Thought Leadership

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I never made a conscious decision to take up this line of work. In fact, it all happened by chance and coincidence, as so many of life’s bigger decisions do; you reach a crossroads, a path opens up and you think, why not?

Dear Honorable Secretary Thomas E. Perez: I am writing in strong support of OSHA inspecting our nation’s Grain Storage Facilities.  Our family has suffered a terrible loss of our son in a grain facility nearly 21 years ago and I have been fighting ever since to make all grain storage facilities a safer place to work.

Resolution #1: Less Focus On Preaching More On Teaching. Awareness campaigns are important for the unaware. But most workers who ultimately get hurt do so knowing something they know is dangerous, or at very least that they suspected COULD be dangerous. 

Before an organization begins to curse safety, it is probable that one or more of the following have occurred: regulators with a limited knowledge base of safety have caused grief, a condition of supposed danger has led to an operations shutdown, a series of injuries or a severe injury has caused notable concern.

Most of us know we should perform regular health checks on our vehicles, but how many of us actually do them? When was the last time you checked the tyres? Or the oil level? Or even the lights?

Not quite sure who lit the fire at OSHA but the level of activity at the agency in the last two months is more activity than we have seen in the last several years combined. Now the question is likely to be whether or not any of this activity will result in completed actions. Here’s a look at the current activity:

A number of companies have made significant improvements to their safety cultures. Their progress is so dramatic, they often come to the realization that it is highly probable that their next fatality will come from a contractor they hire. To safety leaders, this is not an acceptable risk.

One of your readers recently emailed: “I have always found it interesting that the ES&H function in a significant number of corporations is managed, note I did not say led, by executives who have failed somewhere else in their corporation and are clueless when it comes to ES&H activities.”

Maybe in the UK, Australia, U.S., and other developed countries there are real safety pros. What I have seen (sorry if it's blunt) in Asia and even in the Middle East (I served in southeast Asia and the Middle East) is that there are no real safety pros.

I preferred to give you my input privately. When in private industry, my supervisor, the HR manager, kept telling me that if I found safety hazards I could not put it in writing, that way "if management does nothing and someone is injured or killed there will be no liability."