add to the research or the findings before we go to our takeaways?
Drew: No, that's fairly short, but I think that's a good summary of the findings. I don't want to overblow what was found.
David: Okay. I'll throw a couple of takeaways down here in the prep, and I'm keen to get your thoughts on it. The first one, you said it's not very interesting, the communication one, or maybe it's not very surprising.
I think the communication piece for me, the practical takeaway there is you need to have very dedicated and deliberate contractor communication processes. You can't rely on your existing toolboxes, emails, alerts, reporting systems and whatever your standard safety communication mechanisms are. You can't just rely on that information making its way to your contractors. I think an organization needs to have a very deliberate set of contractor comms processes that are two-way.
Drew: Yes. I'll go a step beyond that, David, and say that you don't just need systems, you need plans as well. You need a set of types of information that are going to need to be conveyed. Understanding that some of that is not just going to be at a particular point in time, It's going to be storing up information so that new contractors get a store of information from the last six months that may be things that have been sent out to all the previous contractors.
Also, it's got to actively manage the volume of that as well to make sure that you're not giving them so much information that they can't deal with it. That's why it needs to be dedicated. It needs to be something that is capable of doing that filtering, tailoring, prioritization, and time shifting. You can't just adapt your normal communication channels to just happen to also include subcontractors. It's not going to work.
David: The second takeaway I had there is around this idea that the safety management systems and formal safety arrangements don't suit the context of subcontractor work. In many of our safety management systems, you might just have one element that's contractor management. It might be one of 11 or 12 elements of your management system.
I'd almost go as far as to say that an organization may want to have a safety management system and then almost a completely separate but obviously interfaced contractor safety management system, which actually looks at all of the elements of safety management, all of the activities for safety, and how that apply in the context of contractors incident investigation, risk management, auditing, training, induction, leadership, all these things and go, okay, well, that's how we do it for our organization. But how do we actually do all of these things specifically with our contractors? I think at the moment, it's just like, we'll just include our contractors in all the normal stuff that we do.
Drew: Can I modify that slightly, David? There needs to be at least two different things. One of them is there has to be a system for managing contractors who are small enough that you don't expect them to have large systems of their own so that you can basically bring them into part of your own management system. They're not employees, but most of the aspects of safety are still going to need to be handled through your systems, because they don't have those systems themselves or the capacity to take on the management of those systems.
For other subcontractors, there needs to be a way of your safety management system interfacing with theirs without imposing undue burden, without expecting them to be able to modify theirs to interface with yours and to interface with the five other systems that they need to interface with. Every time you ask someone to pre qualify, you'll basically ask them to create a new interface onto their management system to meet the pre qualification. That's just not reasonable, that's passing work onto the subcontractors rather than taking responsibility for meeting the interface where it's at.
David: I like that, Drew. Thank you. The third that I had there is around verifying expertise. In the paper, you talked about that we pre qualify like you mentioned while we check for licenses and certifications. We make assumptions that people do this work all the time, they know how to do it safely, but being very, very clear that, what do I need to do to be confident that this contractor can manage their work in my specific context using maybe equipment that I provide, doing it in my underground mine, or something like that? They may have good task expertise, but do they have the expertise to manage the risk of that task in this situation? I think that needs careful cooperative discussion.
Drew: The idea of prequalification, we could have a whole separate podcast about it. It's a misunderstanding of the obligation. We are creating the work environment that the subcontractor is coming into. It's our obligation to make sure that that work environment is safe for them, and part of that means them understanding what it takes to work safely within our environment. Unless your pre qualification system is run by people who are also creating your environment, know your environment, and doing that matching, then you're not checking the right things through pre qualification anyway.
David: I think we should do that pre qualification podcast, Drew. Number four was about how we include critical non core work within the specific scope of the contracts, make those expectations clear, and obviously then pay our contractors for doing that. At the moment, we might be paying a contractor to drill a hole, replace some equipment, or build something for us. That's the core work, whatever it's going to take to actually build that thing.
If we want all these other safety activities and non core peripheral work so that the overall experience of that work is at the standard and the level of risk that we want, then we need to pay for that. Many of the contracts I see just have complied with all safety requirements. How's a contractor meant to cost that up and know what to do?
Clients should be very specific about all of the non core work expectations, and they should be included in work scopes, and then the contractors can give that work the same importance as getting the core tasks done.
Drew: Yeah. I see that one as an ethical responsibility. If you're not telling people specifically what long term safety work you want done and making sure that that's costed out, then you're implicitly asking people to skimp on that part of their quoting and their delivery. That's just not ethical.
David: Agree, Drew. The last one I had there was about maybe notwithstanding everything that we've talked about on this podcast. There was a comment that these longer term partnering arrangements or working with contractors over a longer period of time may mediate some of these challenges with subcontractors, because you do end up maybe getting to know each other's capabilities, expertise, build some communication channels, integrate your systems, and align on what's important to be done. Maybe more partnering, longer term relationships can moderate some of these challenges.
Drew: The slight modification I'd make to that one is I think for that to happen, safety needs a voice in the selection of subcontractors. It doesn't come directly from this study, but the number of times I've heard we select the subcontractors for cost, then we expect the safety team to sort it out, and get them up to standard rather than recognizing that actually your selection of subcontractors and your maintenance of those relationships is a core safety activity for both parties.
David: Yeah, maybe a bonus activity. A bonus takeaway, Drew, not consistent with the paper, but based on what you said is to align the KPIs of your supply chain team and your safety team. Because I did run into a situation in an organization where the supply chain team had an express KPI to lower supply chain costs by 10%. They went out, retended everything, and went to reduce cost. It meant the removal of certain contractors that the safety team had been working with three to five years to get up to a really good standard.
Obviously, the supply chain team based on their incentive, which was to find someone cheaper, introduced a whole lot of risk. Maybe that's the trade off the company wants to make, but that should be a really known trade off when teams are working slightly across purposes at times.
Drew: David, the question we asked this week is, why are subcontractors at high risk?
David: I think the short answer in some of it is that there are lots of filtered and missing communication towards contractors' gaps in situational specific expertise that don't get identified and just our broad safety management systems and arrangements that don't work well for the subcontractor context.
Drew: That's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. David, where can people get us these days?
David: LinkedIn, all your favorite podcast channels. We look forward to getting on track with fortnightly episodes for 2024.
Drew: Okay. Thanks, David.
David: Thanks everyone.