Our goal is that anyone who interacts with our operations returns home safely to their family. We consider this a moral imperative, and it is the reason health and safety is our company’s foremost value and priority.

Our efforts to offer our employees and contractors a safe and healthy work environment and to provide for our communities’ wellbeing directly contribute to our priority SDGs 8, 9 and 11 as well as to SDG 3.

At CEMEX, Health and Safety has long been our top priority. The unprecedented challenges of 2020 underscored the importance and relevance of keeping it so. As soon as the COVID-19 threat emerged, we activated our local, regional, and global Rapid Response Teams to implement preventive measures in response to this worldwide health crisis.

Throughout the pandemic, CEMEX maintained constant communication with government authorities and maintained the strictest requirements as we worked to safeguard our people and safely deliver to our customers the products and services needed to ensure the continuity of essential activities.

Our Path to Becoming an Injury-free Company

We are constantly working towards our ultimate goal of zero injuries worldwide at every location—our Zero4Life commitment. We believe that zero injuries and fatalities are possible, and, to that end, we continually renew our determination to protect our people.

We continued to make progress in most of our countries in 2020, with 96% of our operations achieving zero employee and contractor fatalities and Lost Time Injuries (LTIs). These results provide both motivation and clear evidence that our Zero4Life commitment is producing positive outcomes and becoming a reality across the vast majority of our sites.

Our 0.5 employee LTI frequency rate has remained a positive benchmark for a global company in our industry for several years. Sadly, there were 3 employee and 4 contractor fatalities, 5 of which occurred away from our premises. We are committed to maintaining our positive momentum on this important health and safety journey.

• We have continued to reduce the number of fatalities year-over-year but acknowledge zero is the only acceptable number.
• We reduced the total number of injuries involving employees and contractors. Progress in the past decade has derived in 77% LTIs reduction.
• 85% of our operations achieved zero employee and contractor Total Recordable Injuries (TRI’s).

Contractor Safety

Consistent with our Zero4Life commitment, we are not only dedicated to the safety of all of our employees, but also to that of our contractors. Accordingly, we continue to focus on contractor management and driving safety in our various global campaigns and initiatives. Each injury and each fatality are analyzed carefully to identify root causes and required actions to prevent future incidents.

Our Contractor Health and Safety Verification Program is designed to confirm the practices and credentials of contractors who work on our behalf. Working with our Global Procurement team, we evaluate contractors’ health and safety practices through a specialized third-party organization that utilizes a data-driven system. The verification checks for regulation compliance, liability policies, risk premiums, manuals and procedures, and applicable training and accreditations, among other requirements. This evaluation helps us to verify that contractors know and comply with health and safety processes and keep safe while working with us.

As part of our Contractor Health and Safety Verification Program, in 2020, we reached our goal of evaluating at least 82% of our company’s procurement contractors spend. To achieve this goal, we engaged our operating countries and worked closely with our Health and Safety Functional Network.