LEEDing construction safety a Natural Step

摘要

After the sixth construction worker in six months died at the $9.2 billion MGM Mirage CityCenter construction site, workers went on strike citing conditions were unsafe and Perini Building Co. was being unresponsive. It lasted only one day, but the larg-est-ever safety related strike in Las Vegas at the largest-ever private construction project in the United States attracted national attention. I was in Las Vegas at the time, and witnessed a tableau of 20 or so unmoving cranes looming over a complex conglomeration of structural steel and partially clad towers, animated only by an ant-like march of picketers. The words "safe" and "safety" appear only one time each, and both in reference to lighting design. The draft of LEED 2009 under public review does not enhance LEED's concern for work-site safety. There exist measures that LEED easily can adopt, such as OSHA 29 CFR 1926, "Safety and Health Regulations for Construction." And there is precedence. Sweden's Natural Step framework for sustainability, which is gaining legs in the United States and has been talked about being adopted by LEED, addresses safety indirectly. The fourth of its four Framework elements states, "In a sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs." Workers being subjected to unsafe or unhealthy conditions on a green-building construction site, being paid unfairly low wages, or being subjected to discriminatory practices, conflicts with this criterion.