How I Lost Faith In Management’s Support of Safet

By Phil La Duke 

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.

Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention

Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Stop. Don't Shoot! 

Contributor: 1% Safer,

We all want to be safe, right? And if there’s anything we could do within reason to keep workers safe, we would do that, right? I always believed that. What kind of monster would put the lives of the people who work for them at risk? Furthermore, what kind of sociopath would allow someone to be put in mortal danger when a cost-effective and easy engineering control could prevent it? I found out the answers to all these questions years ago, and in a seemingly innocuous act, I found out that not only are managers and executives often. The kind of people who will knowingly and willingly put workers at risk. I know there are some of you who are saying to yourself that’s not me. Those of you who work in safety may be saying, "I would quit my job before I would work for someone like that." Maybe some of you are correct but many of you are lying to yourself and others.

Consider this: years ago, I was a consultant, selling a new approach to worker safety. We provided an on-site coach and a database that would record the hazards supervisors found, assign a deadline based on the risk, completely describe the hazard in detail, take a GPS reading of where the hazard was located, send emails to the persons responsible for correct in the hazards, and provide 60 or so reports so that people could be held accountable.

The database along with the associate training and coaching resulted in a massive quantifiable reduction in injuries, and a corresponding uptick in reporting of injuries, near misses, and incidents. Before you think this is an ad, I should mention that I don't have the database or its code anymore so I couldn't sell it to you even if I wanted to. We were able to lower the cost associated with worker injuries by an average of $5 million per location.

But more than any of these things, we were able to restore the organization's faith in its leadership’s commitment to worker well-being. Department managers, and first-line supervision after overcoming their reluctance to change quickly saw the benefits of the approach, not only to safety but all of the SQDCME.

One day I was on a site and I was talking to one of the techs from a vendor that had installed the controllers for a machine. He asked me what I did, and I told him, and in the course of the conversation, he said, you know the cleaning crew doesn’t lock out when they enter the energized "kill zone" when cleaning a specific piece of equipment. He said if they keep doing that it was almost certain they would die. I asked him how difficult would it be to have his controllers feed that information into the database he said "simple". The capacity was already there, and all we had to do was a couple of hours of programming.

I was astonished. I thought of the implications of being able to have the safety manager, the plant manager and the maintenance manager. I’ll get an email urgently telling them that there were workers that were not locking out the system.  For those of you who don’t know what lockout means, it is the practice of ensuring that a piece of automated equipment is non-energized and that all forces (electrical, hydraulic, gravity, etc.) have been removed from the equipment. And locks have been placed on the equipment to ensure that no one inadvertently re-energizes the equipment while someone is in the kill zone; robots and other energized equipment are unforgiving.

I was beyond excited; I thought this is a license to print money. I could be responsible for saving countless lives. If we could get this deployed on a wide scale throughout the industry I went to the plant manager and explained what I wanted to do. He said 1st “how much would it cost, “ I said less than $500. He told me he would think about it. Think about it? What was there to think about? I mean he knew he had a problem with people not locking out, especially on off shifts where there was a lot less supervision. He knew he could prevent that. What reason could he have for not adopting this? I talk to the owner of our company, and he said we would do it gratis. Free. No cost to the customer.

The next day I met with the plant manager. He told me he didn’t want to go forward with my suggestion. I asked him why incredulously. He explained to me that if he knew about a lockout violation, and did nothing about it, he would be liable. I explained to him that the law didn’t agree with him and that the fact that he knew or should’ve known was typically the standard of liability. He told me he would change it.

I know, as well as you that there are bad actors in the industry, so I went to the Director of safety who went to the vice president of operations and gave him the same response. I read one of those sappy memes on Facebook the other day that said you can’t help someone who won’t participate and help him/herself.  I don’t know why, but that’s stuck with me. And it really applied to me I thought OK these people say they’re serious about safety, but they’re willing to roll the dice with the workers' lives. It was frustrating but there was absolutely nothing I could do.

I had subsequent customers and offered those same services to them, and each time the executives would give me the same response—no, we don’t wanna know. I realize the level of cowardice and depraved indifference toward human life that exists at the C+ suite. I realize that this was so inculcated into the way they did business that we had progressed in safety in a very little sense. It was as if I had traveled back in time to when they budgeted for how many people they were going to kill when building the Brooklyn Bridge.

I realized that I’m just one person and clearly I was unable to convince them that having a paper trail that identified a lockout violation that ultimately prevented a death was a good business idea.

There’s a fine line between managing your risk and covering your ass. And I know no one reading this thinks they would ever say “I don’t want to know if there’s a lockout violation because then it creates a paper trail and if that purple person dies I would be liable.”

So now, when I see the cute, see signs that say, look here to see who is responsible for your safety and you look into a mirror, I chuckle a little. I chuckle because they aren’t joking because where the rubber hits the road they don’t give a shit about whether or not you’re going to die as long as they don’t get blamed for it.

I know this will anger some of you, but I can always speak from my own experience and from my own perspective. Millions are spent by companies, trying to buy a quick fix for safety, even if that quick fix is simply shifting the blame from manager to worker.

A lot of you see me as a cynic; I am. A lot of you think I am sarcastic and caustic; I am. A lot of you think that I write books, make speeches, and write blogs for money, or to satisfy my ego; that’s not the case (there’s no money in books or speeches or blogs unless you tell people what they want to hear and that’s not my style.) I am a screaming malcontent, who is sickened by the actions and indifference of so many people who are responsible under the law for maintaining a safer workplace but use instead to sit on their asses and roll the dice with people's lives.