It’s time to expand the profession’s vocabulary
Do you believe the United States is in the midst of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character,” to use the words of pollster John Zogby?
Or are our attitudes and behaviors simply adjusting to this recession, and we’ll revert to our old “orientation,” however you want to interpret that, once this storm passes?
Zogby argues, based on zillions of polls and interviews he has conducted during the past decade, that we are on our way to becoming a society that is “less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
To be sure, changes of all sorts are occurring around us at what seems dizzying speed.
The Big Three U.S. automakers, it’s been said, must fundamentally change how they operate to survive. The banking system is obviously ripe for systemic change. Our foreign policies with numerous countries, particularly in the Middle East and Far East, are under review and subject to new strategies. The same goes for the country’s position on climate change. Our energy consumption must become greener, less oily, according to the White House. The nation’s highways, bridges, tunnels, our concrete and asphalt infrastructure, is in for massive rebuilding. Healthcare coverage, patient safety, pharmaceutical marketing, education, labor laws, the Internet grid, the unemployment safety net are all subject to near-term Washington intervention. Creative destruction is wreaking havoc in mass communications, with newspapers disappearing, network news watched by a dwindling audience, and web sites and Internet feeds increasingly becoming primary news sources.
What about the profession of occupational safety and health?
Current status
Sure, the profession has taken its share of blows in this recession. What job, other than coal miners and debt collectors, hasn’t? Pros with outstanding resumes are out of work. Consultants are scrambling to hold onto clients.
A compliance officer in California emailed me: “In the private sector, most of the big employers have outsourced a lot of the (EHS) work, so there are not many people to lay off anymore. What takes the hit is funding for outside consultants to come in and do ‘preventive maintenance’ type of work. So my impression is that a lot of the PM type monitoring, hazard evaluation, extra training when not legally required, is going to go by the wayside. Emergency situations will be dealt with, but the old list of routine activities is in for a significant reduction.”
Return to old ways?
Sooner (hopefully) or later the country will pull out of this recession. But do you seriously believe “things” — everything from loan policies to energy consumption to news consumption to foreign relations to how companies manage safety and health programs — will all return to their previous “orientation,” to use pollster Zoby’s term?
Cynics, who are never in short supply, will assert yes, old habits run deep. But when talking about the occupational safety and health profession’s future, I say the timing couldn’t be better for a “fundamental reorientation.” In fact, I’ll up the ante and say it is overdue and essential. Not regarding the profession’s character, which will always be grounded in a unique mix of science, passion, empathy, and initiative. What must change is how professionals communicate to the world at large — to management, employees, the media, politicians, the public — all who, let’s be honest, give workplace safety and health little thought unless a crane topples over in Manhattan or a refinery blows in Texas.
Workplace safety and health is too narrowly defined by accidents, incidents, losses, call them what you will, they are negatives. Plus, the word “safety” does not inspire or motivate commitment. “Health” is more readily embraced by society. “Safety” reminds us of school safety patrols, seat belts, NASCAR SAFER Barriers or public safety — policing, firefighting, inspecting restaurants.
The profession, for long-term sustainability’s sake, needs to communicate that it is about more than inspecting, patrolling, policing, putting out fires, and reacting. These characterizations are old school and restraining. I agree with Carl Metzgar, CSP, a longtime safety and loss control consultant in Winston-Salem, N.C., who recently wrote a letter to me (yes, not an email) in which he commented, “Boy, do I hate that misused, misunderstood, meaningless word.”
Carl was referring to the word “safety.”
Good riddance
Let’s get rid of it. No, we can’t do that. It’s in the title of our magazine, of every other similar magazine, just about all the major professional societies, and maybe a hundred thousand business cards.
But we can begin to expand the profession’s vocabulary and self-definition. I offer up the term “risk” as a substitute for “safety” in many instances.
In a paper on reinventing OSHA, Gary Rosenblum, CIH, writes, “The game must be changed, and risk management should be used to do this. Risk management is many things, but focusing on reducing uncertainty and increasing desired outcomes by scientific anticipation and effective flexibility is a big part of it.
“Today businesses are in dire straits and looking to cut costs drastically. It is inevitable that without dramatic change, business will stop investing in safety and health, with the hopes that perhaps the downside won’t be that bad. This is bad risk management. Risk management means protecting assets against loss from an uncertain world by reducing risks wherever they may be.”
Put aside the evidence that financial risk management went out the window in the past ten years. “Risk” resonates and grabs the attention of managers, reporters, consumers, and yes, students considering a career in occupational safety and health.
Its applications are expansive. Think of its association to “enterprise,” “exposure,” “value,” “ethics,” “vulnerability,” “uncertainty,” “liability,” “assets,” “assessments,” “severity,” “outcomes,” “perceptions,” “behavior,” “decision analysis,” “scenario planning,” “investments,” “communication,” “protection,” “security” and “management.”
We’re overdue to bring about an expanded reorientation of how people think about workplace safety, how the profession defines itself, and how it’s understood by those outside the field.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Could it be? OSHA senile at 38?
Regulatory bodies, like people, have distinct life cycles
…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth, they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D, “The Great Crash, 1929,” published originally in 1955
Could it be the venerable good doctor, a titan of economics, possessed the prescience to be describing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 16 years before it began operation in 1971? And more importantly, could he have been explaining why so many occupational safety and health professionals today are disengaged from OSHA?
The profession’s disconnect from OSHA is palpable, almost raw with frustration. “Leave me the hell alone and let me do what I know how to do,” emailed a pro with almost four decades in the field. He laments the agency’s “misleading and often confusing direction” in recent years, and the lack of any significant regulatory agenda items “or public outcries to fix what may not be broken.”
“OSHA is almost 39 years old now” writes Tom Lawrence, whose safety and health career pre-dates the birth of the agency, in an email to us. “Politics in abundance and budgets in scarcity. Potential for significant change? Not likely.”
It’s time to cut the ties that have bound professionals to Washington for almost 40 years, argues Lawrence, and press ahead with innovation and resourceful not in abundance inside the beltway.
Who’s in charge here?
Or as American Industrial Hygiene Association Director of Government Affairs Aaron Trippler recently wrote in his newsletter: “Many of those who live and work here, including yours truly, also shake our head when we see Congress and the agencies attempt to do the work of governing.” Trippler went on to describe the consultant hired by OSHA who worked for 27 months, ending in mid-2008. His fee: $572,946 billed for labor and $108,434 in compensation for his commuting costs. “This was more pay than that of the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, the Secretary of Labor, the Vice President of the U.S., or any member of Congress. Who in the heck is in charge?” asks Trippler.
That confusion, in terms of OSHA’s management, is the one issue regarding the agency labor and business camps both can agree on. But that’s as far as any consensus goes. Borrowing from Galbraith’s depiction of a federal regulator, labor will argue the agency has devolved into an arm of the industry it regulates. Numerous businesses look at OSHA’s actions or inaction and see bureaucratic senility.
An agency evolves
OSHA’s life cycle can be traced in a way that parallels Galbraith’s evolutionary stages. First, in its youthful heyday of the 1970s, the agency was vigorous and aggressive with inspections and standards-setting. After a bureaucratic start-up phase, committed health and safety experts led OSHA — Dr. Mort Corn (1975-1977) and Dr. Eula Bingham (1976 – 1980). Dr. Bingham, the most fervent regulator and activist agency head ever, was evangelical in her endeavors to protect workers. Meanwhile, a growing number of employers, employer associations, and Republican politicians found OSHA’s actions increasingly “intolerant.”
Surprisingly, the agency did not “mellow” during the 1980s Reagan years and the term of President George H.W. Bush (1988-1992). “I remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s when we saw a flurry of new standards — hazard communication, respiratory protection, lockout-tagout, process safety management — and thought that OSHA had a decent handle on driving safety improvements at the national level,” writes Jeff LaBelle, a safety and risk assessment manager, in an email to us. “Since then we’ve seen much too little and much too late.”
Ironically, the mellowing and winding-down occurred during a Democratic regime, the two terms of President Clinton (1992-2000). It was the vision of Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore that a more mature OSHA would reinvent itself as a customer-focused, problem-solving partner with industry. In this context, OSHA’s much ballyhooed ergonomics standard, rushed out the door mere days after Gore lost the 2000 election, could be considered a mid-life crisis binge.
The “much too little and much too late” phase of OSHA’s evolution, which critics peg from 1992 until the present, could be interpreted, using Galbraith’s life cycle of a regulator, as the disorientation and cognitive failures that accompany aging. But although OSHA chiefs Joe Dear, Charles Jeffress and John Henshaw during that time were attacked on many counts, senility never came up; all were in their prime when at the agency. Critics contend that as OSHA has aged, it has become more than ever an arm of the industry it regulates. Ergo, the never-ending announcements of industry alliances in recent years. And, to be sure, a fantastically rich web site with deep resources and “tools” to help businesses.
Life on the beach?
So what have we here in 2009?
Will OSHA continue to slumber in what Galbraith would ascribe as its sunset years? Overworked and under-staffed safety and health professionals in industry are not of a mind to wake the agency and confront possibly a slew of new standards. That’s not going to happen anyway, not with an army of attorneys at the disposal of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for OSHA to continue to drift listlessly in its old (by Galbraith’s definition) age. Big business is global, with its workers at risk around the world and up and down supply chains, but OSHA is not an energetic global regulatory thought-leader. It must be.
And small business, which still dominates the domestic workplace landscape, cannot continue to put workers at risk, increasingly non-English speaking employees, through ignorance, lack of resources, or knowing non-compliance.
In this economy, retirees return to work and workers put off retirement. Old age ain’t what it used to be. Yes, there’s much talk of the graying of OSHA, of the coming wave of retirements. Still, hundreds if not thousands of careerists at OSHA aren’t ready to cash it in. They need strong, vibrant leadership. And here in 2009, when OSHA needs direction and vision, the safety and health profession can’t be caught “decoupling” and leaving the agency to close its eyes and stretch out on a beach chair somewhere.
Dave Johnson, Editor
…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth, they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D, “The Great Crash, 1929,” published originally in 1955
Could it be the venerable good doctor, a titan of economics, possessed the prescience to be describing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 16 years before it began operation in 1971? And more importantly, could he have been explaining why so many occupational safety and health professionals today are disengaged from OSHA?
The profession’s disconnect from OSHA is palpable, almost raw with frustration. “Leave me the hell alone and let me do what I know how to do,” emailed a pro with almost four decades in the field. He laments the agency’s “misleading and often confusing direction” in recent years, and the lack of any significant regulatory agenda items “or public outcries to fix what may not be broken.”
“OSHA is almost 39 years old now” writes Tom Lawrence, whose safety and health career pre-dates the birth of the agency, in an email to us. “Politics in abundance and budgets in scarcity. Potential for significant change? Not likely.”
It’s time to cut the ties that have bound professionals to Washington for almost 40 years, argues Lawrence, and press ahead with innovation and resourceful not in abundance inside the beltway.
Who’s in charge here?
Or as American Industrial Hygiene Association Director of Government Affairs Aaron Trippler recently wrote in his newsletter: “Many of those who live and work here, including yours truly, also shake our head when we see Congress and the agencies attempt to do the work of governing.” Trippler went on to describe the consultant hired by OSHA who worked for 27 months, ending in mid-2008. His fee: $572,946 billed for labor and $108,434 in compensation for his commuting costs. “This was more pay than that of the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, the Secretary of Labor, the Vice President of the U.S., or any member of Congress. Who in the heck is in charge?” asks Trippler.
That confusion, in terms of OSHA’s management, is the one issue regarding the agency labor and business camps both can agree on. But that’s as far as any consensus goes. Borrowing from Galbraith’s depiction of a federal regulator, labor will argue the agency has devolved into an arm of the industry it regulates. Numerous businesses look at OSHA’s actions or inaction and see bureaucratic senility.
An agency evolves
OSHA’s life cycle can be traced in a way that parallels Galbraith’s evolutionary stages. First, in its youthful heyday of the 1970s, the agency was vigorous and aggressive with inspections and standards-setting. After a bureaucratic start-up phase, committed health and safety experts led OSHA — Dr. Mort Corn (1975-1977) and Dr. Eula Bingham (1976 – 1980). Dr. Bingham, the most fervent regulator and activist agency head ever, was evangelical in her endeavors to protect workers. Meanwhile, a growing number of employers, employer associations, and Republican politicians found OSHA’s actions increasingly “intolerant.”
Surprisingly, the agency did not “mellow” during the 1980s Reagan years and the term of President George H.W. Bush (1988-1992). “I remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s when we saw a flurry of new standards — hazard communication, respiratory protection, lockout-tagout, process safety management — and thought that OSHA had a decent handle on driving safety improvements at the national level,” writes Jeff LaBelle, a safety and risk assessment manager, in an email to us. “Since then we’ve seen much too little and much too late.”
Ironically, the mellowing and winding-down occurred during a Democratic regime, the two terms of President Clinton (1992-2000). It was the vision of Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore that a more mature OSHA would reinvent itself as a customer-focused, problem-solving partner with industry. In this context, OSHA’s much ballyhooed ergonomics standard, rushed out the door mere days after Gore lost the 2000 election, could be considered a mid-life crisis binge.
The “much too little and much too late” phase of OSHA’s evolution, which critics peg from 1992 until the present, could be interpreted, using Galbraith’s life cycle of a regulator, as the disorientation and cognitive failures that accompany aging. But although OSHA chiefs Joe Dear, Charles Jeffress and John Henshaw during that time were attacked on many counts, senility never came up; all were in their prime when at the agency. Critics contend that as OSHA has aged, it has become more than ever an arm of the industry it regulates. Ergo, the never-ending announcements of industry alliances in recent years. And, to be sure, a fantastically rich web site with deep resources and “tools” to help businesses.
Life on the beach?
So what have we here in 2009?
Will OSHA continue to slumber in what Galbraith would ascribe as its sunset years? Overworked and under-staffed safety and health professionals in industry are not of a mind to wake the agency and confront possibly a slew of new standards. That’s not going to happen anyway, not with an army of attorneys at the disposal of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for OSHA to continue to drift listlessly in its old (by Galbraith’s definition) age. Big business is global, with its workers at risk around the world and up and down supply chains, but OSHA is not an energetic global regulatory thought-leader. It must be.
And small business, which still dominates the domestic workplace landscape, cannot continue to put workers at risk, increasingly non-English speaking employees, through ignorance, lack of resources, or knowing non-compliance.
In this economy, retirees return to work and workers put off retirement. Old age ain’t what it used to be. Yes, there’s much talk of the graying of OSHA, of the coming wave of retirements. Still, hundreds if not thousands of careerists at OSHA aren’t ready to cash it in. They need strong, vibrant leadership. And here in 2009, when OSHA needs direction and vision, the safety and health profession can’t be caught “decoupling” and leaving the agency to close its eyes and stretch out on a beach chair somewhere.
Dave Johnson, Editor
A cheap shot
OSHA lobs spitball at Battleship Wal-Mart
Last month, OSHA’s area office for Long Island, New York, cited Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., $7,000 for inadequate crowd control following the November 28, 2008 death of a temporary Wal-Mart employee. The man was knocked to the ground and trampled by a frenzied mob of some 2,000 bargain-hunters in a pre-dawn, Black Friday holiday sales stampede at Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream, N.Y. store, about 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy-tree) 34, had only been on the job a week as a so-called “seasonal worker” and died of asphyxiation. $7,000 is the maximum penalty OSHA can cite for a single serious violation, which was what the tragedy was judged to be. $374.5 billion was the sales total racked up by Wal-Mart for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2008. Inspectors used Section 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the so-called general duty clause, to cite Wal-Mart the maximum $7,000 fine for a serious violation of the clause.
There’s something pathetic here, though perfectly legal, about a $374.5 billion business being fined $7,000 for an employee’s gruesome death on the job.
A belated gold standard
In all-too-typical reactive fashion, Wal-Mart, as part of a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office to avoid prosecution, has gone out and hired the finest crowd security consultants in the country. They’ve worked NFL Super Bowls and Olympic games. Now they’ll devise “protocols set up to be the gold standard for crowd management” in the retail industry, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
A $10,000 fine is the max the D.A. could have sought.
Wal-Mart will implement the new plan at its 92 New York stores as part of the deal with the D.A.’s office. The deal also calls for Wal-Mart to set up a $400,000 victims’ compensation and remuneration fund (11 others, including a pregnant women, were injured in the crush), contribute $1.2 million for Nassau County’s Youth Board, donate $300,000 to the United Way of Long Island, and hire 50 high school students every year to work in its five stores in the county. Call it knee-jerk corporate social responsibility.
Here’s hoping the high schoolers receive the training in security and crowd control Mr. Damour never got.
Monetizing life
This story isn’t about Wal-Mart, OSHA, or the Nassau Country DA. It’s about the impossible and demeaning task of putting a price tag on human life. Here there can be no “gold standard.”
The mathematics of loss doesn’t add up. In 25 major aviation accidents between 1970 and 1984, the average compensation for victims who went to trial was $1 million, according to a Rand Corporation analysis. Average comp for cases settled out of court was $415,000. The wife of a currency trader killed in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers was eligible for $138,000. The widow of a security guard killed in Tower 1 will get $444,010.
For some, money doesn’t matter. There were about a dozen families so clinically depressed about 9/11 they never filed a claim to the compensation fund. Those families would have received on average $2 million each tax-free.
OSHA’s $7,000 fine of course is not intended to compensate for a life lost. But it’s ridiculous to read OSHA’s press release stating a $374.5 billion company has been hit with a $7,000 penalty for the death of one of its employees trampled on the job like a human doormat. Like it or not, the $7,000 is interpreted as the price tag for this fatality. It’s grotesque.
It’s all legit
EPA recently fined an apartment complex owner and property management firm more than $300,000 for failing to disclose information about lead paint to tenants. Failure to simply disclose info about lead paint is 40 times worse of a transgression than having an employee stampeded to death? OSHA recently fined a Texas piping manufacturer $146,500 — more than 20 times the Wal-Mart fine — for 29 serious violations, though no one was injured or killed.
These discrepancies are legitimized by laws that on the books. They also cheapen respect for life and dignity.
Stronger medicine
In Congress, there is a proposal to increase the OSHA serious/fatality violation penalty maximum to $12,000, allowing up to $50,000 for a fatality.
$7,000, $12,000, $50,000 — no matter how many zeroes you affix to the penalty, it won’t modify corporate behavior or change corporate culture. As someone once told me, only greed (see financial meltdown) or fear (of a brand meltdown) will do that.
OK, so how about mandatory referral to the Justice Department and jail time with no parole for managers found guilty of willfully or seriously neglecting their duty to protect employees when the outcome is an on-the-job fatality?
How about a memorial, a small white cross with a marker perhaps, to Jdimytai Damour set up inside the electronic doors of Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream store. Shoppers entering might stop to consider, “What the hell happened here?” Or maybe their curious kids will ask. I’d like to hear the explanation.
And OSHA needs get with the 21st century service-driven “new” economy. The symbolism of the Wal-Mart penalty is unnecessary. Issue retail industry safety and health guidelines. Put more of a priority on evaluating work environments where public behavior can be hazardous, such as retailing, health care (patients and visitors), and highway construction work zones.
Don’t lob spitballs at battleships and in doing so belittle lives lost. Do something of consequence. What’s $7,000 to a $374.5 billion multinational? A dwarf kicking grains of sand at a giant. Stop degrading victims, victims’ families and OSHA’s credibility. Rewrite the legal technicalities that lawmakers, attorneys and companies hide behind. Stop making it so easy for all of us to quickly turn the page and forget another life lost unnecessarily.
Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
Last month, OSHA’s area office for Long Island, New York, cited Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., $7,000 for inadequate crowd control following the November 28, 2008 death of a temporary Wal-Mart employee. The man was knocked to the ground and trampled by a frenzied mob of some 2,000 bargain-hunters in a pre-dawn, Black Friday holiday sales stampede at Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream, N.Y. store, about 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy-tree) 34, had only been on the job a week as a so-called “seasonal worker” and died of asphyxiation. $7,000 is the maximum penalty OSHA can cite for a single serious violation, which was what the tragedy was judged to be. $374.5 billion was the sales total racked up by Wal-Mart for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2008. Inspectors used Section 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the so-called general duty clause, to cite Wal-Mart the maximum $7,000 fine for a serious violation of the clause.
There’s something pathetic here, though perfectly legal, about a $374.5 billion business being fined $7,000 for an employee’s gruesome death on the job.
A belated gold standard
In all-too-typical reactive fashion, Wal-Mart, as part of a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office to avoid prosecution, has gone out and hired the finest crowd security consultants in the country. They’ve worked NFL Super Bowls and Olympic games. Now they’ll devise “protocols set up to be the gold standard for crowd management” in the retail industry, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
A $10,000 fine is the max the D.A. could have sought.
Wal-Mart will implement the new plan at its 92 New York stores as part of the deal with the D.A.’s office. The deal also calls for Wal-Mart to set up a $400,000 victims’ compensation and remuneration fund (11 others, including a pregnant women, were injured in the crush), contribute $1.2 million for Nassau County’s Youth Board, donate $300,000 to the United Way of Long Island, and hire 50 high school students every year to work in its five stores in the county. Call it knee-jerk corporate social responsibility.
Here’s hoping the high schoolers receive the training in security and crowd control Mr. Damour never got.
Monetizing life
This story isn’t about Wal-Mart, OSHA, or the Nassau Country DA. It’s about the impossible and demeaning task of putting a price tag on human life. Here there can be no “gold standard.”
The mathematics of loss doesn’t add up. In 25 major aviation accidents between 1970 and 1984, the average compensation for victims who went to trial was $1 million, according to a Rand Corporation analysis. Average comp for cases settled out of court was $415,000. The wife of a currency trader killed in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers was eligible for $138,000. The widow of a security guard killed in Tower 1 will get $444,010.
For some, money doesn’t matter. There were about a dozen families so clinically depressed about 9/11 they never filed a claim to the compensation fund. Those families would have received on average $2 million each tax-free.
OSHA’s $7,000 fine of course is not intended to compensate for a life lost. But it’s ridiculous to read OSHA’s press release stating a $374.5 billion company has been hit with a $7,000 penalty for the death of one of its employees trampled on the job like a human doormat. Like it or not, the $7,000 is interpreted as the price tag for this fatality. It’s grotesque.
It’s all legit
EPA recently fined an apartment complex owner and property management firm more than $300,000 for failing to disclose information about lead paint to tenants. Failure to simply disclose info about lead paint is 40 times worse of a transgression than having an employee stampeded to death? OSHA recently fined a Texas piping manufacturer $146,500 — more than 20 times the Wal-Mart fine — for 29 serious violations, though no one was injured or killed.
These discrepancies are legitimized by laws that on the books. They also cheapen respect for life and dignity.
Stronger medicine
In Congress, there is a proposal to increase the OSHA serious/fatality violation penalty maximum to $12,000, allowing up to $50,000 for a fatality.
$7,000, $12,000, $50,000 — no matter how many zeroes you affix to the penalty, it won’t modify corporate behavior or change corporate culture. As someone once told me, only greed (see financial meltdown) or fear (of a brand meltdown) will do that.
OK, so how about mandatory referral to the Justice Department and jail time with no parole for managers found guilty of willfully or seriously neglecting their duty to protect employees when the outcome is an on-the-job fatality?
How about a memorial, a small white cross with a marker perhaps, to Jdimytai Damour set up inside the electronic doors of Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream store. Shoppers entering might stop to consider, “What the hell happened here?” Or maybe their curious kids will ask. I’d like to hear the explanation.
And OSHA needs get with the 21st century service-driven “new” economy. The symbolism of the Wal-Mart penalty is unnecessary. Issue retail industry safety and health guidelines. Put more of a priority on evaluating work environments where public behavior can be hazardous, such as retailing, health care (patients and visitors), and highway construction work zones.
Don’t lob spitballs at battleships and in doing so belittle lives lost. Do something of consequence. What’s $7,000 to a $374.5 billion multinational? A dwarf kicking grains of sand at a giant. Stop degrading victims, victims’ families and OSHA’s credibility. Rewrite the legal technicalities that lawmakers, attorneys and companies hide behind. Stop making it so easy for all of us to quickly turn the page and forget another life lost unnecessarily.
Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
“Most of the parents were desperate…”
It’s time to truly engage victims and their kin
I’m reading the new book, “Columbine,” (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009) and I can’t get Ron Hayes out of my head. Ron, from Fairhope, Alabama near Mobile, has been raising hell as a worker safety and victims’ rights activist since 1993, when his 19-year-old son Pat was killed on the job. Pat was "walking down the corn" — scraping the inside walls of a grain bin in Florida. As Pat knocked down the corn, 60 tons of it collapsed in a rush, suffocating him to death.
In “Columbine,” author Dave Cullen describes how the families of the 12 dead students, one dead teacher, and the 24 injured were misled and mistreated by public officials. Ron knows that pain.
Panicked parents of Columbine students frantically tried to learn the fate of their kids in the hours immediately after the shooting spree. “No word, for hours on end,” writes Cullen. Day stretched into night. The wife of the murdered teacher couldn’t sleep, still not knowing if her husband was dead or alive. She curled up with a pair of his socks.
The father of one murdered boy had his son’s death confirmed the next morning, flipping through a Denver newspaper. He stopped when he saw a half-page aerial photo of his son’s body stretched out on a sidewalk, next to a large pool of blood.
Fog of catastrophe
Chaos and confusion are partially to blame for the stonewalling and lack of cooperation that often confronts survivors and families of victims after a fatality — especially a large-scale catastrophe. At Columbine High, law enforcement officials had no clue how many perpetrators there might have been. A conspiracy was suspected due to scale of the attack. School officials needed a day to confirm how many of Columbine’s 2,000 students were safe, where they were, how many had been sent to hospitals.
“I knew Cassie was in there (the high school) somewhere,” said her father. “It was terrible to know she was on the other side of the fence and there was nothing we could do.”
“Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died,” writes Cullen.
The official Jefferson County (Jeffco) Sheriff Department’s report had been promised in the summer of 1999, but as the first anniversary (April 20, 2000) approached county officials said the report still had six to eight weeks to go.
“Investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information,” writes Cullen. Finally, two families filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately. They asked for videos made by the two killers, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. The father of one of the families who filed wanted to compare the raw data with the written report. “They lie as a practice,” he said.
“Treated like dirt”
That’s what Ron Hayes discovered, too. “There was no help or justice for Pat. OSHA treated us like we were dirt,” Hayes told a Senate Labor Committee hearing in April, 2008. “Losing a loved one on the job is very difficult to deal with but when the very agency that is supposed to protect them, fails in correcting, investigating and prosecuting the company that killed your loved one, it is even harder to bare.”
A district judge in Colorado approved the request of the two Columbine families. Days later, the judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. What emerged was about seven hundred pages of who, what, where, when and how information. “The logistics were useful, but hardly what people had been waiting for,” writes Cullen. The essential question of why had been ducked.
Victims and their families are often kept in the dark, and the truth suppressed, out of fear of lawsuits. Columbine was no exception. The sheriff’s report described a complaint that had been filed 13 months before the shooting by a family whose son was the subject of death threats from one of the killers. Ten pages of annihilation rants from the same murderer’s web site had been obtained. The report spent one paragraph summarizing these warnings and two defending police actions, or inaction.
“The department claimed it had been unable to access one of the killer’s web site, despite the fact that officials had printed pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found,” writes Cullen.
“Just heartbroken”
After an OSHA investigation into Pat’s death, agency investigators determined that his employer, Showell Farms, was guilty of six willful safety violations and recommended that the company pay more than $500,000 in fines. But OSHA's area director later reduced the fine to $42,000, citing a lack of clarity about whether OSHA's standards applied.
Ron Hayes and his family learned of the reduced fines and citations from a local news broadcast — despite repeated requests to OSHA for information. "When I saw it on TV that day," he recalled in article in Mother Jones magazine, "I was just heartbroken."
At last year’s Senate hearing Hayes testified, “These cases fall by the wayside and no one seems to care, except for the family.”
Misery at the church
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., discovered this firsthand when he and three other senators visited with the families of 12 coal miners killed in the January 2, 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. These families had been pained beyond the pale by a horrible communication breakdown. Gathered at the Sago Baptist Church, they first received word through widespread press announcements that 12 survivors were found and only one had died. Families ran outside, celebrating a “miracle.” Hours later completely contradictary and correct reports arrived. Only one miner survived while the other 12 had perished.
Kennedy said he was troubled to hear the families had not yet been involved in the accident investigation. He urged state and federal investigators to take time to talk to the relatives, who he said are extremely knowledgeable about the industry.
Congress jumps in
Earlier this year the “Protecting America’s Workers Act” was introduced in the U.S. House a Representatives. Among the bill’s provisions: a series of legal rights to allow “workers and their families to hold dangerous employers accountable,” according the language of the legislation.
These rights include:
● Workers and employee representatives have the right to contest OSHA’s failure to issue citations, classification of its citations, and proposed penalties.
● Injured workers, their families and families of workers who died in work-related incidents have the right to meet with investigators, receive copies of citations, and to have an opportunity to make a statement before any settlement negotiations.
● Any worker or their representative can object to a modification or withdrawal of a citation, and this entitles them to a hearing before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
You can argue whether these rights go too far, and Congress will. But it’s time, past time, to stop callous treatment of victims and their families and bring them in from the dark. They need to be engaged, not ignored.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
I’m reading the new book, “Columbine,” (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009) and I can’t get Ron Hayes out of my head. Ron, from Fairhope, Alabama near Mobile, has been raising hell as a worker safety and victims’ rights activist since 1993, when his 19-year-old son Pat was killed on the job. Pat was "walking down the corn" — scraping the inside walls of a grain bin in Florida. As Pat knocked down the corn, 60 tons of it collapsed in a rush, suffocating him to death.
In “Columbine,” author Dave Cullen describes how the families of the 12 dead students, one dead teacher, and the 24 injured were misled and mistreated by public officials. Ron knows that pain.
Panicked parents of Columbine students frantically tried to learn the fate of their kids in the hours immediately after the shooting spree. “No word, for hours on end,” writes Cullen. Day stretched into night. The wife of the murdered teacher couldn’t sleep, still not knowing if her husband was dead or alive. She curled up with a pair of his socks.
The father of one murdered boy had his son’s death confirmed the next morning, flipping through a Denver newspaper. He stopped when he saw a half-page aerial photo of his son’s body stretched out on a sidewalk, next to a large pool of blood.
Fog of catastrophe
Chaos and confusion are partially to blame for the stonewalling and lack of cooperation that often confronts survivors and families of victims after a fatality — especially a large-scale catastrophe. At Columbine High, law enforcement officials had no clue how many perpetrators there might have been. A conspiracy was suspected due to scale of the attack. School officials needed a day to confirm how many of Columbine’s 2,000 students were safe, where they were, how many had been sent to hospitals.
“I knew Cassie was in there (the high school) somewhere,” said her father. “It was terrible to know she was on the other side of the fence and there was nothing we could do.”
“Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died,” writes Cullen.
The official Jefferson County (Jeffco) Sheriff Department’s report had been promised in the summer of 1999, but as the first anniversary (April 20, 2000) approached county officials said the report still had six to eight weeks to go.
“Investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information,” writes Cullen. Finally, two families filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately. They asked for videos made by the two killers, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. The father of one of the families who filed wanted to compare the raw data with the written report. “They lie as a practice,” he said.
“Treated like dirt”
That’s what Ron Hayes discovered, too. “There was no help or justice for Pat. OSHA treated us like we were dirt,” Hayes told a Senate Labor Committee hearing in April, 2008. “Losing a loved one on the job is very difficult to deal with but when the very agency that is supposed to protect them, fails in correcting, investigating and prosecuting the company that killed your loved one, it is even harder to bare.”
A district judge in Colorado approved the request of the two Columbine families. Days later, the judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. What emerged was about seven hundred pages of who, what, where, when and how information. “The logistics were useful, but hardly what people had been waiting for,” writes Cullen. The essential question of why had been ducked.
Victims and their families are often kept in the dark, and the truth suppressed, out of fear of lawsuits. Columbine was no exception. The sheriff’s report described a complaint that had been filed 13 months before the shooting by a family whose son was the subject of death threats from one of the killers. Ten pages of annihilation rants from the same murderer’s web site had been obtained. The report spent one paragraph summarizing these warnings and two defending police actions, or inaction.
“The department claimed it had been unable to access one of the killer’s web site, despite the fact that officials had printed pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found,” writes Cullen.
“Just heartbroken”
After an OSHA investigation into Pat’s death, agency investigators determined that his employer, Showell Farms, was guilty of six willful safety violations and recommended that the company pay more than $500,000 in fines. But OSHA's area director later reduced the fine to $42,000, citing a lack of clarity about whether OSHA's standards applied.
Ron Hayes and his family learned of the reduced fines and citations from a local news broadcast — despite repeated requests to OSHA for information. "When I saw it on TV that day," he recalled in article in Mother Jones magazine, "I was just heartbroken."
At last year’s Senate hearing Hayes testified, “These cases fall by the wayside and no one seems to care, except for the family.”
Misery at the church
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., discovered this firsthand when he and three other senators visited with the families of 12 coal miners killed in the January 2, 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. These families had been pained beyond the pale by a horrible communication breakdown. Gathered at the Sago Baptist Church, they first received word through widespread press announcements that 12 survivors were found and only one had died. Families ran outside, celebrating a “miracle.” Hours later completely contradictary and correct reports arrived. Only one miner survived while the other 12 had perished.
Kennedy said he was troubled to hear the families had not yet been involved in the accident investigation. He urged state and federal investigators to take time to talk to the relatives, who he said are extremely knowledgeable about the industry.
Congress jumps in
Earlier this year the “Protecting America’s Workers Act” was introduced in the U.S. House a Representatives. Among the bill’s provisions: a series of legal rights to allow “workers and their families to hold dangerous employers accountable,” according the language of the legislation.
These rights include:
● Workers and employee representatives have the right to contest OSHA’s failure to issue citations, classification of its citations, and proposed penalties.
● Injured workers, their families and families of workers who died in work-related incidents have the right to meet with investigators, receive copies of citations, and to have an opportunity to make a statement before any settlement negotiations.
● Any worker or their representative can object to a modification or withdrawal of a citation, and this entitles them to a hearing before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
You can argue whether these rights go too far, and Congress will. But it’s time, past time, to stop callous treatment of victims and their families and bring them in from the dark. They need to be engaged, not ignored.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
Recession blues?
Research doesn’t show injuries increasing
In April we received this email, edited here for brevity:
Mr. Johnson,
I am a police officer in Edmonton, Alberta. I have been researching the effects of low morale usually associated with job stress/job dissatisfaction on officer safety performance. Have you noted a relationship between employee morale (job satisfaction) and employee performance with respect to safety?
Olena Fedorovich
Dear Olena,
Excellent question. With the economy in the tank, you would think employee morale is taking a bath. I emailed your question to 112 occupational safety and health experts; and searched the internet to review published research.
I learned there is no easy answer for you. Safety and health experts disagree vehemently on whether low morale leads to an increase in injuries.
From consultant Bob Veazie: “Yes, LOW MORALE ABSOLUTELY MEANS MORE INJURIES.” (The emphatic capitalization is his.)
“The short answer is yes, the potential for errors and injuries is greatly increased by low morale,” said Michael Topf, president of Topf Initiatives.
We also received these responses:
“I’ve seen less than sterling EHS performance during times of a robust economy, when morale was seemingly high, and commendable EHS performance during times of stress,” reported Chris Laszcz-Davis, principal of The Environmental Quality Organization.
“I looked at this question during my research for my Ph.D. One of the surprising things I found was that plants with a more positive attitude had workers who were willing to take more chances in their general behavior toward safety,” recalled Henry Lick, former director of industrial hygiene for Ford Motor Company.
Are you sufficiently confused, Olena?
The problem is a paucity of empirical evidence connecting morale, job satisfaction and job distress to safety outcomes. The expert responses I received often carried qualifiers: “I believe,” “I would think,” “It’s tough to determine,” “I suspect.” Dee Woodhull, a consultant with ORC Worldwide, said it best: “This (low morale, high distress equals more injuries) seems to be one of those myths in the safety profession we assume is true.”
Stick to the facts
Mired in opinion and mythology, Olena, let’s stick to the facts:
● Levels of distress among employees have been rising long before the current recession. Time magazine ran a cover story on June 6, 1983: “Stress: The Epidemic of the 80s.” Dan Petersen, in an interview with ISHN published July 18, 2003, said: “In the last 10 to 15 years I have never seen the number of pissed off and angry people working in companies.”
● Occupational injury rates have plummeted during this timeframe. By 2007, the incidence rate for private industry had dropped to 40 percent of its 1972 value, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
● “The rate of growth of the workplace incidence and illness rate drops about 2.5 percentage points during the 20 months leading up to the (recession) trough, before bottoming out in sync with economic activity,” writes Frank A. Schmid, director and senior economist for the National Council on Compensation Insurance, Inc. (NCCI), in a paper, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” published March 28, 2009.
“Of particular interest is the Great Depression,” writes Schmid. “The recession-related drop in (injury) frequency growth during the Great Depression was the most extensive of all recessions.”
One myth of the Great Depression was punctured by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1954 book, “The Great Crash: 1929.” Galbraith wrote that the image of speculators hurling themselves from Wall Street windows in a suicide wave following the stock market crash is “part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none. The suicide statistics for New Yorkers show only a slight deviation from those of the country as a whole.”
● A Gallup Poll from August, 2008 reported 90 percent of U.S. workers were either completely satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. Only nine percent were dissatisfied with their work to any degree.
So here is the situation: 1) the U.S. economy is as bad as it’s been in 50 years; 2) distress levels have been increasing for decades; 3) during that time injury rates have dropped significantly; 4) historical statistics show no correlation between recessions, depressions and increased injuries (author Schmid calls this “the dog that did not bark”); 5) job satisfaction has not been affected by years of increasing wear and tear of distress and Petersen’s “pissed off and angry” workforce.
Why doesn’t the dog bark?
What gives, you’re probably wondering, Olena. Here are potential reasons for the decline in injuries despite hard times and increasing distress:
● Workplace injury rate under-reporting. According to a 2008 House Committee on Education and Labor hearing report, under-reporting estimates range from 33 to 69 percent. Among the reasons cited: OSHA logs are maintained by employers, who might have an incentive to under-report to avoid inspection, or win safety performance contests.
● Fear of job insecurity. As a result, safety complaints and reports of minor types of injuries that can be covered up can decline. “Fear of job loss causes many in the workforce to travel under the proverbial radar to not be noticed,” said James Leemann of the Leemann Group LLC.
● Fear drives risk aversion. “What causes risk aversion?” asked A&K Ross Associates in a paper presented at the 2005 International Rail Safety Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. “Basically fear. Fear of blame, fear of job loss or promotion, fear of media scrutiny when things go wrong, fear of prosecution.” The result, according to the authors: “An overly cautious approach to safety.”
All caution was tossed out the window in the consumer spending spree and extreme risk-taking of financial institutions in the years leading up to the recession. But now, bewildered by a recession with no end in sight, risk aversion has reach new heights, according to a September, 2008 Merrill Lynch Survey of Fund Managers. Investors have taken a “flight to safety” with the most risk-averse mindset yet recorded, according to the survey.
● Survival first. “Most folks I know today are grateful to have a job and anxious to work safely and effectively,” said Laszcz-Davis.
“I do not think a ‘morale meltdown’ precipitates an increase in at-risk behaviors or more injuries,” said Leemann. “It results in just the opposite behavior. Most people are in such a survival mode the last thing they want to do is lose their job.”
● Humans could be naturally risk-averse. Behavioral economists have discovered “losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good, driving our risk-taking,” writes Michael Shermer in “Irrational Economic Man,” published January 11, 2009 in City Journal magazine. “So deep and powerful an economic emotion is this aversion that it may be an evolved trait,” he writes.
● The innate pursuit of esteem. This pursuit “makes people loss averse,” write Tyler Cowen and Amihai Green in a paper published February 13, 2003, “Esteem and Risk Aversion.” “When esteem enters the picture, individuals are more likely to be strongly risk-averse,” the authors write.
● Low moods. Symptoms of low mood — fatigue, loss of motivation and interest, pessimism, and the behavioral inability to feel rewarded by previously pleasurable activities — function to reduce risk-taking, according to Daniel Nettle in an article published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
As the mood state deteriorates, the riskiness of behavior will decline until it becomes highly risk-averse. Low moods sap individuals of the energy, enthusiasm and optimism needed to believe risks will pay off.
To sum it up, Olena, plenty of evidence exists that low moods, low self-esteem, risk aversion, and fear of job loss — recession blues — all contribute to reduced risk-taking and lower injury rates. Historical injury statistics tied to business cycles bears this out.
Distress and injuries: a shaky connection
There’s one more point we should make, Olena. In your email, you connect low morale, job distress and job dissatisfaction, as though they are one and the same. Research tells a different story:
● “An individual’s actual level of morale has no influence on their level of distress, and vice versa,” write Peter Cotton and Peter M. Hart in “Occupational Wellbeing and Performance: A Review of Organizational Health and Research,” published in the July, 2003 Australian Psychologist. “The factors influencing levels of morale are not the same as those determining levels of distress.”
To simplify the authors’ model, morale and job satisfaction are more a function of one’s cognitive states, a matter of making mental judgments, evaluations and perceptions about work. Distress — or its opposite: energizing, motivating stress — emanates more from our emotional side, states of anxiousness, anger, guilt, sadness, energy, enthusiasm and pride.
● “Stress researchers have failed to link indicators of occupational stress to relevant organizational outcomes,” which would include injuries, state Cotton and Hart.
This “failure to link” is also referenced in the 2006 book, “Human Safety and Risk Management,” by A Ian Glendon, Sharon Clarke and Eugene F McKenna. The relationship between job distress, job dissatisfaction and injury is moderated by several factors, according to the authors: safety knowledge, safety motivation, safety culture, social support from co-workers, relationships with supervision, management concern and support, and personality type.
“There is limited evidence to support a relationship between job distress and work-related injuries such as vehicle crashes, “ according to the authors.
● The “selling of distress.” In our review of relevant research, we discovered most claims of a connection between job distress and costly injuries were made by organizations or associations with a vested interested in promoting the prevalence and cost of job distress — stress reduction coaches and consultants, stress institutes, etc. Most of the research relates distress to the costs of increased absenteeism, presenteeism (mentally checking out while still on the job), high turnover, substance abuse and stress-related workers’ comp claims (typically cases of subjective mental anguish or back injuries, not more objective injuries such as body blows, falls, crashes or amputations).
We don’t want to diminish the damage caused by job distress. It’s real, and it’s costly. But the impact is on one’s overall well-being, especially mental and physical health, more than traumatic injury causation, according to research.
NIOSH makes this point in its booklet, “Stress…at Work,” (NIOSH Publication 99-101) stating: “Job stress poses a threat to the health of workers, and in turn, the health of organizations. Evidence is rapidly accumulating to suggest that stress plays an important role in several types of chronic health problems — especially cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and psychological disorders.”
Important findings
So Olena, we’ll leave you with three discoveries we made in the course of our research:
1 — Injury rates follow business cycle behavior, but counter-intuitively. According to the NCCI report, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” in recessions job creation plummets while job destruction soars. Job destruction (layoffs) decreases the growth rate of workplace injury and illness rates. Why? The most inexperienced workers are laid-off first, and the longest-tenured workers survive. Approximately 30 percent of all reported injuries in manufacturing are associated with workers who have been with their current employer for less than one year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coming out of a recession, when hiring increases (job creation), injury rates will rise as more inexperienced workers land jobs. This includes workers who switch jobs, come out of unemployment, or rejoin the workforce.
2 — Focusing on the morale, job satisfaction, and distress of employees can lead to a “blame the worker” mindset. This misses the very significant influences that organizational culture, co-worker support, and supervisory and management leadership have on morale and distress.
“Substantial improvements in the levels of occupational wellbeing will only be achieved by focusing on improving leadership and managerial practices and other aspects of organizational climate,” write Cotton and Hart. “Organizational climate is the strongest determinant of individual morale. Organizational development programs that improve the quality of leadership practices and organizational climate are likely to have a greater impact on reducing workers’ compensation premiums that traditional occupational health and safety risk management approaches.”
3 — “Personality is the strongest determinant of individual distress, write Cotton and Hart. Perhaps you should survey, study and discuss the emotions, moods and levels of self-esteem that run through your workforce. Look for “withdrawal behaviors” that negative emotions trigger: absenteeism, turnover, submitting stress-related comp claims, lack of participation, decreasing volunteerism, and isolation and alienation (leading in extreme cases to potential violent outbursts). Keep in mind that after personality, morale and organizational culture are the two biggest influences on withdrawal behaviors.
So if officers in your Officer Safety Unit are not wearing body armor or carrying radios when they should, don’t be too quick to pin it on the recession, poor job satisfaction, or distress. Step back and look at your organization and the level of communication, social support, training and education, concern and empathy on the part of supervisors and managers.
Regards,
Dave Johnson, Editor
In April we received this email, edited here for brevity:
Mr. Johnson,
I am a police officer in Edmonton, Alberta. I have been researching the effects of low morale usually associated with job stress/job dissatisfaction on officer safety performance. Have you noted a relationship between employee morale (job satisfaction) and employee performance with respect to safety?
Olena Fedorovich
Dear Olena,
Excellent question. With the economy in the tank, you would think employee morale is taking a bath. I emailed your question to 112 occupational safety and health experts; and searched the internet to review published research.
I learned there is no easy answer for you. Safety and health experts disagree vehemently on whether low morale leads to an increase in injuries.
From consultant Bob Veazie: “Yes, LOW MORALE ABSOLUTELY MEANS MORE INJURIES.” (The emphatic capitalization is his.)
“The short answer is yes, the potential for errors and injuries is greatly increased by low morale,” said Michael Topf, president of Topf Initiatives.
We also received these responses:
“I’ve seen less than sterling EHS performance during times of a robust economy, when morale was seemingly high, and commendable EHS performance during times of stress,” reported Chris Laszcz-Davis, principal of The Environmental Quality Organization.
“I looked at this question during my research for my Ph.D. One of the surprising things I found was that plants with a more positive attitude had workers who were willing to take more chances in their general behavior toward safety,” recalled Henry Lick, former director of industrial hygiene for Ford Motor Company.
Are you sufficiently confused, Olena?
The problem is a paucity of empirical evidence connecting morale, job satisfaction and job distress to safety outcomes. The expert responses I received often carried qualifiers: “I believe,” “I would think,” “It’s tough to determine,” “I suspect.” Dee Woodhull, a consultant with ORC Worldwide, said it best: “This (low morale, high distress equals more injuries) seems to be one of those myths in the safety profession we assume is true.”
Stick to the facts
Mired in opinion and mythology, Olena, let’s stick to the facts:
● Levels of distress among employees have been rising long before the current recession. Time magazine ran a cover story on June 6, 1983: “Stress: The Epidemic of the 80s.” Dan Petersen, in an interview with ISHN published July 18, 2003, said: “In the last 10 to 15 years I have never seen the number of pissed off and angry people working in companies.”
● Occupational injury rates have plummeted during this timeframe. By 2007, the incidence rate for private industry had dropped to 40 percent of its 1972 value, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
● “The rate of growth of the workplace incidence and illness rate drops about 2.5 percentage points during the 20 months leading up to the (recession) trough, before bottoming out in sync with economic activity,” writes Frank A. Schmid, director and senior economist for the National Council on Compensation Insurance, Inc. (NCCI), in a paper, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” published March 28, 2009.
“Of particular interest is the Great Depression,” writes Schmid. “The recession-related drop in (injury) frequency growth during the Great Depression was the most extensive of all recessions.”
One myth of the Great Depression was punctured by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1954 book, “The Great Crash: 1929.” Galbraith wrote that the image of speculators hurling themselves from Wall Street windows in a suicide wave following the stock market crash is “part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none. The suicide statistics for New Yorkers show only a slight deviation from those of the country as a whole.”
● A Gallup Poll from August, 2008 reported 90 percent of U.S. workers were either completely satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. Only nine percent were dissatisfied with their work to any degree.
So here is the situation: 1) the U.S. economy is as bad as it’s been in 50 years; 2) distress levels have been increasing for decades; 3) during that time injury rates have dropped significantly; 4) historical statistics show no correlation between recessions, depressions and increased injuries (author Schmid calls this “the dog that did not bark”); 5) job satisfaction has not been affected by years of increasing wear and tear of distress and Petersen’s “pissed off and angry” workforce.
Why doesn’t the dog bark?
What gives, you’re probably wondering, Olena. Here are potential reasons for the decline in injuries despite hard times and increasing distress:
● Workplace injury rate under-reporting. According to a 2008 House Committee on Education and Labor hearing report, under-reporting estimates range from 33 to 69 percent. Among the reasons cited: OSHA logs are maintained by employers, who might have an incentive to under-report to avoid inspection, or win safety performance contests.
● Fear of job insecurity. As a result, safety complaints and reports of minor types of injuries that can be covered up can decline. “Fear of job loss causes many in the workforce to travel under the proverbial radar to not be noticed,” said James Leemann of the Leemann Group LLC.
● Fear drives risk aversion. “What causes risk aversion?” asked A&K Ross Associates in a paper presented at the 2005 International Rail Safety Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. “Basically fear. Fear of blame, fear of job loss or promotion, fear of media scrutiny when things go wrong, fear of prosecution.” The result, according to the authors: “An overly cautious approach to safety.”
All caution was tossed out the window in the consumer spending spree and extreme risk-taking of financial institutions in the years leading up to the recession. But now, bewildered by a recession with no end in sight, risk aversion has reach new heights, according to a September, 2008 Merrill Lynch Survey of Fund Managers. Investors have taken a “flight to safety” with the most risk-averse mindset yet recorded, according to the survey.
● Survival first. “Most folks I know today are grateful to have a job and anxious to work safely and effectively,” said Laszcz-Davis.
“I do not think a ‘morale meltdown’ precipitates an increase in at-risk behaviors or more injuries,” said Leemann. “It results in just the opposite behavior. Most people are in such a survival mode the last thing they want to do is lose their job.”
● Humans could be naturally risk-averse. Behavioral economists have discovered “losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good, driving our risk-taking,” writes Michael Shermer in “Irrational Economic Man,” published January 11, 2009 in City Journal magazine. “So deep and powerful an economic emotion is this aversion that it may be an evolved trait,” he writes.
● The innate pursuit of esteem. This pursuit “makes people loss averse,” write Tyler Cowen and Amihai Green in a paper published February 13, 2003, “Esteem and Risk Aversion.” “When esteem enters the picture, individuals are more likely to be strongly risk-averse,” the authors write.
● Low moods. Symptoms of low mood — fatigue, loss of motivation and interest, pessimism, and the behavioral inability to feel rewarded by previously pleasurable activities — function to reduce risk-taking, according to Daniel Nettle in an article published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
As the mood state deteriorates, the riskiness of behavior will decline until it becomes highly risk-averse. Low moods sap individuals of the energy, enthusiasm and optimism needed to believe risks will pay off.
To sum it up, Olena, plenty of evidence exists that low moods, low self-esteem, risk aversion, and fear of job loss — recession blues — all contribute to reduced risk-taking and lower injury rates. Historical injury statistics tied to business cycles bears this out.
Distress and injuries: a shaky connection
There’s one more point we should make, Olena. In your email, you connect low morale, job distress and job dissatisfaction, as though they are one and the same. Research tells a different story:
● “An individual’s actual level of morale has no influence on their level of distress, and vice versa,” write Peter Cotton and Peter M. Hart in “Occupational Wellbeing and Performance: A Review of Organizational Health and Research,” published in the July, 2003 Australian Psychologist. “The factors influencing levels of morale are not the same as those determining levels of distress.”
To simplify the authors’ model, morale and job satisfaction are more a function of one’s cognitive states, a matter of making mental judgments, evaluations and perceptions about work. Distress — or its opposite: energizing, motivating stress — emanates more from our emotional side, states of anxiousness, anger, guilt, sadness, energy, enthusiasm and pride.
● “Stress researchers have failed to link indicators of occupational stress to relevant organizational outcomes,” which would include injuries, state Cotton and Hart.
This “failure to link” is also referenced in the 2006 book, “Human Safety and Risk Management,” by A Ian Glendon, Sharon Clarke and Eugene F McKenna. The relationship between job distress, job dissatisfaction and injury is moderated by several factors, according to the authors: safety knowledge, safety motivation, safety culture, social support from co-workers, relationships with supervision, management concern and support, and personality type.
“There is limited evidence to support a relationship between job distress and work-related injuries such as vehicle crashes, “ according to the authors.
● The “selling of distress.” In our review of relevant research, we discovered most claims of a connection between job distress and costly injuries were made by organizations or associations with a vested interested in promoting the prevalence and cost of job distress — stress reduction coaches and consultants, stress institutes, etc. Most of the research relates distress to the costs of increased absenteeism, presenteeism (mentally checking out while still on the job), high turnover, substance abuse and stress-related workers’ comp claims (typically cases of subjective mental anguish or back injuries, not more objective injuries such as body blows, falls, crashes or amputations).
We don’t want to diminish the damage caused by job distress. It’s real, and it’s costly. But the impact is on one’s overall well-being, especially mental and physical health, more than traumatic injury causation, according to research.
NIOSH makes this point in its booklet, “Stress…at Work,” (NIOSH Publication 99-101) stating: “Job stress poses a threat to the health of workers, and in turn, the health of organizations. Evidence is rapidly accumulating to suggest that stress plays an important role in several types of chronic health problems — especially cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and psychological disorders.”
Important findings
So Olena, we’ll leave you with three discoveries we made in the course of our research:
1 — Injury rates follow business cycle behavior, but counter-intuitively. According to the NCCI report, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” in recessions job creation plummets while job destruction soars. Job destruction (layoffs) decreases the growth rate of workplace injury and illness rates. Why? The most inexperienced workers are laid-off first, and the longest-tenured workers survive. Approximately 30 percent of all reported injuries in manufacturing are associated with workers who have been with their current employer for less than one year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coming out of a recession, when hiring increases (job creation), injury rates will rise as more inexperienced workers land jobs. This includes workers who switch jobs, come out of unemployment, or rejoin the workforce.
2 — Focusing on the morale, job satisfaction, and distress of employees can lead to a “blame the worker” mindset. This misses the very significant influences that organizational culture, co-worker support, and supervisory and management leadership have on morale and distress.
“Substantial improvements in the levels of occupational wellbeing will only be achieved by focusing on improving leadership and managerial practices and other aspects of organizational climate,” write Cotton and Hart. “Organizational climate is the strongest determinant of individual morale. Organizational development programs that improve the quality of leadership practices and organizational climate are likely to have a greater impact on reducing workers’ compensation premiums that traditional occupational health and safety risk management approaches.”
3 — “Personality is the strongest determinant of individual distress, write Cotton and Hart. Perhaps you should survey, study and discuss the emotions, moods and levels of self-esteem that run through your workforce. Look for “withdrawal behaviors” that negative emotions trigger: absenteeism, turnover, submitting stress-related comp claims, lack of participation, decreasing volunteerism, and isolation and alienation (leading in extreme cases to potential violent outbursts). Keep in mind that after personality, morale and organizational culture are the two biggest influences on withdrawal behaviors.
So if officers in your Officer Safety Unit are not wearing body armor or carrying radios when they should, don’t be too quick to pin it on the recession, poor job satisfaction, or distress. Step back and look at your organization and the level of communication, social support, training and education, concern and empathy on the part of supervisors and managers.
Regards,
Dave Johnson, Editor
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