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This past September I enjoyed my fourth business trip to Australia, appreciating another opportunity to teach Aussies the principles and procedures of People-Based Safety (PBS).

Action plans, response plans, contingency plans — all of these plans do the same thing: spell out how a business will provide an uninterrupted flow of products or services during an emergency.

America runs on Dunkin’,” goes the slogan for Dunkin’ Donuts. And much of business runs on too little sleep. The same could be said of many safety and health managers

A hundred years ago “The Jungle” was self-published by 27-year-old Upton Sinclair, after rejections from publishers uninterested in a grim novel dedicated to “the workingmen of America.” To research his exposé of squalid working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking factories, Sinclair conducted his own hazard recognition walkarounds. Dressed in shabby clothes and carrying a lunch bucket, he wandered the vast Armour facilities unquestioned by what little security existed at the plant.

The answer to the question in the title is “yes.”
When we perceive an event as a challenge or potential threat, a physical and psychological response is triggered by the autonomic nervous system. Whether the stressor is external (an oncoming car swerves into our lane) or internal (an anxiety-arousing thought), its onset abrupt (a sudden emergency) or gradual (a long-term unresolved problem), this automatic reaction is essentially the same.

According to OSHA administrator, Edwin Foulke Jr., OSHA’s current “big issues” are: #1 hexchrome, #2 pandemic flu preparedness, #3 global harmonization, and #4 permissible exposure limits (PELs). Among these big issues, global harmonization is likely to become the biggest problem for most employers.

For many years accident measures like the number of accidents, frequency rates, severity rates, and dollar costs were used to measure the progress of the organizational unit because practitioners felt comfortable using them. These results measures did not reveal whether the overall safety system was effective, diagnose what was or was not working, or indicate whether the system was in or out of control.

I bet most of you have used the term guilt trip when explaining personal feelings or when attempting to understand the behavior of others. What do we mean? Can we use this metaphor to improve safety?
Yes.

Once I had the chance to create a mini work culture. I was to lead a small editorial team out of corporate cubicleland and set up shop in a small suite of offices nearby.

I became acquainted with safety many years ago. My first acquaintance was on my first introduction to industry — an aircraft manufacturer upon my graduation in industrial engineering in 1952.