Who Gets to Design Safety? Power, Hierarchy and Worker Voice in Construction Risk Management

Abstract

The construction industry remains among the most dangerous occupations in the world and safety management in this industry remains hierarchical in nature, being designed by engineers, regulatory agencies, and site managers and not by those who actually face the highest risk of danger. This paper argues that this asymmetry in who gets to design safety is systemic, arising from the intersection of organisational hierarchy, national power distance, and multi-tier subcontracting, all of which erode both accountability and worker voice. Drawing on a theoretical framework that integrates the safety-voice, power-distance, and systems-theoretic accident model and processes (STAMP) literatures with a structural analysis of Istanbul’s construction sector, the paper shows how legal, contractual, and cultural mechanisms suppress the feedback processes that resilience-oriented safety management depends on. Drawing on Turkish labour-law thresholds for union recognition, subcontracting data, and a case of worker protest during the construction of one of Istanbul’s largest infrastructure projects, the paper identifies three mechanisms of exclusion: statutory representation thresholds that structurally exclude construction workers, subcontracting chains that diffuse responsibility for safety outcomes away from the workers who bear the risk, and organisational hierarchies that discourage safety voice long before it reaches any formal channel. The paper concludes with a set of design principles for reintegrating worker feedback into safety control structures, offered as a contribution to resilience engineering practice.