Contact: Jeff Leieritz (202) 905-2104              [email protected]

For Immediate Release

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 1— Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) celebrates Safety Week 2017 with a call for the construction industry to pledge support for substance abuse prevention and implement additional safety processes that lead to world-class safety performance. According to a recent ABC report, member construction firms with a substance abuse program in place reduce their incident rates by more than one-third compared to the industry average, and those that implement proactive best practices in 20 key safety components reduce recordable incidents by up to 87 percent.

“Associated Builders and Contractors believes that every jobsite incident is preventable, and that it is our responsibility to help our members create the conditions to send every employee home safely each night,” said ABC Vice President of Health, Safety, Environment and Workforce Development Greg Sizemore. “ABC has tools proven to help members achieve world-class safety performance, including our Safety Training Evaluation Process, or STEP. Data from our 2017 Safety Performance Report shows that high-performing ABC STEP members are 770 percent safer than the industry average reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

To spread the word about the key role workplace substance abuse programs and policies play in keeping jobsites safe, ABC released a new video encouraging construction firms to increase awareness of the dangers of substance abuse and pledge to work toward eliminating substance abuse-related incidents.

ABC developed STEP in 1989 as a safety benchmarking and improvement tool designed to help contractors of all sizes analyze and improve their safety and loss prevention programs. Applying world-class processes dramatically improves safety performance among participants regardless of company size or type of work.

ABC’s 2017 Safety Performance Report tracked 35 data points from ABC’s 2016 STEP participants in construction, heavy construction, civil engineering and specialty trades to determine the correlation between implementing leading indicator use and lagging indicator performance, which is measured by the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) and Days Away and Restricted or Transferred (DART) rate.

ABC is a national partner in Safety Week 2017, a national, industry-wide effort to promote safety best practices and raise awareness of the importance of an uncompromising commitment to safety in the construction industry.