Who carries the burden? Labour fragmentation and digital safety

Digital approaches to health and safety should help construction sites to be safer places to work, but do they work equally well for staff and the self-employed? Melvin Keyani FCIOB, who sits on the CIOB HS&W Policy Review Panel, details why labour fragmentation must be considered when deploying digital safety approaches.

Construction remains one of the UK’s most hazardous industries, despite decades of regulatory intervention and sustained improvements in health and safety performance. Industry discourse has traditionally focused on specific hazards, unsafe behaviours, or individual competence.

More recently, attention has also turned to the growing use of digital safety systems, including app-based inductions, training platforms, inspection tools and reporting systems, which are often promoted as improving consistency, assurance and compliance across complex projects.

However, a less visible, yet equally influential factor, continues to shape how these systems function in practice: labour fragmentation.

In this context, labour fragmentation refers to the diverse and often unstable employment arrangements that characterise the construction workforce, including self-employment, agency work and layered subcontracting. These arrangements interact directly with digital safety systems, shaping who must repeatedly engage with them, how often compliance tasks are completed, and where the administrative burden of digitalisation ultimately sits.

Current workforce data indicates that approximately 35% of the UK construction workforce is self-employed or engaged through agency arrangements, with the remaining 65% employed through other contractual forms. At the same time, around 82% of the workforce operates in blue-collar, site-based roles, where exposure to physical hazards is greatest, while only 18% occupy white-collar, office-based positions.

These figures are significant because they describe an industry in which the majority of workers are both physically exposed to risk and required to interact with digital safety systems in demanding site environments.

Taken together, these characteristics create conditions in which risk, responsibility and organisational support are unevenly distributed. Digital safety systems, while designed to standardise safety management across fragmented projects, may therefore operate very differently for site-based workers than for office-based staff. Labour fragmentation does not affect all workers equally: instead, it shapes safety outcomes through several interrelated mechanisms that influence exposure to risk, access to training and the experience of digital compliance.

Health and safety legislation applies irrespective of employment status. In principle, all workers are afforded the same level of protection. In practice, however, fragmented labour arrangements often result in unequal exposure to risk and uneven access to safety resources, including appropriate PPE, adequate training and work equipment required to safely carry out daily tasks. Increasingly, this inequality is also mediated through the design and deployment of digital safety systems.

Self-employed and agency workers are more likely to move frequently between sites and employers, requiring continual adaptation to new rules, procedures and safety cultures. This mobility is now routinely accompanied by repeated engagement with multiple digital safety platforms, each with different interfaces, requirements and expectations.

As a result, workers may experience inconsistent induction quality, variable access to task-specific digital training and limited familiarity with site-specific risks that are often communicated primarily through app-based systems.

Moreover, economic pressures associated with insecure work can reduce workers’ willingness to challenge unsafe practices or refuse hazardous tasks, particularly where doing so may threaten future employment opportunities. In digitalised environments, this pressure can extend to compliance behaviour, with workers prioritising the completion of mandatory digital tasks to demonstrate compliance, even when systems are poorly aligned with site conditions or task realities.

These structural conditions matter because evidence consistently shows that self-employed workers are disproportionately represented in the HSE’s construction fatality statistics. Risk in construction is therefore not randomly distributed; it follows structural and employment lines, shaped not only by how work is physically undertaken, but also by how safety is administratively managed and digitally enforced.

Persistent skills shortages further intensify these inequalities. Under programme pressure, training, mentoring and competence development are often compressed or treated as secondary priorities. In a fragmented workforce, the consequences of this compression are unevenly felt, particularly where competence management is increasingly mediated through digital systems.

Self-employed and agency workers without guaranteed continuity or paid training time may be less able, or less willing, to engage in training and induction activities that fall outside their working hours. Where training is delivered primarily through digital platforms, repeated or poorly targeted inductions can be experienced as administrative hurdles rather than meaningful learning opportunities. This is particularly the case when identical content must be completed multiple times across different projects or systems, offering little additional value.

As a result, competence can become something that is assumed, self-certified or evidenced through digital records, rather than actively supported and developed through supervision, mentoring and contextual learning. When competence management is reduced to digital compliance, the likelihood of error, fatigue and unsafe shortcuts increases, especially in complex or time-pressured environments.

Over time, this dynamic can weaken both safety performance and trust in organisational systems. Digital safety platforms may provide assurance that processes have been completed, but they do not necessarily guarantee that competence has been meaningfully embedded or that workers feel supported to apply it in practice.

Digital systems are increasingly used to manage health and safety tasks in construction, including inductions, training, inspections and reporting. From an organisational perspective, these systems promise consistency, traceability and improved assurance across multi-employer sites. However, the experience at the workface is often more complex.

Site-based workers frequently report challenges such as repeated digital inductions covering identical content, unreliable connectivity in basements, plant rooms and enclosed spaces, difficulty interacting with touchscreens while wearing PPE, and limited training or technical support when systems fail. Over time, these issues contribute to frustration, fatigue and disengagement, particularly where digital tasks are layered onto already demanding physical work.

Collectively, these experiences give rise to digital compliance burden: the cumulative cognitive and administrative load imposed by mandatory digital systems. In a fragmented labour market, this burden falls disproportionately on workers who move between sites most frequently and who have the least paid time available to complete compliance activities.

From a safety perspective, this matters. Cognitive overload and distraction can reduce situational awareness, particularly in dynamic, high-risk environments where attention to changing hazards is critical.

Labour fragmentation is unlikely to disappear from the construction industry. The challenge for safety professionals and organisations is therefore not to eliminate fragmentation, but to design systems that reduce inequality rather than amplify it.

I suggest three principles to guide future practice.

Where risks are equivalent, organisations should avoid unnecessary repetition of generic inductions and recognise prior learning and competence. Modular, risk-specific inductions can maintain control while reducing administrative burden in a highly mobile workforce.

Specify digital systems as safety controls

Digital platforms should be treated as safety-critical tools. If systems cannot function reliably with PPE, in poor connectivity or under site conditions, they introduce risk rather than control it. Usability and reliability should be procurement requirements, not optional features.

Recognise and resource compliance time

Mandatory safety tasks must be planned, supported and paid. Expecting workers, particularly the self-employed, to absorb safety compliance time reinforces inequality and encourages workarounds that undermine safety objectives.

As construction continues to digitise, safety professionals should ask a fundamental question: are these systems reducing risk at the workface, or simply improving assurance at a distance? Labour fragmentation shapes who carries risk, who absorbs administrative burden, and who has a voice in safety decision-making. Addressing inequality in construction safety therefore requires engagement with structural conditions, not just individual behaviour. Without this shift, well-intentioned systems may continue to reinforce the very inequalities they seek to resolve

Melvin Keyani FCIOB is EHS director at Dornan, a doctoral researcher and is a member of the CIOB HS&W Policy Review Panel.