Committed to Safety: Mortenson Achieves Important Milestone

The risks are real in construction, and it requires a never-ending focus to ensure every single worker goes home safe each day. In an industry that carries inherent risk, we recently announced, along with our trade partners, we have not had a recordable job-related illness or injury on any of our Phoenix-based projects for a full year.

The construction industry traditionally has higher than average safety incident rates compared to other occupations. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2019 – the last full year reported – there were approximately 2.8 non-fatal construction-related recordable incidents per 100 full-time workers. A recordable incident is a work-related illness and any injury which results in loss of consciousness, restriction of work or motion, transfer to another job, or requires medical treatment beyond first aid.

This milestone was achieved by more than 1,000 company team members and trade partners, who worked more than 800,000 hours of work across 14 projects in the state of Arizona. Those workers went home safely to their families every night for the last 365 days as part of our company's dedication to protecting our employees, customers and partners through our long-standing Zero Injury safety program, which requires team members to be ever-vigilant.

To reach this milestone as a company and with our trade partners, we focused on reducing hazards through a variety of practices including 5S, scheduling and planning, quality management and collaborative execution, and establishing comprehensive safety cultures on its projects.