A comparative analysis between contractors' and inspectors' perceptions of the department of labour occupational health and safety inspectorate relative to South African construction

摘要

A doctoral study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness and performance of the Department of Labour (DoL) Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Inspectorate in South Africa. Information was sought and obtained from various respondents including building and civil contractors, OH&S consultants, project managers, DoL inspectors, and designers by means of a questionnaire survey. The salient findings of the study elucidate that the DoL OH&S Inspectorate is not perceived as effective in terms of OH&S or as a means of assuring compliance according to contractors in South Africa. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the perceptions of the contractors and the Department of Labour (DoL) inspectors in terms of the performance of the DoL OH&S Inspectorate. Mean scores, mean rankings, t-values and p-values enabled the perceptions of the two stakeholder groups to be analysed. Analysis of the contractors' mean responses (x_(contractors)) and the inspectors' mean responses (x_(inspectors)) revealed that six of the ten performance aspects had statistically significantly different mean scores, highlighting the contractors' perceptions as statistically significantly different to the inspectors' perceptions. This paper provides a discussion of the performance aspects relative to the DoL Inspectorate's responsibility of assuring OH&S, and benchmarks the current gap in perceptions between inspectors and contractors in South Africa.