By John Hamilton
President, Greater Detroit Building Trades Council

Professionals from all over Michigan's construction industry gathered during the Dec. 14 meeting of the Great Lakes Construction Alliance to review a report card on the Alliance's Safe2Work construction safety training effort. The CD-ROM based program has been winning endorsements from project owners and contractors alike.

Built on a series of 14 modules, the program has already been completed by nearly 40 hard working men and women in southeastern Michigan. Several thousand more have completed at least one of the modules. In December it became part of the apprenticeship training program provided by Ironworkers Local 25. It's being used by other unions and still others are actively considering it. And already letters of endorsement for Safe2Work have been received from two very prominent project owners - Detroit Edison, a DTE Energy Company, and General Motors Corp.

"This gives me a level of assurance that we have a consistent safety training program on our (construction) sites, and that we have a drug-free/alcohol-free work force," Douglas R. Gipson, DTE Energy's executive vice president for power generation and chief nuclear officer, told the meeting's audience. "This is also a way the building trades leadership is providing value to us. . .I think this is going to pay big dividends as you go forward." Gipson is in charge of approximately $400 million a year in construction for his utility company.

Mike Mayra, construction group manager of GM's World Wide Facilities Group, was equally complimentary. He praised the program's "success in bringing us to act together, to do the same things regarding safety" in making progress toward the goal of injury-free construction careers. Deborah Martin of GM's Safety Task Team agreed, saying the automaker has established a goal of having all of the construction trades on its projects enrolled in Safe2Work.

Working for the Alliance, the training program has been developed by Coastal Training Technologies Corp. At the meeting Susan DeLong, its vice president for Safe2Work, presented a new videotape on the effort and demonstrated the newly redesigned Safe2Work web site, accessed at www.safe2work.com. The revamp was influenced by concepts pioneered by Yahoo to speed up the site for those forced to rely on telephone dialups for Internet access.

Using state-of-the-art technology providing both privacy and security, the website not only stores and provides access to workers of the status of their safety training and drug and alcohol tests, it also permits construction employers to confirm it as well. This reduces redundancy. When enrolled in Safe2Work, as they move from construction site to site workers no longer have to sit through safety videotapes they've watched so many times they can recite their scripts from memory. They also don't have to keep taking drug test after drug test for the same reason, having become a participant - under the MUST (Management & Unions Serving Together) program, created by the GLCA - that provides both scheduled and random testing.

To date some 52,090 workers have been registered in the Safe2Work system along with 1,300 employers. Of that amount, over 29,000 have taken drug and alcohol tests during 2001 under the MUST program, with approximately 95% passing them. That's far above the industry's national average passing rate of approximately 88%. It remains MUST's goal, however, to continuously improve its test results.

By providing a centralized and standardized program, MUST eliminates the need for project owners to implement their own for insurance reasons. Experience is already showing that too many drug and alcohol testing programs competing against each other often leads to complicated and confusing situations. In Washtenaw County alone there currently are six different drug-testing programs.

The differences in policies and rules are enough to frustrate both workers and contractors, generating unnecessary misunderstandings and stress.

Safe-2-Work is set up to take some of that frustration out of the process.