Columns

RSS

To improve their safety, outcomes some organizations advocate "everyone is responsible for safety." The thinking behind this is that it will create a universal mindset in their workforce to actively engage everyone. The fundamental problem with this thinking is that it is not practical to hold a group accountable for individual behavior. 

Preventable injuries culminate from a series of sequential events, as represented by five dominos. The first represents the task or situation, followed by some faulty worker decision, resulting in the unsafe action, which leads to an accident and the inevitable injury. By tipping the first domino all tend to fall, and by removing some of the intervening domino the accident can be eliminated. Hence the belief that workers decisions or actions are the primary cause of accidents.

Heat stress occurs when employees are exposed to high heat and high humidity environments, indoors or outdoors. Though preventable, heat stress signs and symptoms can go unrecognized until the full exposure to the heat presents itself.

We are often asked about what advice we would have for other women in manufacturing. At first, it was a difficult question for us to answer because we did not particularly focus on being women – we just were people working hard at doing the jobs we were engaged in. 

Today, there are approximately 1.2 million women employed in the US construction industry, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Women still account for only 11 percent of the construction industry overall, however.