Working Around Other Trades

On a busy job most of the hazards around you were made by somebody who does not work for your company, does not report to your foreman, and will be gone before you find out what they left.

1926.16 puts overall responsibility on the prime contractor for compliance across everything under the contract, and that responsibility is not relieved by subcontracting the work. But the standard cannot make anybody talk to anybody, and that gap is where people get hurt.

The classic ones

• Somebody working above you who does not know you are there, and no barricade between.
• A cover, a rail or a barricade removed by a trade who needed the access and did not put it back.
• A hole cut in a floor for a duct, a pipe or a conduit and left open until the fitting arrives.
• Your lockout removed by somebody who needed the panel on, or a circuit re-energised by another crew.
• Cords, hoses and welding leads across everyone's route.
• Hot work above a trade using flammables below, or vice versa — the two crews are twenty feet apart and neither knows.
• A crane or a lift swinging over an area another company is working in.

What to do about it

• Go and tell them. Directly, before you start, not through two offices. Thirty seconds of "we're cutting this floor at ten, here's where" prevents most of the list above.
• Ask what is happening above and below you, every day, because it changes daily.
• Barricade and sign your hazard for people who do not know your work. A cone means nothing; a barricade with a sign saying what and until when means something.
• Never remove another trade's protection. Not a rail, not a cover, not a barricade, not a tag, not a lock. If it is genuinely in the way, find whoever owns it. If you cannot find them, it stays.
• Hand it over properly. If you take something down to work, you put it back before you leave, or you hand it to a named person who accepts it. "I told someone" is not a handover.
• Report the hazard even when it is not yours. Especially then. The other crew's open hole is going to be walked into by your crew, and by them.

Site rules are the site's

Whichever company signs your cheque, the rules on the job are the job's — access, permits, PPE, hot work, sign-in, the muster point, the site speed. Learn them on the first morning, and if two sets of rules conflict, the stricter one applies until somebody senior sorts it out.

And the reporting

If a hazard belongs to another company and it does not get fixed after you have asked, escalate it to the GC. That is not going behind anyone's back — it is the mechanism that exists precisely because no single employer controls the whole site.