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As the mid-day break legilation comes to an end for another year, Peter Ward reports on the effect it has on MEP contractors and how much workers are benefiting from it's use.

Walking outside in the summer heat can be unpleasant for anybody in the Middle East, however picking up your tools and working at the peak of the hot season can be extremely dangerous. In the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar a mid-day break is enforced with the aim of getting construction workers out of the sunlight at the hottest times of the day to reduce health and safety risks.

In the UAE, from 12.30 to 3pm anyone working outside must be allowed time to rest and a place to get out of the sun. In Bahrain the law states that firms should allow from noon until 4pm for their employees working outside to rest.

Dr G Y Naroo of the Rashid Hospital Trauma Centre in Dubai explains how important this is for the workers: "With a patient who has heat stroke there is a very high mortality and morbidity [rate]; even for some who have recovered there is some sort of neurological damage."

Losing this amount of time in a day though can have a huge impact on projects and contractors have had to find a way of working with the banShift switching

One method in which contractors can avoid the issue is to switch shifts so that work is carried out either early in the morning or late at night. This means that no working hours are lost and the ban is respected. Rotary International contracts manager Martin Leath reveals: "We start early then take a mid-day break and make up the hours; that way the guys get a long break, but has it affected work? Not really."

The firm has only one project that has been affected by the break; staff on its other outdoor jobs have been put on nightshifts. Fellow contractor Drake & Scull also reports no negative impact on projects due to the mid-day break.

Quality, health, safety and environment manager Wael Salah explains: "We have been [operating] in this market for 40 plus years; our work programme takes into consideration any breaks and even emergency stoppages - it is already considered in our plans. We reschedule our timings to suit and need to increase our labourforce sometimes...but more or less it is not affecting our productivity."

Sensaire project director Alan Hart however, warns that the impact of the ban could be big, despite his firm being relatively unaffected: "If [a project] is just starting and you are exposed [to the direct sunlight] then it's going to have a massive impact [on programming]".

Company compliance

The percentage of companies in the UAE complying with the rule has increased over time. When it was first introduced in the UAE, 75% of companies in Abu Dhabi were found to be abiding by the law.

This year early figures from the Ministry of Labour suggested that this has risen to 99%. Statistics from other Emirates have also been encouraging: a Ministry official claimed in July that the number of companies in Sharjah complying with the regulations has hit 99.7%.

Hospitals in the UAE have been told to report any incidents of construction workers being admitted to hospital with heat-related illnesses during the time of the break.

However, this only applies for the period of the mid-day break and not long after it and there have been steady claims from hospitals that they are treating a large number of construction workers with heat-related illnesses.

Despite this, Naroo reveals that cases of heat-related illnesses are down this year: "For years during the peak summer time, in the peak of humidity, we always had many patients and maybe 30 or 40 patients every day.

But this year there have been very few patients." He adds that the reason for this is due to the "strict application" of laws such as the mid-day break by Dubai Municipality this year.

In 2007, by the end of the ban 617 companies in the UAE had been caught with employees working outdoors. This year inspections have been carried out, although some firms have yet to encounter them.

"I don't honestly know of any of our sites that have had visits," reports Hart. Those sites seen as "easy targets" may be seeing the most inspections, he adds: "If they can be seen from the road then [the inspectors] go in...hey seem to be picking on those because they are softer targets."

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