‘In the air’ and below the horizon: migrant workers in UK construction and the practice-based nature of learning and communicating OHS

Abstract

Local, tacit and normally unspoken OHS (occupational health and safety) knowledge and practices can too easily be excluded from or remain below the industry horizon of notice, meaning that they remain unaccounted for in formal OHS policy and practice. In this article we stress the need to more systematically and routinely tap into these otherwise ‘hidden’ communication channels, which are central to how everyday safe working practices are achieved. To demonstrate this approach this paper will draw on our ethnographic research with a gang of migrant curtain wall installers on a large office development project in the north of England. In doing so we reflect on the practice-based nature of learning and sharing OHS knowledge through examples of how workers’ own patterns of successful communication help avoid health and safety problems. These understandings, we argue, can be advanced as a basis for the development of improved OHS measures, and of organizational knowing and learning.

Keywords:

• Communication
• ethnography
• migrant workers
• occupational health and safety
• tacit skill

Notes

1. All names and identifiers have been anonymized in this article.

2. This paper is based on a chapter published in the book Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry (Pink et al., 2012). We thank Routledge and Taylor & Francis for granting permission to reuse this material.

3. Site Safety League Tables are usually managed by the main contractor using factors such as a ‘risk rate matrix’ (differentiating between high risk and low risk trades) and the number of workers employed, etc., which can have inevitable bearing on the incidence of accidents on site, although some of the categories involve more subjective assessment, such as that of the ‘attitude’ of the workers.

4. This idea of a collective manufacturing of individual and embodied skills, which develop and operate below the level of consciousness or articulation, resonates strongly with the concept of habitus. Indeed, Wacquant (2004, p. 16), in his ethnography of prizefighting, introduces the term ‘pugilistic habitus’ in relation to forms of bodily apprenticeship; that is, an individual mastery of a craft whose occupational apprenticeship is collective, with the boxing gym seen as ‘a social and moral forge’ (Wacquant, 2009, p. 147). While it goes beyond the scope of this paper, interesting parallels could be drawn with Paap’s (2006, p. 180) discussion of the ‘collective assertion of the “pigness” identity’ which she encountered when working in construction.

5. While now fraught with dated and racist assumptions of migrant labour, that ‘very backward races are unable to keep on at any kind of work for a long time’, Marshall (1960) makes early observations of the distinct skill of trade communities and how ‘we are apt to regard as commonplace those excellences which are common in our own time’ (p. 205).

6. We are aware that the architect’s marking up of the panels was seen as an unusual practice and that this is a very hands-on interpretation of his role for onsite supervision and inspection of curtain wall installation.