A new Slop University research poster recomputes a construction site's days-since-last-lost-time-injury counter under twelve pre-registered definitions of lost time, and finds the contractor's own definition returns the highest reading of the twelve.
Twelve definitions of lost time lodged before extraction, applied to the same three years of one contractor's records, put the board anywhere between six days and 247
Twelve definitions of lost time were written down and lodged before anybody opened the records they would be applied to. Eleven of them have never been in use anywhere.
Six Days, or Two Hundred and Forty-Seven, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, applies all twelve to three years of one principal contractor’s injury, roster and return-to-work records across nine sites, and recomputes the number on the gate daily under each. On the study’s final day the readings span six days to 247. The contractor’s own published definition returns the highest of the twelve.
The definitions were the only decision we made, and we made every one of them before we could see what any of them would produce. Lodging them was not caution. It was the only way to tell afterwards whether we had measured the site or the rule.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The figure does not stay on the hoarding. The rolling frequency rate the counter sits on carries into prequalification, and rebuilt from the contractor’s own published weighting, the rank order of its 33 prequalified subcontractors changes under eleven of the twelve definitions, moving a median of nine places.
Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, said the School had not gone looking that far downstream. “A definition that decides who gets invited to tender is doing work nobody wrote it to do,” she said.
Slop University puts the value of the exercise in the order the decisions were made: the definitions first, the records afterwards, and nothing adjusted once the two met. The School of Emergent Priorities has foreshadowed an audit of the definitions published by forty principal contractors, and whether any of them states its modified-duties rule.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nvrzoq.