Subcontracting, Repeat Latent Failures and Workplace Disasters

Abstract

AbstractSubcontracting, the subletting of work tasks creating a hierarchy of contractual relationships (especially multi-tiered subcontracting), is a centuries-old form of work organisation but has grown substantially since the mid-1970s, including Uber-type arrangements facilitated by digital surveillance and platforms and global supply chains (Nossar in The regulation and management of workplace health and safety: historical and emerging trends, 100–122, 2020). Evidence that subcontracting arrangements can exacerbate health and safety risks (including injury rates, exposures to harmful substances and worker mental wellbeing) is also not new, being extensively documented by government reports and research from the late nineteenth century (see for example Gregson and Quinlan in Labor Hist. 62:534–550, 2020; Quinlan in Int. J. Health Serv. 43:721–744, 2013; Quinlan et al. in Saf. Sci. 57:283–292, 2013)). This paper focuses on the connection between subcontracting and workplace disasters, how to understand their causation and what remedial measures can be taken to minimise such incidents. To do this, it draws on the Pressure, Disorganisation and Regulatory Failure (PDR) model (Bohle et al. in Work Stress 29:114–127, 2015) and the Ten Pathways framework for analysing death and disaster (Quinlan in Ten pathways to death and disaster: learning from fatal incidents in mines and other high hazard workplaces, Federation Press, Sydney, 2014).