On February 14th, the District Council and Turner Construction held a joint safety event at Columbia Business School to kick off the new Recordable Incident Rate (RIR) safety initiative. The event was held in conjunction with Turner’s morning huddle and aimed to communicate to members the importance of low incident rates.
RIR is a metric used to measure a company or a project’s safety performance. The lower the RIR, the better a company’s safety performance appears. By tracking RIR, companies can watch safety trends year over year to ensure work site safety is improving.
The morning huddle began with an overview of the work to be done that day and was followed by presentation by Eddie McWilliams, Director of Organizing, about the importance of safety. Eddie began by explaining the Experience Modification Rate (EMR) safety campaign that was launched last year to promote and educate members on the importance of zero accidents. EMR is the number used to gauge past cost of injuries and future chances of risk for a company. RIR is the number of incidents for a specific job site.
“We’re out there in a very competitive New York City construction industry. We all know we’re competing against nonunion contractors and developers. We can broaden that divide. Union carpenters are they way to go. What I’m asking union carpenters to do here today is to bring this to everybody else on the job…make sure everybody else knows what EMR and RIR are,” Eddie said.
To watch the full safety meeting click here.
