At Clayco, safety is personal. Every time an employee gets hurt on one of our jobs—whether it’s a scratch, a pinched finger, or something more serious—I treat it as if it happened to a member of my own family. In fact, everyone at Clayco is family.
I started this company in 1984 with no formal engineering degree and no prior construction experience—just a deep love for architecture, innovative buildings, and cranes. Before Clayco, I worked as a journeyman painter for my father’s industrial painting company, where unsafe business practices led to frequent injuries. I found this completely unacceptable.
When I entered the construction industry, I was shocked by how widespread the acceptance of serious accidents (and even fatalities) was. The industry viewed them as an unavoidable part of the business. From the moment Clayco was founded, we took a strong stand to avoid unsafe practices at all costs.
A Culture of Safety Innovation
Although we at Clayco have had extraordinary results in our safety program, we recognize that constantly improving our safety procedures and standards is essential in our industry. We continue to develop innovative solutions and management processes that have helped shape safety behavior across construction projects in North America. While we don’t take sole credit, I will say that our relentless push for safety reform has been recognized by the Associated General Contractors (AGC), the insurance industry, and even our competitors. We have openly shared every lesson we’ve learned to accelerate industry-wide safety improvements.
My personal safety journey began at an all-day training session at the Wood River Oil Refinery in Alton, Illinois. While many attendees grumbled about spending eight hours reviewing basic safety protocols, I was fascinated. At the time, hard hats were the bare minimum, and safety glasses were far from standard. The oil industry, notorious for unchecked fatalities and injuries, was finally starting to take notice—and so was I.
I immediately applied those early safety innovations to Clayco job sites, even when it put us at a competitive disadvantage. It was simply the right thing to do. We want our teams, partners, and customers to know we are tirelessly committed to maintaining their safety at all costs.
Leading Safety Standards in Construction
In St. Louis, Missouri, we became the first builder—and among some of the largest in the country—to mandate hard hats, safety glasses, and other safety innovations that are now industry standards. While many in the industry saw OSHA as an adversary, we saw an opportunity to collaborate. Today, Clayco has achieved more Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) status than any other builder in the country.
At the end of 2024, there were approximately 6.27 million employers in the United States. Only 2,000 of those companies have OSHA VPP status. Of those, only 67 companies are in the construction space. Clayco has not only been an OSHA VPP member for seven years (and counting) but has also been recognized as the first mobile workforce to receive OSHA’s VPP Star status in select states and the first to receive any such designation within one of our hyperscale data center customer’s global portfolio.
In 1999, after visiting a construction project in Mexico City where every worker wore a yellow vest, we introduced a high-visibility yellow shirt or vest policy across all Clayco job sites. Within three weeks, we had provided 30,000 yellow shirts and vests to our workers. This initiative caught the attention of contractors and subcontractors nationwide, who soon implemented similar policies.
Today, you can visit construction sites across the U.S., Canada, and South America and see the direct results of Clayco’s commitment to safety: high-visibility gear, improved project controls, and numerous measures that have significantly reduced workplace injuries.
A Shared Commitment to Safety with Record Setting Results
Whether it’s fall protection, on-site vaccinations, or having nurses on every job site—we share it immediately with our competitors, and they do the same with us. The result? Safer job sites for everyone.
Clayco has achieved the lowest Experience Modification Rate (EMR) in the industry of 0.40, an incredible feat given the size of our company and the complexity of our projects. Many of our clients have adopted our safety strategies, recognizing that no one should ever be hurt on a construction job. In fact, our goal is for workers to leave our sites healthier than when they arrived.
In 2024, Clayco’s job sites accumulated more than 28 million craft hours and achieved record-setting Total Recordable Incident (TRIR) and Lost Time (LTR) rates of 0.32 and 0.05, respectively. These metrics are 79% and 91% below (better than) national averages. Our TRIR on Mission Critical projects is even better, at 0.25.
Today, Clayco proudly upholds industry-leading safety performance, including multiple projects logging millions of hours worked with zero recordable injuries and being named a National Safety Council (NSC) award recipient seven years in a row.
Rest assured, we will continue to do our part to drive the industry forward. For our employees and those under our care, for the collective Clayco family–and for yours. Because of you, our safety journey will never end, and we will never be satisfied.
Safety isn’t just a priority—it’s a core value that defines everything we do.
