Steve R, for the me question of work shorts isn't one of liability or necessarily safety. Granted there are some safety concerns. Had a sticky worm drive guard not close, my heavy jeans grabbed the blade as the saw kicked down, with shorts on part of my thigh would be gone. For the most part though, I see it more as a potential productivity loss issue that can easily be avoided.
There's lots of crap on rehab jobs. Pieces of lath sticking out, nails, splinters, stuff falling over and swiping you,etc. Even a good clean jobsite has issues for limited time periods. Guy walking around with shorts on, scrapes against something, he'll get scraped or cut and bleed. Depending on the severity of the encounter, I'm losing 5,10, 30 or more minutes of productivity out of that guy. Clean the scrape, stop the bleeding, make sure he is Ok, etc. Then he's also probably going to work a bit slower the rest of the day. Guy with shorts on has to kneel down on the floor to perform a task more productivity loss potential. Kneels down without knee pads and gets something stuck in his kneecap; or he has to go get his knee pads out of the truck. Either way, wasted time.
A guy with work pants on avoids these issues. Work pants can easily absorb at lot of the mentioned encounters and allow the worker to keep on working. At the end of the day, he's been more productive and helped keep the job on schedule.
As far as wearing gloves using circular saws or drills, I've seen too many gloves get caught up on sticky blade guards, grabbed by a splinter or torqued by a drill. As much as the idea of wearing gloves to protect hands seems like a good one. Experience has shown the opposite to be true. Gloves and power tools don't mix well.
My old man was a GC. I've been on jobsites since I was 7 or 8. I still do a lot of residential rehab along with other stuff.
