1. Paul O’Neill would be voted in as OSHA chief by safety pros in a heartbeat. Or they would like to clone him for every boardroom meeting on safety. He is an inspiration to professionals, with his straight talking passion for safety.
For the record, there were 204 exhibitors from foreign countries; 100 of them from China. Most of the rest were from Canada, with a smattering of vendors from India, Malaysia, Pakistan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Portugal, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Bahrain and Argentina.
The National Safety Council recently recognized four individuals with the highest honor it bestows on safety professionals. The Distinguished Service to Safety Awards are presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated a lifetime of outstanding service to the field of safety and health through their careers.
The National Safety Council honored former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill with the Council’s President’s Award at its annual Congress & Expo – the world’s largest annual gathering of safety and health professionals.
The National Safety Council hosted its National Awards Celebration in Chicago at its annual Congress & Expo. This event honors the safety accomplishments of NSC members.
“We were up in a customer focus group in Milwaukee not long ago. We had companies there from Fortune 100 to mom and pops,” said the VP of safety for a major distributor. “I’d say seven out of ten had had recent brushes with OSHA. So OSHA is still a big driver of sales, no doubt about it.”
No, they didn’t turn off the lights and locked the doors. The show definitely goes on, and when you’re inside the expo or attending education sessions, the ugly world of federal government shutdowns seems far far away.
1 – Ties are out. The men’s tie business must be dying a slow death. Of 13,000 people at the Congress and Expo, you might count the number wearing ties on one hand. OK, maybe on both hands. Business casual rules, no doubt. Many attendees are comfortable in jeans and sports shirt. You don’t see many suits at all. Mostly it is the speakers in suits. And certainly not all of them.
It’s no secret speakers sometimes go out of their way to come up with a catchy title to fill a room with attendees. This is much more common in the safety field than say industrial hygiene, where many session topics are narrow and technical. Anyway, at this year’s Congress & Expo, speakers are again playing games with their presentation titles. Here is a selection of them:
Here at the 2013 NSC Congress & Expo, an Egyptian surgeon, Alaa Zidan, who now works as a health and safety consultant in Bahrain, gave a presentation, “Positive Safety Culture and Emotional Intelligence,” that was probably unlike any safety presentation most in the audience had ever heard.