Construction worker death puts spotlight on lack of safety in the Kingdom

It's gets to be a bit amusing when you are living in Thailand to see the extremely lack of concern over safety when it comes to construction and anything involving the building of anything. This is particularly noticeable when dealing with smaller individual homes where there are apparently zero regulations about providing any sort of safety for workers. It seems to be kind of hard-wired into the culture that work-safety is a waste of time and money and it is very common to see people on job sites without any sort of protective equipment so far as to be wearing flip flops or even barefoot. Hard hats? You'll not find one of those on most job sites.

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It was just a day or two ago where a worker that was doing something on the BTS (the Bangkok Sky-train) just walked into an open hatch on a platform and fell to his death. While there is no word on how someone could walk into a clearly open hatch, I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone was scrolling around on their phone.

If that is the case we cant' really fully blame whoever was in charge of the repairs but one needs to ask, why was a hatch with such a large fall left open in the first place?

The media, the company involved in the repairs, as well as the government are scrambling to cover this up and make it look like it was an isolate incident but anyone that lives here knows damn well that this is extremely common. Well maybe not the dying part of it but the accident-prone nature of construction in Thailand is very dangerous.

A friend of mine ran a small construction company in the South of Thailand and he would tell me stories about how he would provide PPE (protective equipment) but nobody would use them and would groan and moan if they were forced to. Then, as soon as the boss would leave the site they would take all this gear off.

In the years that he was running this company multiple people died on his sites and in the western world at least, multiple deaths in the same small company would open up serious allegations and probably convictions of unsafe work environments. Maybe that is just a western notion though because he told me that this sort of thing is so common that they actually have an unofficial list of how much has to be paid out to workers should they suffer horrible injury or even death.

In the case of death, the payout was 100,000 THB which is just over $3000 paid to the family. That is just insane to me.

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In the big city of Bangkok, they do seem to at least try to put up the facade of having safety measures in place, especially when it comes to skyscrapers and municipal things like roads. But the above picture comes from a road under construction that simply collapsed while they were building it and multiple people were instantly killed.

Recently there was a rather large earthquake in Thailand as well as the surrounding countries and a large building that was under construction had 32 fatalities. Instead of addressing the lack of safety that exists all over the country, Thailand did what Thailand usually does and they blamed the Chinese company building the tower and accepted zero responsibility for the near complete lack of regulations regarding any of this.

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When things like this happen the media and government are very quick to publish images of the super fast response of emergency workers and shift the focus to that while kind of sweeping what made this happen in the first place, under the proverbial rug.

Now before anyone accuses me of naming, shaming, and blaming the government and lack of regulations on everything please refer back to my original story about my friend the contractor and how he provides safety equipment but nobody wants to use it. They see it as getting in the way of doing a job efficiently. I don't think that many of these workers are being FORCED into an unsafe work environment, there is just a culture of ignoring the dangers for some reason.

This isn't to say that Thailand should adopt an over-the-top comprehensive safety program that makes everything take 10 times as long, but perhaps the focus here should be to maybe look at what could be improved rather than simply doing what they often do, which is to find someone else to blame it on. The arrogance needs to be put on hold for a little bit while we figure out how to, i dunno, not having people die on construction projects.