The number one job of a safety director is to protect their employees from harm. Harm can come from many different directions and can strike an employee in any number of ways and places—the head, the hands, the feet, eyes, ears, nose, lungs, heart. It could be excessive heat, excessive cold, excessive sunlight, toxic chemicals and gases, spills, falls. It could come from equipment, vehicles, dry rot, asbestos, combustible dust, animals, electricity, fires, floods.
The list goes on and on, of course, as every workplace has its own unique potential to expose workers to some kind of harm. And for just about every possible danger, there is a corresponding solution to prevent it, or at least contain it.
But what if the biggest risk factor to your employees’ health and safety isn’t any of those things mentioned above? What if you—the safety manager—are yourself the biggest threat to your workers?
In a recent poll of its members, TeamBlind, a community app for the workplace, asked: What is the main source of employee burnout at your current workplace? Some of the most frequently cited responses include: work overload, toxic culture, lack of career growth, and insufficient rewards. But by far the number one cause of employee burnout is: poor leadership and unclear direction.
Now, burnout doesn’t refer to the occasional stress that all of us experience from time to time on the job. It’s not the typical employee grumble about being overworked and underpaid, or the wish that Friday would hurry up and get here already. According to Psychology Today, burnout is “a state of chronic stress that leads to: physical and emotional exhaustion; cynicism and detachment; and feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. When in the throes of full-fledged burnout, [employees] are no longer able to function effectively on a personal or professional level.”
Various university studies in recent years, including those conducted by Harvard, Binghamton University and the University of Manchester, indicate that poor leaders—in popular parlance, toxic bosses—are often the culprit for an employee’s high blood pressure, depression, substance abuse, overeating, heart attacks, and other physical, psychological and emotional issues. It should be pointed out that merely being inexperienced or not-a-people-person doesn’t make somebody a toxic boss. The type of boss that can burn out employees is one whose behavior is consistently abusive, one who takes a tangible delight in inflicting emotional harm on his or her workers. As Lancaster University’s Cary Cooper once put it, ““Nobody damages your health more in the workplace, potentially, than your manager.”
Here are just some of the ways that burnout can affect an employee (and by extension, the company itself): chronic fatigue, forgetfulness or lack of attention to details, dizziness, anxiety, lack of productivity, anger, absenteeism, apathy, poor performance. Now imagine a scenario where an employee suffering from one or more of these traits is, let’s say, working at a construction site, or driving a forklift, or handling hazardous materials. Not a pretty picture, is it?
One of the most popular comic strips of all time is Blondie, although more often than not the main focus of the strip is Blondie’s husband, the hapless Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood works for Julius Dithers, owner of a construction company and as toxic a boss as the workplace has ever seen. In a recent Sunday strip, as part of a daydream sequence, Dithers clubs Dagwood over the head, chokes him, kicks him, yells at him, drags him by the feet, lifts him over the head, and tosses him out the door as he fires him. When his wife asks him why he’s in such a good mood, Dithers says, “I was just thinking how much I love going to work each day.”
While Dithers’ constant verbal and physical abuse of his employees (mostly Dagwood) is played strictly for laughs in the comics and Hollywood has mined the entire premise of “Horrible Bosses” for comedic gold, this kind of workplace bullying is definitely no laughing matter. The damage that bad bosses can inflict upon their employees’ health, to say nothing of their company’s financial health, can be enormous. According to Inc., bad bosses cost the economy roughly $360 billion per year in lost productivity, partly because employees with bad managers tend to slow down, purposefully make errors, hide from their boss, take longer breaks, or just generally fail to do their best work.
Safety managers, probably due to the nature of the job, tend to be the least prone to displaying this type of bad boss behavior, but they need to be sensitive to recognizing when this type of abuse occurs at their companies, especially among their managerial peers in other departments. Being proactive is one way we all can ensure that this type of toxic manager is an endangered species.
Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: “The regulatory climate is concerning. Excessive governmental regulation and inconsistent enforcement have created an over-taxing burden on safety budgets, staff time allocations and workload burnout. Regulations interfere with proactive safety leadership and increase risk of unsafe behaviors as employees perceive the regulatory and legal requirements of training as compliance being more important than the relational aspects of safety coaching.”
That’s just one of the hundreds of comments we received from our 2018 National Safety Survey, but it pretty well encapsulates similar sentiments from the 870 EHS professionals who participated in the survey. Even in the best of situations, EHS professionals tend to view the various regulatory agencies with a bit of trepidation, so it’s not surprising that compliance with the steady stream of regulations is one of the main things keeping safety leaders up at night.
A year ago, shortly after President Trump took office, we asked if you thought his administration would have a positive impact on OSHA, and most of you (60%) said no. This year, we asked if you thought the Trump administration had brought a more balanced approach of cooperation and enforcement to OSHA than the Obama administration, and a very small majority (51%) said yes. It’s hard to make any clear conclusion from those results, other than to say EHS professionals seem to believe OSHA under Trump is no better nor worse than OSHA under Obama.
Taking a look at the demographic information gleaned from the survey, we’re able to develop a profile of what a typical EHS professional looks like (not that there’s anything typical about an EHS professional). This archetypal EHS manager is a white male in his 50s, with more than 20 years of experience in the EHS profession, living in the Midwest, and working in the manufacturing industry. He earns more than $100,000 and anticipates getting a raise this year between 1%-2%. His primary responsibility is safety, with a second responsibility for occupational health. He works in a plant or facility and reports to the executive suite.
That’s what the number-crunching reveals, anyway, but we’ve found that we get an even better sense of who you are and what matters most to you from the open-ended (and anonymous) responses to our questions, such as the one we led off this column with about the regulatory climate. Here are a few other comments from survey respondents:
• “Senior management talks big about safety but does not reinforce it on the shop floor, nor lead by example. I have become the Safety Cop, but I am not considered part of management and do not get the benefit of the doubt or support from the other supervisors and managers with regard to safety.”
• “I have been promised that extra staff will be hired to help with EHS responsibilities. After over a year and ongoing budget cuts, I’ve been told I won’t get help. I have been working 12- and 15-hour days for over two years and am just worn out. I can never catch up.”
• “With the introduction of pleasure drugs and legalized marijuana the state of U.S. industry will crumble. We are already seeing spikes in workers compensation claims in MA, RI, CO, WA, OR, CA. Why? Because the workforce is high. It will be a challenge going forward.”
• “My job would be much more satisfying and meaningful if management would offer support. If regulations were actually enforced it could help push safety to the forefront of importance.”
• “I don't know where to learn about the ‘E’ in EHS. It was not in my educational program and I feel like I am behind my peers in environmental knowledge.”
• “I love my job, but women have to work three times harder than men still.”
• “Safety regulations are driven by public perceptions and politics. This is as crazy as a rabid weasel.”
So plenty of things are keeping safety leaders up at night. But to put it all into context, we also sought to identify your level of satisfaction with your job and profession. And the good news is that 79% said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs. And when we asked about their satisfaction with EHS as a career path, the response was even higher: 85% said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the EHS profession. So while the job may be tough and the hours long, the role of the safety leader is one that offers a very high level of personal satisfaction. And when you consider that you’re the ones focused on making sure all of us get home safely at night, that’s very good news indeed.
Describing her 40+ year career in industrial hygiene, Deborah Imel Nelson says, “It’s been a never-ending source of gratification, friendships, learning, knowledge, a little frustration thrown in there, but I would do it all over again.” Although Nelson recently retired from a long career in government (including stints at the Department of Agriculture, the EPA and OSHA) and just completed a one-year term as president of the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA), she is hardly slowing down. Besides remaining active on the AIHA board, she also plans to return to school—not as a professor this time (earlier in her career she was a professor at the University of Oklahoma) but as a student, as she intends to earn a Total Worker Health certificate.
On the occasion of her completing her term as AIHA president, Nelson shared her perspective with EHS Today on current trends in health and safety, and offered some insights on what the industrial hygiene field could be and should be doing to advance the cause of workplace safety.
What was it that got you interested in a career in industrial hygiene?
Nelson: I always thought I’d be a doctor, but they weren’t really encouraging young women to go to medical school back in the 1970s. I had also read Rachel Carson’s book, The Silent Spring, and I had always wondered: What if there’s a profession that combines air pollution and environmental contamination with human health? I was so excited when learned about industrial hygiene—that there is a profession that deals with these things—that I never looked back. I’ve had some detours working in emergency management and a couple other things, but those side trips have had the unintended benefit of strengthening my skills that I could bring back to industrial hygiene.
What have been your greatest successes and greatest challenges in the past year as president of AIHA?
Nelson: We’ve tried to change the culture of the organization, and this was already in play when I came onto the board three years ago, but we’ve continued the push to involve more people on committees and boards through what we call open call. That’s kind of our shorthand for putting out a call to say we’re looking for people to be on the strategic planning committee, or our nominating committee, or our awards committee. And while we’ll have leadership from the board involved, we want to get members young and old, new members, and academia to participate. That’s going to be valuable in getting more people involved, getting more diversity, and helping us make better decisions.
One of our big successes this year is that we have spent hours and hours looking at our bylaws. Some of it was obviously outdated and needed to be changed for just housekeeping. But we also are proposing opening up membership to anybody who wants to come and play with the industrial hygienists, anyone who has an interest in industrial hygiene. We’re making it easier for students to continue to be student members. We’re opening up the process for our nominations procedure so that we have wider participation from the membership on who gets nominated to run for the board. We’ve listened to our membership.
As for the question of challenges, we have such a wide range of membership, from people who are brand new to people like me who have been a member for more than 40 years. We have people in academia, government, industry, consultants, military, and so on, so there are a lot of different opinions. To me one of the challenges is all the moving parts and the diverse opinions, the number of projects and initiatives. So we all have to go back to our magnetic north, which is worker health and safety.
I think I knew this going in, but I really learned it this past year that there’s no one person who can make all the decisions. The CEO certainly plays a role, and the president plays an influential role as well, but you can’t be an effective leader unless you inspire great people along with you.
What issues has AIHA focused on over the past year?
Nelson: I wouldn’t necessarily call them new initiatives, but we’ve focused on new ways of looking at things that were going on already. Take, for example, our international strategy. We’ve always had people going to different countries and we’ve always donated money to different charitable groups, but we now have a rich strategy that helps us focus our efforts. We’ve spent a lot of effort in China, and we’re now shifting our focus to Southeast Asia and the Asian continent. So for example, India has a growing industrial hygiene community, and they want to partner with us. So given our limitations in resources—both financial and in terms of bandwidth of our staff and members’ time—we have made this decision to shift our focus from China to India. That’s not 100% yet; it’s still a conversation that we’re having.
We’ve always had a government affairs program, but now we’re working on getting membership involved. We have a number of different committees now that our government affairs director is leading, so we have a group that is working on cannabis. We have a group that’s going to start working on the needs of contingent workers, meaning people who don’t punch a timeclock for an employer. They’re not in a standard employer/employee relationship, so they may be temporary or subcontractor workers or Uber driver types. In other words, people who don’t have somebody looking after their health and safety. So we’ve got a group that’s focusing on how do we provide health and safety benefits to those people, and the learning that they need to keep themselves protected?
One thing we’re really excited about is a one-hour program called Safety Matters [a one-hour interactive teaching module and PowerPoint presentation]. This started at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) as a semester-long program called Talking Safety that was developed mainly for middle school and high school kids who were going to be heading out for their first jobs, whether it’s in fast-food or retail or construction or whatever. There’s an unacceptable rate of injuries to these kids when they’re new on the job, so the Safety Matters program is designed for our members, many of whom don’t have a teaching certificate, to go into the schools or 4H or after-school programs and talk to kids about how to look around the workplace, see what might be hazardous, and then what to do about it, who to talk to, how to get help.
We’ve got legislation that references this program now—it doesn’t require it but it references it—in Oklahoma, Texas and a couple other states. This is an ongoing effort. It’s going to go on for a long time, but we’re hoping that not only can it help protect young workers but also have the benefit of letting young people know what a great profession industrial hygiene is. Because many of them have probably never heard of it before.We’ve got efforts going on right now for women in IH. And our strategic plan for the next three years includes focusing on community awareness, advancement and dissemination of knowledge, integrity of practice, and advocacy. So we’re really pleased with the direction that the plan is taking.
What are the current trends that you’re seeing—not just within AIHA but within the workplace, within the country, that are related to industrial hygiene?
Nelson: I retired from the federal government a little over a year ago, so I can really only speak to the daily problems of industrial hygienists in government practice, but from talking to my colleagues I think this is pretty true across the board. So many organizations have downsized their number of health and safety professionals. You hear this everywhere you go: There’s so much more to do with fewer people to do it.
When I was working for the government at the Department of Agriculture, one of our biggest issues came up during the Bird Flu outbreak of 2014-2016. We couldn’t put down 50 million birds on our own, so there were thousands of contractors and sub-contractors and their subs and their subs. Dealing with the complexity of determining who’s responsible, who created the hazards and who controls it, and all of that, getting the attention and resources from management that are needed—and it’s not that management doesn’t think it’s important, it’s just that there are limited resources. It’s in large part a bandwidth issue. There aren’t enough people to do all the work, and not enough hours in the day.
What is the health of the organization and the profession?
Nelson: When you talk about the current regulatory environment, and my career has spanned many administrations, things are going to change from year to year, especially when you get a new administration and a new OSHA director and secretary. But I’ve always thought that the very best companies, and the really progressive people who recognize the value of safeguarding their human capital, are working to make sure that the standards they operate under within their company or in more and more cases with their suppliers, that they exceed those standards.
I’ve recently become enthused about an initiative from NIOSH called Total Worker Health [a program that integrates protection from work-related safety and health hazards with promotion of injury and illness prevention]. We spend so many hours a week at the workplace, so if we’re going to help people be physically active, a lot of that is going to have to happen at the workplace. There’s a lot of talk on things like workplace stress and the role of the employer on worker health.
There are issues beyond just how many chemicals are in the air, or how noisy it is—people are starting to think in a wider sense about the impact of work on people’s health. Companies are starting to do things like ensure there’s healthy food in the cafeteria, that there are smoking cessation programs, that people have a chance to get up and walk around at work. Those are very simple examples, but I think those are so important.
In terms of the health of the organization, we can always welcome more members or donations, but we’re holding steady. But so many people that entered the IH profession like I did back in the 1970s—call it the retirement cliff or the silver tsunami, whatever you want to call it—we’ve either already retired or we’re going to retire really soon. I don’t want to see us lose our emeritus members so we’re trying to come up with ways to continue to involve them, such as by mentoring students and early career professionals.
We’re working on what we call our brand refresh project, and this is not specifically for AIHA, but we’re working with the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) and the American Board of Industrial Hygiene (ABIH) as well. We have identified some key audiences, and we’re focusing on various groups, such as high school and college academic advisors and guidance counselors, to let them know what a terrific career industrial hygiene and safety is. We’ll focus on the C-suite to make sure we get the right messages to the right people so that they know what an EHS professional can do—not only for the health of individuals but for the whole organization.
Has the health of the worker in the workplace gotten better over the years? We’ve got all the technology and data and information, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to better health.
Nelson: One way you can track it is by the number of workplace fatalities. Starting almost from the day President Nixon signed the Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the number of fatalities started dropping from something like 14,000 a year down to somewhere around 4,000-4,500. That doesn’t include every workplace fatality, just those that are required to report it through OSHA. But in the last couple of years, that trend has started reversing [5,190 workplace fatalities in 2017, according to OSHA]. I don’t know if it’s an aberration or if it’s an indication of a trend.
There are two very key factors involved here. One is the opioid crisis, and we know that nationwide, the counties that have the largest percentages of their employed people in manufacturing are the counties with the highest number of opioid deaths. That’s according to a recent report from MAPI [Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation]. You start to wonder: Are these people who got injured on the job? Did they start taking opioids for injuries or back pain or whatever?
The national trends in mortality indicate that the group that’s showing reductions in life expectancy are the middle-aged, unemployed people in despairing conditions. And that certainly spills over into the workplace, even though they’re unemployed. We are starting to recognize that people who have opioid addictions in the workplace may very well be a safety risk to others. I think for a lot of reasons that we don’t totally understand yet, the opioid crisis is playing a role in that.
There’s another factor, and I worked constantly on this issue when I was at the Department of Agriculture, and that is the issue of distracted driving. Forty percent of workplace fatalities are transportation-related, and how much of that is due to people texting or talking on the phone? The National Safety Council has tried to make people aware of this through awareness campaigns. People, even highly educated people, will call me from their cars and say, “Well, I’m on the phone but it’s hands-free, so I’m ok.” Well, no, you’re not because it’s your brain that’s occupied. It’s the whole business of inattentional blindness. I don’t know how we get around that because cars nowadays are being manufactured with Bluetooth connections. They’re making it easy for you to be a distracted driver. I think that’s certainly played a role in the rise in workplace fatalities.
What’s your take on self-driving vehicles?
Nelson: I know there are problems but I think in the long run—and this is just personal opinion, I don’t have any statistics to support this—self-driving vehicles are safer than people who are texting and shaving and putting on makeup and eating a hamburger while they’re trying to drive and their kids are screaming in the backseat. I’m a cyclist, and Boulder, Colo., is a pretty good place to ride your bike, but still, too many people get hit by cars here, so I’m always thinking about road safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
You bring up a good point because robot cars also aren’t going to be driving while intoxicated. And they’re not going to fall asleep behind the wheel.Nelson: And they’re not going to be exceeding the speed limit, either. If smart highway technology can space out cars on the road, and monitor speeds, we’ll be able to avoid the traffic jams and rubbernecking we have now. So that’s my take on safety in the workplace. In terms of health in the workplace, we have not made much progress in occupational illnesses. Some of the most reliable estimates put the number of occupational illnesses at ten times the number of safety injuries. Since many of them, such as cancers, respiratory disease, renal disease and cardiovascular disease, have long latency periods, those aren’t tied directly to the workplace so they’re not identified as occupational illnesses. We haven’t made progress in turning that around, and that’s a huge, unaddressed issue in the area of worker health and safety in this country.
We know now that workplace stress leads to heart disease, and depression leads to cardiovascular disease, and those have implications on your lifespan. When it comes to the increasing amount of stress in the workplace, it isn’t just industrial hygienists who are trying to do more with less every single day—it’s everybody. We’ve got to look at the whole picture in order to address that issue.
How has the IH practice itself changed?Nelson: When I first started I was carrying around a single 15-pound instrument that measured carbon monoxide. None of us had computers back then, of course. We’re now looking at wearable, sensor technology—how is that going to impact how industrial hygienists take measurements and record it and manage that data over a 24-hour cycle? I’ve got two different sound-level apps on my phone, so now that people can measure sound level with their phone, is that going to make them more active participants in the workplace toward reducing noise exposures? There are a lot of different things going on that we need to be aware of.
Do you have any advice for young IH practitioners?Nelson: My first suggestion would be to join your local section of AIHA because you’re going to get opportunities for leadership that you may not get yet at your workplace. You’ll work with other young professionals. You’ll learn from senior professionals. And you’ll learn not only from the technical presentations but also the life skills, workplace strategies, and those kinds of things.
Another piece of advice is to keep that balance of work and family life and friendships and physical activity and your spiritual life to keep a balanced approach to life because as wonderful and exciting as this profession is, it isn’t everything.
EHS training offers a number of immediate benefits to companies, such as bringing new and current employees up-to-speed on the proper ways to use equipment while protecting themselves in the process, as well as remaining in compliance with various industry regulations. And yet, while the benefits of training are tangible, developing the right kind of program can be elusive. Finding new workers by itself is challenging, and employees are changing jobs much more frequently than before. So how do you properly train both long-time employees who think they’ve seen it all along with the Millennials who have to be convinced that safety training will be worth their time?
In this special eBook guide to safety training, we’ll look at some of the innovative ways EHS managers have developed to best prepare and train their workforce in safety best practices. We’ll examine new training techniques, such as microlearning and blended learning, that allow workers to feel more engaged in the training process while learning at their own pace. And you’ll discover why training doesn’t have to be just “one more thing to do” but can deliver real-world returns on time and investment.
Fill out the form below to get started.
How exactly does OSHA work? Is the government really out to get every company and to cite every workplace safety violation? What happens when an OSHA inspector shows up at your door? And can you actually beat an OSHA citation?
Who better to know—and reveal—the secrets of what prompts and occurs during an OSHA inspection than former OSHA officers? At the ASSP 2018 show in San Antonio, Texas, two retired OSHA officers who now work for consulting firm Safety Controls Technology—Nick Walters, formerly regional administrator for Region V (Chicago) and Tom Bielema, formerly Area Director for the Peoria, Ill, OSHA office—shared their field experiences. Walters and Bielema have a combined 47 years of OSHA experience.
1. Why did OSHA pick my company for an inspection?
OSHA follows a number of priorities when determining which facilities to inspect. Those priorities include:
· imminent danger
· fatalities and catastrophes
· sever injuries (i.e., hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye)
· employee complaints
· referrals, whether from law enforcement, other government agencies or the media
· programmed inspections, such as National Emphasis Programs (NEP) or Local Emphasis Programs (LEP)
2. Can I ask for a copy of the OSHA complaint?
Yes, absolutely.
3. Can I ask OSHA to get a warrant?
Again, yes, but you should seriously consider whether you really want to raise the idea in OSHA’s mind that you might have something to hide. All OSHA personnel will present their credentials if you have any reason to question the legitimacy of the inspection or the personnel.
4. What documents am I required to provide to the Compliance Officer?
Typical documents requested include the organization’s Federal Employer ID number, OSHA injury and illness logs, written programs, and training records.
5. Can I limit the scope of the inspection?
Yes, particularly to manage and limit the risk of providing OSHA more information than you necessarily ought to. For instance, resist the temptation to offer OSHA a full tour of your facility or campus. You should definitely require the Compliance Officer to follow all workplace safety procedures. Also, let them know about any trade secret areas in your facility. You should know the scope of the inspection and limit areas of access and travel routes (where appropriate) to only the areas within that scope.
6. How does OSHA decide whether or not I get a citation and what the penalty amount will be?
Penalties are calculated based on severity as well as probability, with mitigating factors including history and good faith. There are four violation types:
· Willful: a violation that the employer intentionally and knowingly commits or a violation that the employer commits with plain indifference to the law. OSHA may propose penalties of up to $129,336 for each willful violation.
· Serious: a violation where there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result and that the employer knew, or should have known, of the hazard. There is a mandatory penalty for serious violations which may be up to $12,934.
· Other-than-serious: a violation that has a direct relationship to safety and health, but probably would not cause death or serious physical harm. OSHA may propose a penalty of up to $12,934 for each other-than-serious violation.
· Repeated: a violation that is the same or similar to a previous violation. OSHA may propose penalties of up to $129,336 for each repeated violation.
7. Does OSHA have a quota system?
In a word, no.
8. What are my options after I receive a citation?
Companies have three options:
· Accept the citations, correct the conditions and pay the penalty.
· Participate in an informal conference.
· Contest the citations, which must be done in writing within 15 working days of the final order.
9. Should I schedule an informal conference and what should I expect when I go to the OSHA office?
They suggest you should always take the informal conference option, where you should be able to get a better explanation of the violation, the standards cited, what is needed to correct the violation, and other issues.
10. Can we beat an OSHA citation?
Yes, particularly if the violation is due to employee misconduct. You must be able to prove all four of these:
· A work rule was violated.
· The work rule had been properly communicated.
· Your organization needs to prove it actively monitors compliance to the rules.
· Disciplinary actions were taken.
Many companies proclaim, “Safety is our number one priority,” which admittedly is a great slogan and looks good on posters and websites. It doesn’t necessarily mean what it seems to suggest, though, if you’re assuming these companies consistently place the safety of their employees, or their customers, above any other consideration. With safety, as with just about anything else that can be measured and charted on a spreadsheet, there’s a bottom line.
OSHA, for instance, can tell you exactly what the cost is of a workplace accident: $129,336. That’s the current amount (as of January 2018) that a company will be fined for a workplace accident if willful neglect can be found, or if it’s a repeat offense.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the cost of a worker’s life is a cool million dollars (give or take a hundred thousand dollars or so), when you factor in hospitalization costs (assuming the employee lived long enough to make it to the hospital), worker’s compensation, general medical expenses, various legal costs, and property loss.
In reality, companies almost never know the real cost of workplace fatalities because they don’t factor in all of the indirect hidden costs, points out Ed Foulke, a partner with Fisher Phillips and former head of OSHA under President George W. Bush. Those hidden costs could include replacing damaged tools and equipment; time lost and overhead costs incurred when work was disrupted; lost orders or billing rights for government contracts; failure to meet production deadlines; and the cost of bad publicity. Throw in legal costs and various HR issues (loss of efficiency due to decreased morale or break-up of work crews, not to mention the difficulty in attracting new employees), and it’s safe to say that it’s difficult if not impossible to calculate the cost of a human life.
You would think, then, that companies would be extremely protective of their employees, to the point of not only being sticklers for best safety practices but going well above and beyond merely being in compliance with the standards set by regulatory agencies. And yet, workplace fatalities keep happening, and even calling them “accidents” is misleading because blatantly unsafe behavior—whether on the part of the employer or the worker—inevitably leads to bad results. Better to call these incidents “deliberates,” if you will.
Automaker Tesla, as we noted last month, is under investigation for Cal/OSHA for allegedly misidentifying workplace injuries as personal medical cases that occurred outside of work. If true, it certainly is a creative way for a company to reduce the incident rate at its facilities, especially when that company had gained notoriety for having an incident rate 31% higher than the industry average. But OSHA doesn’t give extra points for creativity.
Tesla, in fact, is one of the companies tagged on the annual “Dirty Dozen” list of safety offenders compiled by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH). This list—a blacklist, if you will—focuses on companies that are the most egregious at putting their employees in harm’s way, due to unsafe practices. The list is more of an unpopularity contest than a detailed accounting, since National COSH is an advocacy group whose aims include establishing and strengthening unions. But taking that into consideration, the companies on the Dirty Dozen list have shown an astonishing inability to learn from their checkered pasts.
Besides Tesla, other big companies on the list include online retail giant Amazon (seven workers have been killed at Amazon warehouses since 2013); waste disposal specialist Waste Management (the company has been cited more than 60 times by OSHA), and Case Farms, a poultry farming and processing company (Case has received 74 OSHA violations per 1,000 employees, a rate that is more than four times higher than any other poultry firm). Indeed, all of the companies on the Dirty Dozen list seem to share the same basic character flaw: They keep allowing bad things to happen to good people.
“It’s heartbreaking to see workers lose their lives when we know these tragedies could have been prevented,” says Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of National COSH. “Time and again, employers are warned about unsafe conditions. When companies fail to correct safety hazards, it is workers who pay the ultimate price.”
Now of course, it’s entirely in National COSH’s self-interest to publicly shame big-name companies in the hopes of spurring on union-organizing efforts, and one wonders if the advocacy group is just as gung-ho on exposing the safety incidents and fatalities at union shops. Be that as it may, when the ultimate stakes at play are worker’s lives, the only winners in this game are the workers who make it home alive at the end of the day.
Every year the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) compiles a list—a blacklist, if you will—of the companies that are the most egregious at putting their employees in harm's way, due to unsafe practices. Obviously, no company wants to appear on this list, and in fact none of the companies that appeared on the 2017 list are repeat offenders this year. So maybe there's a motivational factor at play here that negative publicity can spur companies to be more proactive in their safety management.According to National COSH data, workplace deaths in the U.S. are on the rise. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that there were 5,190 deaths from workplace trauma in 2016, an increase of 7% from 2015 and a 12% increase since 2012.“It’s heartbreaking to see workers lose their lives when we know these tragedies could have been prevented,” says Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of National COSH. “Time and again, employers are warned about unsafe conditions. When companies fail to correct safety hazards, it is workers who pay the ultimate price.”The following slides examine why these 12 companies appear on the 2018 "Dirty Dozen" list.
Automaker Tesla is one of those companies that everybody loves to talk about because the company has tried to create its own rules in its quest to develop electric, semi-autonomous vehicles. There is a distinct aura of “cool” surrounding the Tesla brand, and with that aura has come an almost-fawning relationship between the popular press at Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, who seems to delight in having the media follow his every word and his every tweet, no matter how outrageous. It’s certainly helped make Musk a rich man and Tesla a household name (although most households could never hope to afford one of their cars).Once a company reaches a certain level of status in the marketplace, inevitably people will start analyzing the company to determine its corporate culture. Tesla, like other entrepreneur-led startups that make it big, has more than its share of arrogance, exuding a vibe that suggests its vehicles are so special and culturally significant to the zeitgeist that they don’t have to play by the same rules that other automakers have to play by. That kind of hubris might be excused if the topic is, say, access to government subsidies. It’s definitely not okay, however, if the topic is safety.In March, the driver of a Tesla Model X was killed when the vehicle—which uses an autonomous driving feature called AutoPilot—crashed into a highway barrier. The promise of self-driving vehicles, of course, isn’t just the convenience but more importantly, the safety. Robot cars don’t fall asleep at the wheel, or text on their cellphones, or get blinded by the sun, or drive while intoxicated. But apparently, they also don’t always slow down when an accident is about to happen. Amazingly, Tesla’s response to the accident was to blame the driver. Their official statement claims, “the only way for this accident to have occurred is if [the driver] was not paying attention to the road.” How’s that for offering up a sacrificial lamb to the cause of technological progress?The company, which is also developing autonomous trucks, continues to insist that drivers need to stay alert and keep both hands on the wheel, despite being well aware that the entire premise of a robot car is that humans can let the vehicle do the driving. Some pundits have even predicted that in the not-too-distant future, human copilots of autonomous vehicles won’t need a license at all.It wasn’t Tesla’s tone-deaf blame-game response that got the automaker in trouble with the National Transportation Safety Board, though—it was when the company broke protocol by releasing its conclusions about what caused the accident before the NTSB had the chance to vet and confirm the investigation results. That’s one of those big no-nos that really gets under regulators’ skin, and by jumping the gun, Tesla got its wrist slapped by the NTSB, which revoked the automaker’s party status, a “privilege” granted companies that allows for the sharing of investigative information during the early fact-finding phase of an investigation, with the understanding that early, inconclusive results are not disclosed.Explaining why Tesla’s party status was revoked, Robert Sumwalt, NTSB’s chairman, said, “Uncoordinated releases of incomplete information do not further transportation safety or serve the public interest.”Meanwhile, it’s not just the company’s vehicles that aren’t quite as safe as advertised; Tesla’s auto assembly plants themselves have serious safety issues. Last month, the California Division of OSHA opened an investigation into reports that Tesla failed to disclose injuries at its factory in Fremont. Under question is whether Tesla was falsely claiming workplace injuries as personal medical cases. You might recall that a year ago, industry watchdog Worksafe released a report stating that Tesla’s incident rate was 31% higher than the industry average, and the rate of serious injuries was double the industry rate. Again, these kinds of cover-ups (if true) aren’t likely to win Tesla any points with regulators, or with the public at large.So a company whose reputation was built on having cool cars that were the safest thing on the road is now having to defend itself against killer robot cars built in dangerous factories. The feel-good story of Tesla’s overnight success doesn’t really feel all that good anymore. Whenever safety takes a back seat to anything else—whether it be profits, productivity or time-to-market demands—nothing good will come of it. If ever there was a company in need of a safety culture intervention, that company is Tesla.But perhaps the takeaway isn’t just a knowing wink at seeing another high-and-mighty company being brought down a few pegs, but the opportunity to ask of your own organization: Are we doing everything we can to promote a culture of safety here, or are we also suffering from safety cultural rot?
On April 28, we’ll observe Workers’ Memorial Day to honor workers who have died while on the job. It’s a sobering reminder that not every employee who reports in at the beginning of their workday goes home at the end of it. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of fatal work injuries reported in the U.S. climbed 7% over the previous year, and in fact it’s the third straight year workplace fatalities have increased.The BLS also compiles a ranking of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S., based on number of fatalities. By that yardstick, the worst job to have if you want to make it home safe every night is anything in the transportation industry, but particularly truck drivers and material moving occupations, which saw 1,388 fatal injuries in 2016, the most recent year for which statistics were available. This helps explain the tremendous interest in autonomous vehicles, although the recent incident in Arizona where an Uber robot car struck and killed a pedestrian might slow the rollout of driverless cars and trucks.Another metric the BLS uses is fatal work injury rate, which is calculated by the number of deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers in any given industry. By that measurement, then, the most dangerous occupation in the U.S. is loggers and lumberjacks, where the death rate has more than doubled over the past decade. In addition to falls, struck-by incidents and the use of dangerous tools such as chainsaws and axes, a lot of inexperienced and undertrained workers come into the logging industry every year, and unfortunately, not all of them survive the rigors of the job. With a fatal work injury rate of 135.9, loggers are by far the workers most likely to die on the job, with fishers coming in a not-so-close second (86.0).But are these really the most dangerous jobs in the country? At least some of those fatalities, if we’re being honest here, are due to carelessness or recklessness, and most if not all of the fatalities are accidental. But I would submit that there are any number of jobs whose workers are subjected to dangerous situations with disturbing regularity, in workplaces where those dangers are deliberate and malicious.Not every workplace danger, after all, involves an employee being put in the way of physical harm. There’s workplace bullying, for instance, where an employee’s self-esteem and even ability to function productively are systematically broken. According to a study conducted by Career Builder, nearly a third (29%) of all workers say they’ve been bullied at work. If you’re a woman the rate is 32%, and if you’re an LGBT worker the incidence is alarmingly high at 40%.There’s sexual harassment, which Hollywood has apparently just discovered but women in industry have known about for far too long. A recent CNBC survey found that 27% of women in the U.S. have been victims of sexual harassment in the workplace, while 10% of American men have also been victimized.There are no official estimates of how many immigrants are subjected to forced labor practices in the U.S., but most studies agree the numbers are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Slavery in the 21st Century not only exists but is thriving, and on a global scale it generates $150 billion in illegal profits every year, according to Action Sustainability. While sex trafficking accounts for some of the forced labor, by far most of it occurs in manufacturing, construction, agriculture, mining, textiles, utilities and domestic work. The BLS doesn’t track all of this activity, nor does it track incidents of racism in the workplace, or gender bias, or ageism. But these very real workplace dangers happen every day.Clearly, we need to ensure that our workplaces are kept physically safe and that our employees remain protected from harm. But that’s not where the job ends; in fact, it’s only the beginning. The threats posed by fires and floods and machinery are great, but the threats posed by inhumane treatment of workers are even greater. That’s why we need dedicated EHS professionals now more than ever.
The chances are very good that you’re reading these words right now on a device of some type, whether it’s a computer, a tablet, a smartphone or maybe even a smartwatch. And even if you’re reading this in the print edition of the magazine, it’s a virtual certainty that your smartphone is within easy reach. Not only are we living in the Information Age, but we’re living in the Always-On Information Age, where everybody has access to the latest news instantly.That’s not to say, of course, that everybody actually spends the time reading all that information… or even reads at all. We’re a society of skimmers, where the news of the day is neatly compartmentalized into whatever is “trending” now, saving us the trouble of hunting down news and information on our own. We’ve become perfectly comfortable with letting social media apps make the decisions for us, even after learning these apps are often powered by algorithms that are manipulated to favor specific political and social ideologies.We like letting machines do that kind of work for us, even though in the back of our minds we kind of wonder just how good a job these machines are doing at picking exactly what we look at—and what we’ll never ever hear about unless, of course, a human person actually tells us about it. It’s a trade-off, though, and part of the attraction to automation and machine intelligence is that we get back from the machines a lot more than we give up. That’s the idea, anyways.One of the key selling points to automation is safety, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Whether it’s an accident caused by a forklift hitting a pedestrian in a warehouse or a truck driver jackknifing on the highways, the thought that an employee could be put in harm’s way at any moment of the day is a constant torment to material handling and logistics managers. So the idea of an automated warehouse populated by AGVs powered by sensors and navigating with an AI-based link to a cloud-based WMS… well, that just sounds great. And clearing out the highways to make room for autonomous vehicles whose drivers never fall asleep at the wheel sounds like the perfect solution to truck driver shortages and skyrocketing insurance premiums. What’s not to like about automation?But that’s just the problem… people don’t seem to like robots in the workplace. A recent study conducted by Ball State University and Villanova University suggests that merely the thought of robots can make people sick.“People who live and work in areas where automation is taking place are sickened by the thought of losing their jobs and having no way of providing for themselves or their families,” says Michael Hicks, director of Ball State’s Center for Business and Economic Research. The robots don’t necessarily need to be taking anybody’s job, you see—it’s the premonition that someday soon, those infernal automatons will be coming to put you on the unemployment line that is causing people mental and physical hardship.“The actual and felt threats from automation may not immediately manifest into morbidities,” Hicks admits, “but the increasing prevalence of poorer self-reported health and feelings of deteriorating physical and mental health can have a direct and lasting impact on individuals, families and communities.”Okay, one might argue, that’s just one study and hardly proof of any real harm caused by the robots themselves. That argument doesn’t hold up well, though, in the wake of Uber’s disastrous trial run of autonomous vehicles in Arizona. In March, one of Uber’s self-driving vehicles—which even had a human co-pilot behind the wheel—struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe. Uber’s immediate reaction was to halt all such trial runs in Tempe as well as Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. The lawyers and courts will have to determine if Uber was criminally negligent in this case; I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this, not by a long shot.In response, Toyota suspended tests of its own robot car program, dubbed Chauffeur, in Michigan and California. Speaking to a Bloomberg reporter, Toyota spokesperson Brian Lyons said, “Because we feel the [Uber] incident may have an emotional effect on our test drivers, we have decided to temporarily pause our Chauffeur mode testing on public roads.”I suspect that both Uber and Toyota will eventually start testing their self-driving cars again, once the political firestorm over “killer robot cars” dies down. And I certainly can’t imagine Amazon ever turning off the switch powering all of their Kiva warehouse robots; as of last fall, the online retail giant had more than 100,000 robots deployed in warehouses throughout the world, with plans to deploy many, many more, according to the New York Times. So for better or for worse, the robots are here to stay.But if we’ve learned nothing else, we hopefully are starting to learn that the one thing that robots can’t do now, and will never be able to do (no matter what the futurists and sf writers want us to believe), is to understand what it means to be human. We can offload a lot of tasks to the robots, but let’s never forget that when something goes wrong, it’s up to us—the humans inside those warehouses and vehicles—to take responsibility for it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.