Workplace Safety Culture

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One month after ISHN published its October issue cover story on Tesla’s quest to have the safest factory in the world, Tesla’s safety and health practices were again in the news. On November 5, 2018, the Center for Investigative Reporting published an article, “Inside Tesla’s factory, a medical clinic designed to ignore injured workers.”

Come next month, January 2019, we’ll be but 11 years from 2030. In 2030, Adam will have 14 years of experience and be in his prime, 38 years old. What will his EHS world, and the broader business world, look like?

What does it mean to actively care for people’s safety? Is this the mission of behavior-based safety (BBS)? Let’s understand the difference between “caring” and “acting.” No one wants to see an individual get injured on the job. This is caring. Yet, many workers admit they do not act on their caring by providing behavioral feedback.

We sat down with Dr. Joshua Alpert, an orthopedic surgeon at Midwest Bone & Joint Institute in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, to talk about the ins and outs of hand injuries. He helped us to understand why hand injuries can be particularly serious and what recovery from an injury looks like.

Providing clean, safe walkways in public facilities is essential for preventing costly slip, trip and fall (ST&F) accidents. Falls on the same level were the second leading cause of all workplace injuries in 2013 at 16.4 percent of all workplace injuries and resulted in $10.1 billion in direct costs (Liberty Mutual, 2016).

Class action lawsuits regarding reproductive health rights were recently filed against Walmart, the U.S.’s largest private employer, in Illinois, New York and Wisconsin. Many other employers such as Amazon, Merck and Novartis face similar lawsuits, too, relating to pregnancy discrimination, failure to provide reasonable accommodations and violations of EEOC rules.

In a recent safety excellence workshop, our firm facilitated a brainstorming exercise with a group of safety professionals interested in solving a particular problem they were experiencing in their safety journey. Their safety process was boring them to tears and they worried it would grow stale and become irrelevant with the workforce.

A space-bound partnership with NASA is about to bring some extra scrutiny here on earth to SpaceX and Boeing Co. The space agency is describing the investigation it will conduct into the workplace safety culture at the two companies as “a cultural assessment study,” that will focus on workplace safety – as well as adherence to a drug-free environment.

Just by putting “Congo miners” in the title here will have most readers flipping to the next page. I learned this lesson years ago writing an article about workplace safety, or the lack thereof, in China. “Why did you write this article?” asked a reader. “I don’t read ISHN for articles about China.” Another reader opined: “Everybody knows nobody values life in a country like China.”