ASSESSMENT OF LOST LABOUR CLAIMS IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN NIGER DELTA REGION, NIGERIA.

Abstract

Claim in the construction industry is becoming spurious and worrisome particularly to clients and consultants. In many of such claim circumstances, labour continues to be a contentious issue. Inefficient use of labour in construction site arising from disruption, work acceleration and brief’s extension often results to lost labour in terms of man-hours. This research responded to the inquiry of lost labour claim in construction projects by investigating the causes of lost labour in construction projects, assessing reliability levels of lost labour estimating methods, identifying the extent of contribution of professional towards the occurrence of lost labour, and evaluating the time and condition of payment for lost labour claim in construction projects using a survey design approach and archival data from a target respondents of registered professionals in the construction industry. Stratified and systematic sampling techniques were adopted for this purpose. A total of 12 construction projects with 109 work items Man Hour losses were tabulated from archival data using the Leonard and Moselhi computation method. A total of 192 respondents including clients, contractor and professionals served as sources of primary data derived by scientific reduction of 261 population size using sample size formula to form a generalizable representation of 74%. Data collected were analyzed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS; ver.19.0) by simple percentage, mean score, spearman correlation, Regression analysis and analysis of variance. The study revealed that lost labour been the aggregate difference between baseline productivity input and actual productivity output can be estimated on the basis of Man-hour earned, Man Hour Estimated and Man Hour Expended. Predicting lost labour value was one of the difficulties associated with estimating lost labour. Accordingly models were developed for testing the reliability levels of the estimating methods using the various methods of tracking lost labour which were identified as workers activity timing, schedule of labour Day work, appropriation of gang size, weather forecast and instantaneous records of labour output. The study established that of the causes of lost labour in construction sites, site conditions, natural disaster, adverse weather, political and economic instability are lead factors. Contemporary literature cited in this study showed that, the various methods for estimating lost labour were inconsistent; however, this study revealed that the specialty industry studies method and its variants are most reliable in terms of giving repeatable results. This study also revealed that the engineers amongst all the construction professionals are frequently behind lost labour occurrence. It concluded that claim for lost labour should be awarded and paid for immediately on satisfactory compliance of the status requirements of the project and further recommended that the specialty industry studies method should be used to estimate such claim.