How to Break the Silence of Subcontractors

Abstract

Research on risk management in subcontracting networks has emphasized the analysis of abuses committed and their consequences on the health and safety of workers. In this chapter, we pay special attention to experiments that have attempted—successfully—to mitigate, or even revert said abuses. They have achieved that in a “projects industry”, as it is the case for construction, a subcontracting-intensive activity. Our goal was to find some common traits between the experiments, beyond the different contexts in which they were embedded, to obtain some general guidelines that can be applied in different contexts with identical results. The most important of these guidelines is in the title of the present text: to overcome the silence of workers and managers in contracted companies, building bonds of trust, based on a real delegation of responsibilities and on the active listening of their perspectives and recommendations.