Safety not always simple

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:56:24 GMT

I was 8 years old the first time I got injured on a construction site. A half-finished house looked like a big jungle gym to me, so I climbed all over the place in my Keds and eventually stepped on a nail. I limped home, got a lecture from my Dad, and then got a tetanus shot. So you might think I’d know better than to run a photo on the cover of Fine Homebuilding showing a carpenter wearing sneakers. The cover of our April/May issue (and the article that goes with it) has resulted in a number of emails criticizing us for running the photo and has spawned a lengthy Breaktime discussion on safety. The controversy raises a number of questions.

How do we get our cover photos?

According to a New York Times article several years ago, Men’s Health telephones the cover model three months before the shoot so he can start doing extra sit-ups and then spends as much as $70,000 for a single photo. For our cover, we gave assistant editor Justin Fink a camera and sent him to a Rhode Island job site. He spent about $43 (lunch for the crew) and came back with his first cover photo.

Who decides what’s safe?

OSHA regulations are black and white: “Residential construction workers must wear shoes or boots with slip-resistant and puncture-resistant soles.” But safety is gray. It’s relative. You can’t build a house and be 100% safe while doing it. It’s always a question of how safe is safe enough, and no two people are likely to answer the same way all the time. We reject some photos because they feature flagrant OSHA violations. Others we reject because they make us (usually me) nervous. And sometimes we’ll run a photo with a violation or a questionable practice because the issue does not seem egregious. Worst of all, though, we sometimes fail to notice a safety issue and learn about it later from our readers. That happens less than it used to.

Are my colleagues and I journalists, charged with accurately presenting the realities of a construction site, or are we educators, charged with promoting safe work habits?

We publish articles about how to do things so that readers can learn from them, which clearly makes us educators. But the reason people trust Fine Homebuilding is that the articles are written by professional builders, about their own experiences, on actual jobs. Much of the magazine’s value comes from its veracity. We tell it like it is, and we show it like it is.

Should Justin have insisted that the carpenter put on a pair of work boots?

We would never hand a carpenter a new tool and insist that he use it in a photo because the manufacturer advertises with us. But we have been known to hand people safety glasses. And I once refused to photograph a guy who was wearing sneakers while pouring concrete and actually walking in the caustic stuff (he later ended up in the emergency room). But how much can we as journalists stage a photo without it looking staged? At what point do people stop trusting us because they don’t believe what they see in our pages? What if every photo in Fine Homebuilding showed only builders wearing boots, safety goggles, hearing protectors, respirators, and hard hats? What if we never showed someone standing on the top step of a stepladder or working on a roof without a harness? Would some people stop reading? I’m thinking particularly of those testosterone-charged, it-will-never-happen-to-me 25-year-olds like I used to be until I stuck my hand into a tablesaw. And if they stop reading, we lose our chance to teach them anything.

Does the fact that we put that photo on the cover send a message that Fine Homebuilding endorses the wearing of sneakers on construction sites?

Some workers believe that sneakers, with their flexibility and superior traction, are actually safer than boots when you’re working on a roof. (Yes, the fellow on the cover is standing in an attic, but he spent most of his day on the roof.) But if you’re unlucky enough to have an OSHA inspector turn up at your job, that argument won’t keep you from being fined.

If I had it to do over, would I still that photo on the cover?

The cynical response would be that I’ll let you know after I see how well the issue sells on the newsstand. But the real answer is yes, I would run that photo again on the cover. It’s a beautiful photo, and rare, too, to get such a beautiful shot of what is often an ugly process, remodeling. It captures a magical moment, opening a roof to light and views that weren’t there before. And I think it celebrates the people who do such work (even if they make questionable choices in footwear), the people who suffer the heat, who eat the dust, and who risk the injuries in order to build our homes or make them better.

Better Than Plumb

Safety not always simple