Is Industrial safety a joke?

Safety article two

Safety cannot be “Managed” or “Directed” by some overpaid executive. Safety cannot be a matter of convenience. Safety cannot be a random act or something you do only when someone is watching. Safety in an industrial environment should be a set of standards applied consistently and uniformly across the entire organization. When decisions about safety are based on the production needs of the machine or process the true intent of safety standards is compromised. The precedent thus established soon becomes common practice. The message heard by the employees is: safety is secondary to production and it is OK to bypass safety rules when production is needed.
Nearly all industrial employees know how to do their jobs safely. Each employee also knows how safety issues have been handled in the past. When a supervisor sets an example by putting production ahead of safety he can expect the same attitude from his workers. When a worker ignores a safety rule in order to make production (following a supervisor’s example) the supervisor is, in some degree, responsible for the employee’s actions.

The company safety manager (director, guru, czar, or some other title) is not nearly as concerned about your personal safety as he is about protecting the company from your lawyers and government agencies. His salary is justified by the potential losses he protects the company from. When the safety manager attends management team meetings nobody asks him about the condition of the most recent injured employee; instead he is asked, either directly or indirectly, what impact the injury will have on the company. There is discussion about disciplinary action against the injured worker in order to reduce the company’s possible liability. Disciplinary action for injuries is actually quite common because it helps reduce the company’s losses (the “safety manager’s primary function). The major shareholders in any organization are not worried about who gets harmed by their company’s pursuit of profit. There may be a few who could pass a lie detector exam while claiming to be interested in a low level employee’s well being. The majority would not even try to make the claim. The more paranoid about legal issues a company is, the more likely it is to actively keep track of how well the federal and state requirements are being met. Some companies do not even try.

Early Horror story:

In the early 70’s I worked at a factory producing shock absorbers. Several times someone would come around with a severed finger in a box (I’m NOT joking!) and tell us who it belonged to. There was discussion about how much a finger was worth in cash and the most recent payouts were brought up. (Would you sell an index finger for $1400?) I do not remember anyone trying to take the finger to the hospital or make any effort to prevent future incidents. One night (I worked third shift) I was sent to the area where the fingers were regularly cut off. Even at eighteen I worried about losing a finger. As I started working I discovered why fingers were being endangered. The operation required two push buttons to be pushed at the same time to start the cycle. The speed of the line was such that a second or two per part was the difference between staying behind and keeping up. Operators were tying a rubber bushing on top of one of the push buttons so that they could hit the button with an elbow and not wait to hit it with their hand. Occasionally the elbow hit the button before the hand was retracted. Another finger lost. I never heard of any effort to slow down the line or prevent overriding the intent of the two-hand safety. This was 30 years ago.

Here’s an example pointing to the lack of change over the years:

Recently an operator was injured by an unguarded pinch point. The machine had been hanging up at this point regularly and people were always having to un-hang it even as production continued. As one could easily anticipate, this finally leads to a significant injury. The line continued to run and the problem with the line was not corrected until the next shift so that production was not impacted. We even had to try to fix it during the ten minute break in production and we had to continue working on it as the line restarted after the break. A temporary patch made the situation better but we had to come back next break to further refine the solution. What is the message from this? What do the other people working in the area think is important? If you are a low wage worker on the line, being pressured to produce, would you feel empowered to shut down the line to address a safety concern. Of course not! You would do as this injured worker did. You would try to clear the jam quickly and keep on working.
Few of the people who work at this level of industry have access to articles like this and many immigrant workers do not understand their rights well enough to stand up to a production-oriented supervisor or team leader. If you are one of these supervisors or managers take some time to rethink your policies. Have some respect for people’s safety beyond the government requirements. Work to improve your attitude and the way your organization treats safety. Simply ending each daily shift meeting with “Work Safe” is not enough!
D. Page


Ps: If you work in manufacturing you must be aware of your rights. You do not have to work in unsafe conditions. More importantly you must watch out for yourself, no one around you can be counted on to watch out for you. If you can, after keeping you safe try to keep your co-workers safe too. Not one person in the company management, the state government or the federal government is watching out for you.