There are more than 2,300 worksites enrolled in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program. Only 29 are health services. Two are amusement and recreation services. Two are hotels and lodgings. Four are retailers, representing L.L. Bean and Amazon.com. One is a general merchandise store and one is a food store.
ORC Worldwide’s safety and health consultancy in Washington, D.C. is one of the largest and most reputable in the country. Of the types of services mentioned above, only Disney, Hospira, Inc., and the ServiceMaster Company are ORC members.
Where is Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Loew’s, with their warehousing hazards? Where are the thousands of hospitals and nursing homes with their fire safety, lifting, needlestick and housekeeping hazards? Where are the theme parks with their pushing the envelop thrill rides? What about fast food chains with their hot grease, cramped kitchens and high turnover? Even pizza delivery services with their scrambling drivers.
I found none as sponsors of the Auditing Roundtable in Phoenix or the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI). I checked the client lists of Behavioral Science Technology, Safety Performance Solutions, and DuPont Safety Resources; hundreds of companies are listed. DuPont lists three retailers. None of the big box chains or national fast food chains. Same goes for healthcare systems and entertainment companies.
According to the web site themeparkinsider.com, “In the United States, no official source is keeping a complete national record of theme park accidents. And in many U.S. states, including Florida, theme parks are not legally required to report accidents involving injury to anyone”
The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions has an annual Safety Week and a traveling safety institute educational program. The IAAP does not make its membership list available to the public.
Same goes for the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety, or IAHSS, which bills itself as “the only organization solely dedicated to professionals involved in managing and directing security and safety programs in healthcare institutions.” Its membership directory is for members only.
I checked out Home Depot’s website and found a raft of information on “Home Depot and the Environment,” but couldn’t locate any safety and health metrics or summaries or success stories.
Takes forever to load Wal-Mart’s website with all the graphics. Here’s a tip, if you want scoops on Wal-Mart corporate, google Wal-Mart corporate. Like Loew’s Wal-Mart uses sustainability far more that anything relating to workplace safety and health to build goodwill and embellish its corporate citizenship.
Wal-Mart’s web site lists all sorts of do-good activities: disaster relief, military support, “meaningful strides to zero waste,” reducing global plastic shopping bag waste, diversity, charitable giving, empowering female factory workers in Bangladesh, a program called “Acres for America,” greater affordability of healthy foods for all Americans. One sentence in the company’s sustainability annual report mentions assisting overseas suppliers improve conditions on the factory floor. I searched the Wal-Mart site for “occupational safety and health” and came up with a 2008 press release on a distribution center getting VPP recognition and the health and safety requirements (PPE, MSDSs, etc.) for company suppliers.
I’m not saying Wal-Mart has a suspect safety program. Same goes for other companies and industries mentioned here. I just don’t know. I find very little info available. If YOU know more, let me know, and I’ll share it in a future post.
It’s strange that for a service-driven economy, service companies don’t talk about safety. One of the countries main exports today are films and TV shows, yet you find very little about entertainment industry safety practices. We don’t make many things anymore, but we sure know how to package and sell (Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Loew’s, Best Buy et al). Yet I can’t recall a safety and health pro from one of these retailers presenting at a safety conference. I’m sure they have, but nowhere near in proportion to the economic influence they wield. Fast food is part and parcel of the American lifestyle, but again, I’ve heard little about their safety records or practices. Healthcare is the 8,000 pound gorilla of the economy, but while patient safety becomes a larger and larger issue, worker safety gets no press.
Strange and perhaps unsettling, occupational safety and health is not a visible nor widely discussed component of many of America’s most dynamic industries in 2010. Quite possibly these firms consider their workplace risks unique and separate from traditional manufacturing, and believe they have little to learn from construction and production safety and health programs. Perhaps, like other industries, they benchmark safety behind closed doors.
But I ask you, has safety lost its way in the 21st century economy? If you have evidence otherwise, bring it on.
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Toyota recall: Why consumer products companies can’t ignore safety
It’s a matter of trust. Safety-related problems are trust-busters for businesses like Toyota. These companies rely on consumer trust in their wares as an essential to building brand loyalty, brand reputation, and of course sales, market share and profits.
Safety issues become an even more significant trust-buster when they go so far as to endanger the lives of unsuspecting customers, as in Toyota’s case when brakes might fail.
I’ve long thought that safety and health pros working for consumer products companies enjoyed unique leverage. Not that they have the perfect safety job; there is no such thing. But think about it: a food company, a healthcare products company, an automaker, all depend on relationships with the public to make a profit. The same goes for airlines, as another example. Any internal screw-up in design, manufacturing, maintenance, operations or quality control that ends up threatening the health, well-being and even the lives of consumers of those products and services is a major blow to the unspoken but taken for granted trust in the safety of what that company delivers.
This is why pharmaceutical companies can’t ignore safety. Remember the Tylenol crisis? Of course you can find flaws in their safety and health programs; you can find flaws in any safety and health program if you look hard enough. But the fact is many of the long-time standard-bearers of strong safety programs are companies that have ties that bind to consumers: Ford, GM, Proctor & Gamble, Delta Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Kraft Foods, Disney, FedEx, UPS, AT&T, GE, Kimberly-Clark.
One of the reasons for the explosive growth in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program in the past ten years is the use of the VPP flag as a sort of seal of good housekeeping endorsement, a visible and promoted display of safety as a company value to help build trust with customers. Look at some of the leading participants in VPP — Delta, GE, Frito-Lay, Sherwin-Williams, L.L. Bean, Monsanto, Honeywell, Georgia-Pacific, L’Oreal, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Milliken, ExxonMobil. With few exceptions, these companies score high in terms of consumer recognition.
Companies that operate off of the public’s radar screen are less likely to be found in the ranks of VPP. Of 2,329 work sites in the VPP at the end of 2009, only 32 are in the primary metals industry; 54 in the fabricated metals industry; 45 in instrument manufacturing. I’m not saying good safety and health programs are not found in these types of industries — good safety programs can be found anywhere you have a CEO who wants good safety, where good labor-management relations exist, and good safety and health expertise is on hand.
But recall McWane, the pipe, fittings and valve company whose many safety failures were documented several years ago by The New York Times, or AK Steel, whose series of fatalities go back even further. These are examples of the “upstream” supply channel nuts-and-bolts manufacturers who produce industrial raw materials and commodity hardgoods out of the public eye. Both McWane and AK Steel took steps similar to what Toyota has announced after their safety problems became public knowledge: top-to-bottom organization reviews, blue-ribbon safety panels, cooperation with regulators, more open safety communications.
Last Sunday more than 100 million people watched the Super Bowl and an hour’s worth of commercials. By the way, if spineless wimpy males, squawking chickens and snarky beer guzzlers are best that the most creative advertising minds in the country can come up with, advertising is mired in a deep recession of ideas. But I’m off point. The commercials were all about branding. We live in the age of brand power. And for some safety and health pros, that’s a distinct advantage.
What do you say?
Safety issues become an even more significant trust-buster when they go so far as to endanger the lives of unsuspecting customers, as in Toyota’s case when brakes might fail.
I’ve long thought that safety and health pros working for consumer products companies enjoyed unique leverage. Not that they have the perfect safety job; there is no such thing. But think about it: a food company, a healthcare products company, an automaker, all depend on relationships with the public to make a profit. The same goes for airlines, as another example. Any internal screw-up in design, manufacturing, maintenance, operations or quality control that ends up threatening the health, well-being and even the lives of consumers of those products and services is a major blow to the unspoken but taken for granted trust in the safety of what that company delivers.
This is why pharmaceutical companies can’t ignore safety. Remember the Tylenol crisis? Of course you can find flaws in their safety and health programs; you can find flaws in any safety and health program if you look hard enough. But the fact is many of the long-time standard-bearers of strong safety programs are companies that have ties that bind to consumers: Ford, GM, Proctor & Gamble, Delta Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Kraft Foods, Disney, FedEx, UPS, AT&T, GE, Kimberly-Clark.
One of the reasons for the explosive growth in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program in the past ten years is the use of the VPP flag as a sort of seal of good housekeeping endorsement, a visible and promoted display of safety as a company value to help build trust with customers. Look at some of the leading participants in VPP — Delta, GE, Frito-Lay, Sherwin-Williams, L.L. Bean, Monsanto, Honeywell, Georgia-Pacific, L’Oreal, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Milliken, ExxonMobil. With few exceptions, these companies score high in terms of consumer recognition.
Companies that operate off of the public’s radar screen are less likely to be found in the ranks of VPP. Of 2,329 work sites in the VPP at the end of 2009, only 32 are in the primary metals industry; 54 in the fabricated metals industry; 45 in instrument manufacturing. I’m not saying good safety and health programs are not found in these types of industries — good safety programs can be found anywhere you have a CEO who wants good safety, where good labor-management relations exist, and good safety and health expertise is on hand.
But recall McWane, the pipe, fittings and valve company whose many safety failures were documented several years ago by The New York Times, or AK Steel, whose series of fatalities go back even further. These are examples of the “upstream” supply channel nuts-and-bolts manufacturers who produce industrial raw materials and commodity hardgoods out of the public eye. Both McWane and AK Steel took steps similar to what Toyota has announced after their safety problems became public knowledge: top-to-bottom organization reviews, blue-ribbon safety panels, cooperation with regulators, more open safety communications.
Last Sunday more than 100 million people watched the Super Bowl and an hour’s worth of commercials. By the way, if spineless wimpy males, squawking chickens and snarky beer guzzlers are best that the most creative advertising minds in the country can come up with, advertising is mired in a deep recession of ideas. But I’m off point. The commercials were all about branding. We live in the age of brand power. And for some safety and health pros, that’s a distinct advantage.
What do you say?
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
I’m so lonesome I could die
One of Hank Williams’ classic songs is “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” A review of fatalities reported to OSHA shows that many deaths are lonesome experiences.
OSHA is now posting on it web site descriptions of on-the-job fatalities on a weekly basis. Employers must report these incidents to OSHA within eight hours.
What struck me looking over the most recent reports is how many on the job deaths occur not on assembly lines or on the shop floor, with victims surrounded by their coworkers, but when workers are off on their own.
Unsupervised.
Out of communication.
Doing the most ordinary, commonplace tasks. Jobs that certainly don’t qualify as high-risk, in most cases anyway, if you were do conduct a risk assessment beforehand.
Take these incidences, for example:
Worker was driving north in patrol vehicle when an attempt was made to pass another northbound vehicle. The vehicles made contact and the worker's vehicle went off the road and hit a utility pole.
Apparently, no one else was in the car. And remember, most job fatalities occur on the road, in motor vehicle crashes.
Worker was found unresponsive with head injuries next to an overturned stepladder. The worker never regained consciousness.
Many times victims are found after the fact, with the details of the incident never fully clear.
Worker was found in employee locker room and was taken to emergency room. Worker was pronounced dead shortly after of a possible heart attack.
Again, “worker was found”…
Worker suffered a heart attack and died while walking to meet a forklift driver to get supplies.
Here tragedy strikes in the most ordinary of circumstances, a worker walking to get supplies.
Worker was crushed when the equipment he was standing on slid off the trailer it was loaded on. The worker was crushed between the bag house and the remaining equipment on the ground.
Here one worker, standing on equipment, loses stability and his life.
Worker was riding an ATV, and it appears that the vehicle slipped on the steep terrain throwing the worker off and then landing on top of him.
“It appears” this is what happened because no one was present to witness the event.
Worker complained about not feeling well. The worker went home and collapsed about 3 hours later and died before taken to hospital.
Here a sick worker goes home alone and never returns.
Worker was installing copper flashing on a roof and was found unresponsive on the ground between the bases of two ladders.
Again, all there is to go on is “was found unresponsive.” No buddy present, no details.
Worker was delivering medical products and was run over by his own truck.
“Run over by his own truck.” A single vehicle incident.
Worker was walking from the parking lot to the entrance and was run over by a delivery truck.
Again, something as simple and everyday as a walk through a parking lot ends a life.
Worker was shoveling corn into a bucket of a bobcat and was found unresponsive.
“Was found unresponsive.” Who knows what really happened? No one will.
When you send workers out on their own to do a job, what kind of mindfulness training have they received? Because when they’re on their own, whether it’s on a roof, a road, or a telephone pole, it’s their own alertness that they must depend on.
OSHA is now posting on it web site descriptions of on-the-job fatalities on a weekly basis. Employers must report these incidents to OSHA within eight hours.
What struck me looking over the most recent reports is how many on the job deaths occur not on assembly lines or on the shop floor, with victims surrounded by their coworkers, but when workers are off on their own.
Unsupervised.
Out of communication.
Doing the most ordinary, commonplace tasks. Jobs that certainly don’t qualify as high-risk, in most cases anyway, if you were do conduct a risk assessment beforehand.
Take these incidences, for example:
Worker was driving north in patrol vehicle when an attempt was made to pass another northbound vehicle. The vehicles made contact and the worker's vehicle went off the road and hit a utility pole.
Apparently, no one else was in the car. And remember, most job fatalities occur on the road, in motor vehicle crashes.
Worker was found unresponsive with head injuries next to an overturned stepladder. The worker never regained consciousness.
Many times victims are found after the fact, with the details of the incident never fully clear.
Worker was found in employee locker room and was taken to emergency room. Worker was pronounced dead shortly after of a possible heart attack.
Again, “worker was found”…
Worker suffered a heart attack and died while walking to meet a forklift driver to get supplies.
Here tragedy strikes in the most ordinary of circumstances, a worker walking to get supplies.
Worker was crushed when the equipment he was standing on slid off the trailer it was loaded on. The worker was crushed between the bag house and the remaining equipment on the ground.
Here one worker, standing on equipment, loses stability and his life.
Worker was riding an ATV, and it appears that the vehicle slipped on the steep terrain throwing the worker off and then landing on top of him.
“It appears” this is what happened because no one was present to witness the event.
Worker complained about not feeling well. The worker went home and collapsed about 3 hours later and died before taken to hospital.
Here a sick worker goes home alone and never returns.
Worker was installing copper flashing on a roof and was found unresponsive on the ground between the bases of two ladders.
Again, all there is to go on is “was found unresponsive.” No buddy present, no details.
Worker was delivering medical products and was run over by his own truck.
“Run over by his own truck.” A single vehicle incident.
Worker was walking from the parking lot to the entrance and was run over by a delivery truck.
Again, something as simple and everyday as a walk through a parking lot ends a life.
Worker was shoveling corn into a bucket of a bobcat and was found unresponsive.
“Was found unresponsive.” Who knows what really happened? No one will.
When you send workers out on their own to do a job, what kind of mindfulness training have they received? Because when they’re on their own, whether it’s on a roof, a road, or a telephone pole, it’s their own alertness that they must depend on.
True grit in filmmaking
Here are the best movies that capture a hard day’s work
On February 2, 2010, nominations will be announced for the 82nd Academy Awards. This year there will be ten Best Picture nominees instead of the customary five.
With movie award season upon us, (movie critics made their selections in December, Golden Globes will be handed out January 17, Screen Actors Guild Awards January 23, Directors Guild Awards January 30, the Film Independent’s Spirit Awards in March), let’s get into the spirit.
What is the best movie you have seen reflecting the realities, attitudes and culture of true grit working people?
I’m not talking about just in 2009. Hollywood makes so few “working class” films (blue collar is boring, the “suits” decided long ago) that we can’t limit picks to any one year. No, the question is: What is the best movie you have ever seen depicting workers up against the kind of risks and dangers we talk about every month in this magazine?
Hollywood’s comfort zone
This rules out scads of flicks about white-collar corporate characters. Hollywood is more comfortable with white-collar bad guys or sad guys, probably because the characters remind them of themselves. There is 2009’s excellent “Up in the Air” with George Clooney as a headcount exterminator, and you can go back through the years with films such as “Michael Clayton” with Clooney again as a conflicted law firm “fixer,” the greed is good gang in “Wall Street,” an unethical journalist in “Shattered Glass,” Jack Lemmon scrambling to salvage his clothing business in “Save the Tiger,” director John Cassavetes’s stark study of a bored, philandering middle-aged exec in “Faces,” and the 1950s study of conformity in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” with Gregory Peck donning the uniform.
Where are the films with workers who have dirt beneath their fingernails? Who risk life and limb for a paycheck? Who are not necessarily heroic but down-to-earth real?
For your consideration
I nominate the following:
How Green Was My Valley (1941) — Story of a Welsh valley's turn-of-the-century descent from pastoral paradise to decimated coal mining region and the effect on pre-union miners.
The Bicycle Thief (1948) — One man’s struggle to feed his family. After nearly two years of unemployment, he finds a job posting bills that requires a bicycle. But his bike is stolen on the first day of his job. With his small son he combs the streets of bombed-out, postwar Rome searching for it with no luck. His will finally broken, he steals a bicycle but is caught in the act.
Wages of Fear (1953) — In an remote, hot and desolate Central American village, four men risk all to get out by accepting an offer from an American oil company to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerin over treacherous terrain to a well fire.
On the Waterfront (1954) — Marlon Brando is an ex-prize fighter who struggles against himself and union corruption along New York’s grim, wintry, dangerous docks.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) — An angry young man trapped in a mindless factory job in a polluted, down and dirty northern English industrial town spends Saturday nights drinking and Sunday mornings fishing; a rebel without focus.
Norma Rae (1979) — Based on a true story, an uneducated woman fights to improve her own life and deplorable conditions in a southern textile mill.
The Devil’s Miner (2005) — A documentary of two brothers, age 12 and 14, raised without a father in a shanty on the side of a mountain in Bolivia, who scramble through silver mines daily to afford the clothing and supplies needed for their education, the only ticket to escape their bleak destiny.
Mississippi Chicken (2007) — Real-life documentary of an activist working among trailer park Latin Americans employed in poultry plants and who are too scared to cause trouble or alert authorities to workplace abuses.
Encounters at the End of the World (2007) — Another documentary, this one studies the motives and philosophies of marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who work in extreme conditions as far away from society as one can get at the Antarctic compound of the National Science Foundation.
The Simpsons — (1989 – present) I’m cheating here, of course. This is TV-land. But the follies of Homer the nuke plant operator, his family and buddies, are really no farce; beneath the buffoonery are populist predicaments of work and play. Plus, unlike most “working-class” film central characters, Homer is no victim, no underdog scraper, or stranger in a strange land.
To this list I’d add the following films, which I’ve read about but not seen. Perhaps you have:
Bread and Roses (2001) — The 1990 Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles is depicted through the struggle of an immigrant woman who refuses to believe she cannot win every battle on her own terms.
El Norte (1983) — A young brother and sister journey from their remote Guatemalan village to the promised land of the Los Angeles. Working as a domestic, the sister is puzzled why her employers uses a washing machine. Her brother works his way up from busboy to waiter to the promise of a better job in Chicago, but their past returns to haunt them.
Hard Labour (1973) — Brutally harsh study of an aging Englishwoman and her daily grind cleaning the homes of the wealthy. She returns to her own home each night to face whines and rants from her husband, an alcoholic custodian.
Blue Collar (1978) — Richard Pryor is one of three friends scraping by trying to escape auto assembly line boredom, hazards, and fears of a dead-end future.
On February 2, 2010, nominations will be announced for the 82nd Academy Awards. This year there will be ten Best Picture nominees instead of the customary five.
With movie award season upon us, (movie critics made their selections in December, Golden Globes will be handed out January 17, Screen Actors Guild Awards January 23, Directors Guild Awards January 30, the Film Independent’s Spirit Awards in March), let’s get into the spirit.
What is the best movie you have seen reflecting the realities, attitudes and culture of true grit working people?
I’m not talking about just in 2009. Hollywood makes so few “working class” films (blue collar is boring, the “suits” decided long ago) that we can’t limit picks to any one year. No, the question is: What is the best movie you have ever seen depicting workers up against the kind of risks and dangers we talk about every month in this magazine?
Hollywood’s comfort zone
This rules out scads of flicks about white-collar corporate characters. Hollywood is more comfortable with white-collar bad guys or sad guys, probably because the characters remind them of themselves. There is 2009’s excellent “Up in the Air” with George Clooney as a headcount exterminator, and you can go back through the years with films such as “Michael Clayton” with Clooney again as a conflicted law firm “fixer,” the greed is good gang in “Wall Street,” an unethical journalist in “Shattered Glass,” Jack Lemmon scrambling to salvage his clothing business in “Save the Tiger,” director John Cassavetes’s stark study of a bored, philandering middle-aged exec in “Faces,” and the 1950s study of conformity in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” with Gregory Peck donning the uniform.
Where are the films with workers who have dirt beneath their fingernails? Who risk life and limb for a paycheck? Who are not necessarily heroic but down-to-earth real?
For your consideration
I nominate the following:
How Green Was My Valley (1941) — Story of a Welsh valley's turn-of-the-century descent from pastoral paradise to decimated coal mining region and the effect on pre-union miners.
The Bicycle Thief (1948) — One man’s struggle to feed his family. After nearly two years of unemployment, he finds a job posting bills that requires a bicycle. But his bike is stolen on the first day of his job. With his small son he combs the streets of bombed-out, postwar Rome searching for it with no luck. His will finally broken, he steals a bicycle but is caught in the act.
Wages of Fear (1953) — In an remote, hot and desolate Central American village, four men risk all to get out by accepting an offer from an American oil company to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerin over treacherous terrain to a well fire.
On the Waterfront (1954) — Marlon Brando is an ex-prize fighter who struggles against himself and union corruption along New York’s grim, wintry, dangerous docks.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) — An angry young man trapped in a mindless factory job in a polluted, down and dirty northern English industrial town spends Saturday nights drinking and Sunday mornings fishing; a rebel without focus.
Norma Rae (1979) — Based on a true story, an uneducated woman fights to improve her own life and deplorable conditions in a southern textile mill.
The Devil’s Miner (2005) — A documentary of two brothers, age 12 and 14, raised without a father in a shanty on the side of a mountain in Bolivia, who scramble through silver mines daily to afford the clothing and supplies needed for their education, the only ticket to escape their bleak destiny.
Mississippi Chicken (2007) — Real-life documentary of an activist working among trailer park Latin Americans employed in poultry plants and who are too scared to cause trouble or alert authorities to workplace abuses.
Encounters at the End of the World (2007) — Another documentary, this one studies the motives and philosophies of marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who work in extreme conditions as far away from society as one can get at the Antarctic compound of the National Science Foundation.
The Simpsons — (1989 – present) I’m cheating here, of course. This is TV-land. But the follies of Homer the nuke plant operator, his family and buddies, are really no farce; beneath the buffoonery are populist predicaments of work and play. Plus, unlike most “working-class” film central characters, Homer is no victim, no underdog scraper, or stranger in a strange land.
To this list I’d add the following films, which I’ve read about but not seen. Perhaps you have:
Bread and Roses (2001) — The 1990 Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles is depicted through the struggle of an immigrant woman who refuses to believe she cannot win every battle on her own terms.
El Norte (1983) — A young brother and sister journey from their remote Guatemalan village to the promised land of the Los Angeles. Working as a domestic, the sister is puzzled why her employers uses a washing machine. Her brother works his way up from busboy to waiter to the promise of a better job in Chicago, but their past returns to haunt them.
Hard Labour (1973) — Brutally harsh study of an aging Englishwoman and her daily grind cleaning the homes of the wealthy. She returns to her own home each night to face whines and rants from her husband, an alcoholic custodian.
Blue Collar (1978) — Richard Pryor is one of three friends scraping by trying to escape auto assembly line boredom, hazards, and fears of a dead-end future.
OSHA’s reg agenda notable for what’s missing
regulatory agenda, released yesterday, is on taking care of rulemaking initiatives that are old and in the way, causing gridlock and preventing OSHA from beginning to track bigger and more controversial regulatory game.
This strategy makes senses both administratively and politically. Agenda items such as crane and derrick safety; exposures to silica, beryllium, and methyline chloride; walking/working surfaces; and electrical power transmission safety have stagnated in the standards-setting office for years and must be dealt with.
Taking care of this kind of administrative housekeeping also gives the new OSHA chief, Dr. David Michaels, and his leadership team breathing room to carefully consider how to address politically hot issues such as ergonomics, updating hundreds of permissible exposure limits (PELs), and setting basic mandates for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
Both Barab and his boss, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, repeatedly asserted in live chat webinars yesterday that OSHA has not current plans for having another go at setting an ergo standard. This is a retreat from Barab’s bold comment made earlier this year at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ meeting that it’s time for OSHA to pick up the political football that is ergonomics and run with it, resistance be damned.
Meanwhile, there was no mention on the reg agenda of workplace injury and illness prevention program requirements, one of Dr. Michaels’s stated priorities for OSHA. It’s simply too early in the Obama era at OSHA to take on that comprehensive issue, sure to impact small businesses and cause a political firestorm.
The same goes for updating the PELs. “While the agency has not made a determination about how to proceed at this time, we continue to look at strategies that protect workers from chemical hazards,” was as close as Barab came yesterday to touching the legal complications of justifying new PELs.
“These are very important and complex issues,” said Barab, referring to ergonomics, injury/illness prevention plans, and updating PELs. And he left it at that.
This strategy makes senses both administratively and politically. Agenda items such as crane and derrick safety; exposures to silica, beryllium, and methyline chloride; walking/working surfaces; and electrical power transmission safety have stagnated in the standards-setting office for years and must be dealt with.
Taking care of this kind of administrative housekeeping also gives the new OSHA chief, Dr. David Michaels, and his leadership team breathing room to carefully consider how to address politically hot issues such as ergonomics, updating hundreds of permissible exposure limits (PELs), and setting basic mandates for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
Both Barab and his boss, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, repeatedly asserted in live chat webinars yesterday that OSHA has not current plans for having another go at setting an ergo standard. This is a retreat from Barab’s bold comment made earlier this year at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ meeting that it’s time for OSHA to pick up the political football that is ergonomics and run with it, resistance be damned.
Meanwhile, there was no mention on the reg agenda of workplace injury and illness prevention program requirements, one of Dr. Michaels’s stated priorities for OSHA. It’s simply too early in the Obama era at OSHA to take on that comprehensive issue, sure to impact small businesses and cause a political firestorm.
The same goes for updating the PELs. “While the agency has not made a determination about how to proceed at this time, we continue to look at strategies that protect workers from chemical hazards,” was as close as Barab came yesterday to touching the legal complications of justifying new PELs.
“These are very important and complex issues,” said Barab, referring to ergonomics, injury/illness prevention plans, and updating PELs. And he left it at that.
OSHA will accomplish little without Obama’s reelection
We’re not even out of 2009, so no one is in the mood to start thinking about another long, drawn-out, media-saturated presidential election battle in 2012. At least outside of Washington. Campaign consultants, party leaders and Potomac Fever gossipers are always on to the next race. It’s the habitual pastime in the nation’s capital.
But if you study the OSHA regulatory agenda issued yesterday by the Department of Labor, two political facts of life strike you. One, even when an administration actually has the will to set new standards, as this one does, it still takes years to grind through the process of small business impact studies, stakeholder meetings, comment periods, public hearings, advance notices, proposals, risk assessments, revisions, more in-house soul-searching and public outreach, and trying to get the Office of Management and Budget and the DOL front office to sign off on a new rule.
Two, due to this grind ‘em out process, it requires two presidential terms, eight years, for an OSHA team (like the present one) that actually wants to be innovative and ambitious to have any chance at achieving even some of its goals.
When you see how relatively innocuous standards proposals such as walking/working surfaces, electrical power transmission safety, and crane and derrick safety have been reprinted for years in the regulatory calendar, you begin to grasp the enormity of the resources and resolve necessary to drive through rules on ergonomics, updating permissible exposure limits, and setting baseline requirements for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
To be sure, in Washington agencies can always ram through standards at the midnight hour of an expiring administration, as OSHA did in 2000 with the ergo rule and in 1980 before the Reagan administration took control. But not to any lasting effect. The new powers quickly rescind the old orders, as the Bush administration did with the ergo rule months after taking office (with the help of Congress).
It’s no surprise that ergonomics, workplace safety programs, and updating PELs were not listed on the first regulatory calendar published by the Obama Labor Department. Why borrow trouble before you even know how you want to proceed? OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels has just been sworn in. Give him a year to put together a strategy for addressing the Big Three regulatory issues.
Even when they make their initial appearance on the reg calendar, it’s only the start of the long grind toward final standards. That journey through a battlefield of political action ambushes and counterattacks will take oh, perhaps a half-dozen years. And that’s for maybe one of the Big Three to actually become a final rule.
Without a second Obama term, these key OSHA issues will receive all sorts of attention, but not enough traction.
But if you study the OSHA regulatory agenda issued yesterday by the Department of Labor, two political facts of life strike you. One, even when an administration actually has the will to set new standards, as this one does, it still takes years to grind through the process of small business impact studies, stakeholder meetings, comment periods, public hearings, advance notices, proposals, risk assessments, revisions, more in-house soul-searching and public outreach, and trying to get the Office of Management and Budget and the DOL front office to sign off on a new rule.
Two, due to this grind ‘em out process, it requires two presidential terms, eight years, for an OSHA team (like the present one) that actually wants to be innovative and ambitious to have any chance at achieving even some of its goals.
When you see how relatively innocuous standards proposals such as walking/working surfaces, electrical power transmission safety, and crane and derrick safety have been reprinted for years in the regulatory calendar, you begin to grasp the enormity of the resources and resolve necessary to drive through rules on ergonomics, updating permissible exposure limits, and setting baseline requirements for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
To be sure, in Washington agencies can always ram through standards at the midnight hour of an expiring administration, as OSHA did in 2000 with the ergo rule and in 1980 before the Reagan administration took control. But not to any lasting effect. The new powers quickly rescind the old orders, as the Bush administration did with the ergo rule months after taking office (with the help of Congress).
It’s no surprise that ergonomics, workplace safety programs, and updating PELs were not listed on the first regulatory calendar published by the Obama Labor Department. Why borrow trouble before you even know how you want to proceed? OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels has just been sworn in. Give him a year to put together a strategy for addressing the Big Three regulatory issues.
Even when they make their initial appearance on the reg calendar, it’s only the start of the long grind toward final standards. That journey through a battlefield of political action ambushes and counterattacks will take oh, perhaps a half-dozen years. And that’s for maybe one of the Big Three to actually become a final rule.
Without a second Obama term, these key OSHA issues will receive all sorts of attention, but not enough traction.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The world's largest safety tailgate party
Last week in Dusseldorf, Germany the world’s largest safety tailgating party was held.
Well, not exactly.
Officially, the event is known as A+A 2009, International Trade Fair for Safety, Security and Health at Work, organized by the German firm Messe Düsseldorf.
But to this American visitor, unaccustomed to the culture of German trade fairs, it seemed like a sprawling party. Part rock concert, part fashion show, part Manhattan boulevard crowd crossing at rush hour. Most men visited A+A wearing suits and ties; most women wore black skirts, black tops, black boots and stockings. Dusseldorf is Germany’s fashion capital, and nearly everyone, everywhere wears black. Very few jeans and windbreakers were seen at A+A.
Beer, only the German variety of course, flowed from most every booth, or so it seemed. And the accommodating bartenders and hostesses would keep refilling your tall, thin beer glass until you threw your hands up and said, “No more.” Many also offered expresso bars. Wines and spirits. Sandwiches.
Fashion shows were held throughout the show days on a carpeted catwalk, with sleek Euro chic models sporting the latest in waterproof yellow, red, and orange hi-viz jackets and trousers. Three rows of seats surrounded the catwalk, occupied by serious men and women dressed in black, legs crossed, arms folded across their chests, as though they were judges. Behind the seats stood attendees, three or four rows deep. Eight to twelve male and female twentysomething models danced, marched, clapped and posed to pounding electronic beats, wearing wool knit caps, rainwear, silver and blue skin-tight body suits, and the bulky outerwear. One break dancing model, doing hand stands and back flips in turnout gear, brought the loudest applause from the audience of several hundred.
Europeans have a more nonchalant attitude toward matters of sex, and throughout the exhibits nude mannequins, some flesh colored, others silver metallic and Terminator-like, wore only fall protection harnesses, long-sleeve synthetic gloves, or a hi-viz jacket top.
Electronic synthesized dance music, and Michael Jackson beats, pumped from the PA systems of many booths, often made conversation difficult. Exhibit space often seemed quadruple the size of what you would see at a U.S. workplace safety and health show. Many had white bar stools and pedestal tables to seat up to 50 visitors. I counted more than 100 sales reps and guests packed into the Sperian booth.
Vendor signs often took on proportions of highway billboards. One featured three young women wearing ripped jeans and tank tops, and two young men in tee-shirts and jeans, straight out of a Gap or Urban Outfitters catalog. What were they selling? Safety shoes.
CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?
For four days, 55,800 visitors — up from 55,200 in 2007 — packed the narrow aisles of nine exhibit halls.
Recession, what recession?
Pump in the loud, thick disco-like music beats, mix in thousands of animated sales conversations in any number of tongues, fuel the exchanges with dark beer or extremely strong German coffee, put all this against a backdrop of vendor signage right out of Times Square, and A+A 2009 had the throbbing, pulsating feel of a long and winding party snaking across acres and acres of exhibit space. A record-setting 1,541 exhibitors came from 62 nations.
Don’t be fooled by the party atmosphere, though. It does nothing to distract vendors from serious negotiations. So what if beer kegs are tapped and the drinking starts by ten a.m.? For all the thousands and thousands of safety and health officers visiting, there is little good old American “tire-kicking” going on, with attendees filling their bags with stress balls, pens, kewpie dolls and magnets.
Of the exhibitors, 538 were German and 238 were Chinese. Germans and Chinese are not big on small talk. Most likely you won’t be handed a business card from one of their sales reps until you’ve been sized up for your buying intentions. Visitors ready to do business are often whisked upstairs to the second floor of many booths, which is often laid out like a restaurant with round or square tables, usually minimalist white, and four seats to a table. Here you find mostly men hunched over or huddled together, empty beer bottles on the tables, engrossed in poker-faced deal-making.
“Generally German trade shows are conducted in a more formal matter than in the United States,” says a Messe Dusseldorf brochure on the country’s business customs and practices. The one downside for U.S. safety and health pros accustomed to business casual: “Khakis and golf shirts are generally too informal for shows in Europe.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The directness of foreign sales reps at a booth can be another culture shock. “Take the direct approach and ask if your booth visitor makes the purchasing decisions,” advises the customs brochure. “In negotiating, Germans tend to start with something close to what they expect to receive in the end. A supplier who asks for much more than they agree to in the end lacks credibility in the eyes of the Germans.”
I got a taste of this visiting the China Pavilion, jam-packed with 10-foot by 10-foot stalls. In one stall, machinery noisily churned out terrycloth gloves. With no machine guarding that I could see. Xinghua Niu, president of Shandong Best Serve Safety Shoe, Ltd., invited me to sit down in his cramped stall. A week earlier he had exhibited at the National Safety Congress and Expo in Orlando, Fla. “U.S. financial crisis hurt very much,” he said through a young woman translator. “Attendance very low.” I asked about the Chinese domestic market for safety goods. It is slowly developing, he explained, as new safety laws come on the books. “People will learn and grow and do better,” he said. He asked if I was a supplier or buyer of safety shoes. I explained I was a magazine editor. Xinghua Niu smiled and replied, “Maybe you introduce me to major. U.S. brands to manufacture for them?”
“I’m no here,” said an Asian munching on sausage and sitting at a table at the booth for the 5th China International Occupational Safety and Health Exhibition. I moved on to the KCL hand protection exhibit featuring two glassed-encased displays of miniature railroad villages, incredibly detailed down to the moving construction cranes, tiny flashing blue welding light, a machine shop, a jet wing assembly operation, a twirling cement truck, and five miniature workers eating lunch at a picnic table, with what looked like the ubiquitous green beer bottles. The only glitch: the machines appeared unguarded and many of the workers were without hard hats and gloves.
A+A 2009, as with all A+A shows (which are held in Dusseldorf every other year), has an unmistakable consumer feel to it. You see it in the names of companies and brands: Rock Star shoes, Mad Dog safety boots and shoes, Job Man, Orbit International, Otter Premium sport footwear, Puma, Dickies, W.L. Gore, Goodyear, Myrtle Beach ball caps, James & Nicholson long and short sleeved dress shirts.
A CONSUMER VIBE
What Germans call “wire and tube” booths largely present consumer designs, signage and entertainment. Halls 3 to 5 and 9 to 10 were reserved for PPE, “corporate fashion” and “safe appliances.” Fire protection, enviro protection, and “measurement and control technology” were pooled in Hall 6. Special exhibits focused on the “Success Factor Office” (something is lost in translation here) and the “Innovation Park Hazardous Substances” (innovative hazardous substances?)
At one booth a bartender mixes vodka and OJ. Another has large photographs of white polar bears wearing insulated black work boots from Sweden. At the corner of one exhibit stands a mannequin wearing a black doo-rag, a double-breasted black-buttoned white top with stiff black and white striped cuffs and upturned collar, and black and white striped pajama bottoms, No shoes, gloves or goggles. One booth has 20 U-shaped black leather chairs for comfortable negotiations. Another is dwarfed by an actual red and black multi-ton trash truck, slightly tilted to one side on a bed of real rocks and gravel, with four-foot diameter tires. The theme? “Power to keep you fit.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you turn a corner and there stands a statuesque blond ponytailed female DJ up on a blue stage-lit carpeted platform with speaker amps, turntables, a Mac laptop and a mixing board. Wearing tight black jeans, the black boots with four-inch heels you see women wearing everywhere in Dusseldorf, a tight gray tank top and head phones draped around her neck, the DJ smiles and sways to disco beats. Next to her stand two technicians working a concert-size mixing board, and next to them, what else, a keg with a tap.
Germany and China were the two leading countries for number of exhibitors. Asia was well-represented with 62 exhibitors from India, 42 from Pakistan, 35 from Taiwan, 25 from South Korea, and 20 from Hong Kong. Eleven of the 37 U.S. exhibitors were grouped under the North American Pavilion banner. The North American hostesses seemed prudish in comparison to their international counterparts, offering coffee and Coca-Cola from a countertop.
OSH GEOPOLITICS
Far from the maddening din of the exhibit halls, at the south end of the Messe Dusseldorf “Kompound,” was the A+A 31st International Congress for Occupational Safety and Health. Here, in a dimly-lit room where attendees sat at long rows of white tables, many wearing headphones listening to translations emanating from a glass-enclosed booth with twelve translators at the back of the room, proceedings took on the air of a United Nations meeting. In fact, the accompanying conference of the International Labour Office (ILO), which is a sub-organization of the UN, had more than 300 delegates from almost 60 countries. The mood was somber and subdued. Several hundred attendees listened on Thursday afternoon to a series of short speeches all emphasizing the significance of the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work.
Crafted in 2008 in Seoul, South Korea at a world conference organized by the ILO, the International Social Security Association, and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the declaration states that promoting high levels of safety and health at work is the responsibility of society as a whole, calls for a national preventive safety and health culture, and emphasizes that continuous improvement of occupational safety and health (OSH) should be promoted by a systems approach to the management of OSH.
Culture. Management systems. Continuous improvement. Sound familiar?
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
The themes of the A+A Congress, attended by 5,000 registrants, could have come straight out of the National Safety Council’s Orlando meeting this year, or the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s 2009 meetings: “Economic Crisis and Safety and Health at Work;” “Safety and Health as Core Elements of Sustainable Corporate Action;” “No Compromise in Times of Crisis;” and “New OSH Culture and Strategies to Claim the Right to a Safe and Healthful Workplace in Times of Global Financial Crisis.”
Birgit Horn, the 36-year-old new project director of A+A 2009, spoke the universal language of safety when asked in an interview for her first impressions of the OSH industry. “The difference between safety and other industries is the emphasis OSH officers put into it,” she said. “People are really touched by the topic.”
Martin-Ulf Koch, manager of the Messe Dusseldorf press department, which oversaw a thriving press room with 300 reporters and journalists, added: “Safety is a mission for these people.”
“It is a very emotional topic I think,” said Ms. Horn. “It makes you really start to look at work differently.” She went on to say workplaces must change to meet the needs of German workers who are “getting older and older” and putting off retirement. “There is a need to keep strength and posture because we will work longer.”
In the states we call that “battling boomeritis.”
Well, not exactly.
Officially, the event is known as A+A 2009, International Trade Fair for Safety, Security and Health at Work, organized by the German firm Messe Düsseldorf.
But to this American visitor, unaccustomed to the culture of German trade fairs, it seemed like a sprawling party. Part rock concert, part fashion show, part Manhattan boulevard crowd crossing at rush hour. Most men visited A+A wearing suits and ties; most women wore black skirts, black tops, black boots and stockings. Dusseldorf is Germany’s fashion capital, and nearly everyone, everywhere wears black. Very few jeans and windbreakers were seen at A+A.
Beer, only the German variety of course, flowed from most every booth, or so it seemed. And the accommodating bartenders and hostesses would keep refilling your tall, thin beer glass until you threw your hands up and said, “No more.” Many also offered expresso bars. Wines and spirits. Sandwiches.
Fashion shows were held throughout the show days on a carpeted catwalk, with sleek Euro chic models sporting the latest in waterproof yellow, red, and orange hi-viz jackets and trousers. Three rows of seats surrounded the catwalk, occupied by serious men and women dressed in black, legs crossed, arms folded across their chests, as though they were judges. Behind the seats stood attendees, three or four rows deep. Eight to twelve male and female twentysomething models danced, marched, clapped and posed to pounding electronic beats, wearing wool knit caps, rainwear, silver and blue skin-tight body suits, and the bulky outerwear. One break dancing model, doing hand stands and back flips in turnout gear, brought the loudest applause from the audience of several hundred.
Europeans have a more nonchalant attitude toward matters of sex, and throughout the exhibits nude mannequins, some flesh colored, others silver metallic and Terminator-like, wore only fall protection harnesses, long-sleeve synthetic gloves, or a hi-viz jacket top.
Electronic synthesized dance music, and Michael Jackson beats, pumped from the PA systems of many booths, often made conversation difficult. Exhibit space often seemed quadruple the size of what you would see at a U.S. workplace safety and health show. Many had white bar stools and pedestal tables to seat up to 50 visitors. I counted more than 100 sales reps and guests packed into the Sperian booth.
Vendor signs often took on proportions of highway billboards. One featured three young women wearing ripped jeans and tank tops, and two young men in tee-shirts and jeans, straight out of a Gap or Urban Outfitters catalog. What were they selling? Safety shoes.
CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?
For four days, 55,800 visitors — up from 55,200 in 2007 — packed the narrow aisles of nine exhibit halls.
Recession, what recession?
Pump in the loud, thick disco-like music beats, mix in thousands of animated sales conversations in any number of tongues, fuel the exchanges with dark beer or extremely strong German coffee, put all this against a backdrop of vendor signage right out of Times Square, and A+A 2009 had the throbbing, pulsating feel of a long and winding party snaking across acres and acres of exhibit space. A record-setting 1,541 exhibitors came from 62 nations.
Don’t be fooled by the party atmosphere, though. It does nothing to distract vendors from serious negotiations. So what if beer kegs are tapped and the drinking starts by ten a.m.? For all the thousands and thousands of safety and health officers visiting, there is little good old American “tire-kicking” going on, with attendees filling their bags with stress balls, pens, kewpie dolls and magnets.
Of the exhibitors, 538 were German and 238 were Chinese. Germans and Chinese are not big on small talk. Most likely you won’t be handed a business card from one of their sales reps until you’ve been sized up for your buying intentions. Visitors ready to do business are often whisked upstairs to the second floor of many booths, which is often laid out like a restaurant with round or square tables, usually minimalist white, and four seats to a table. Here you find mostly men hunched over or huddled together, empty beer bottles on the tables, engrossed in poker-faced deal-making.
“Generally German trade shows are conducted in a more formal matter than in the United States,” says a Messe Dusseldorf brochure on the country’s business customs and practices. The one downside for U.S. safety and health pros accustomed to business casual: “Khakis and golf shirts are generally too informal for shows in Europe.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The directness of foreign sales reps at a booth can be another culture shock. “Take the direct approach and ask if your booth visitor makes the purchasing decisions,” advises the customs brochure. “In negotiating, Germans tend to start with something close to what they expect to receive in the end. A supplier who asks for much more than they agree to in the end lacks credibility in the eyes of the Germans.”
I got a taste of this visiting the China Pavilion, jam-packed with 10-foot by 10-foot stalls. In one stall, machinery noisily churned out terrycloth gloves. With no machine guarding that I could see. Xinghua Niu, president of Shandong Best Serve Safety Shoe, Ltd., invited me to sit down in his cramped stall. A week earlier he had exhibited at the National Safety Congress and Expo in Orlando, Fla. “U.S. financial crisis hurt very much,” he said through a young woman translator. “Attendance very low.” I asked about the Chinese domestic market for safety goods. It is slowly developing, he explained, as new safety laws come on the books. “People will learn and grow and do better,” he said. He asked if I was a supplier or buyer of safety shoes. I explained I was a magazine editor. Xinghua Niu smiled and replied, “Maybe you introduce me to major. U.S. brands to manufacture for them?”
“I’m no here,” said an Asian munching on sausage and sitting at a table at the booth for the 5th China International Occupational Safety and Health Exhibition. I moved on to the KCL hand protection exhibit featuring two glassed-encased displays of miniature railroad villages, incredibly detailed down to the moving construction cranes, tiny flashing blue welding light, a machine shop, a jet wing assembly operation, a twirling cement truck, and five miniature workers eating lunch at a picnic table, with what looked like the ubiquitous green beer bottles. The only glitch: the machines appeared unguarded and many of the workers were without hard hats and gloves.
A+A 2009, as with all A+A shows (which are held in Dusseldorf every other year), has an unmistakable consumer feel to it. You see it in the names of companies and brands: Rock Star shoes, Mad Dog safety boots and shoes, Job Man, Orbit International, Otter Premium sport footwear, Puma, Dickies, W.L. Gore, Goodyear, Myrtle Beach ball caps, James & Nicholson long and short sleeved dress shirts.
A CONSUMER VIBE
What Germans call “wire and tube” booths largely present consumer designs, signage and entertainment. Halls 3 to 5 and 9 to 10 were reserved for PPE, “corporate fashion” and “safe appliances.” Fire protection, enviro protection, and “measurement and control technology” were pooled in Hall 6. Special exhibits focused on the “Success Factor Office” (something is lost in translation here) and the “Innovation Park Hazardous Substances” (innovative hazardous substances?)
At one booth a bartender mixes vodka and OJ. Another has large photographs of white polar bears wearing insulated black work boots from Sweden. At the corner of one exhibit stands a mannequin wearing a black doo-rag, a double-breasted black-buttoned white top with stiff black and white striped cuffs and upturned collar, and black and white striped pajama bottoms, No shoes, gloves or goggles. One booth has 20 U-shaped black leather chairs for comfortable negotiations. Another is dwarfed by an actual red and black multi-ton trash truck, slightly tilted to one side on a bed of real rocks and gravel, with four-foot diameter tires. The theme? “Power to keep you fit.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you turn a corner and there stands a statuesque blond ponytailed female DJ up on a blue stage-lit carpeted platform with speaker amps, turntables, a Mac laptop and a mixing board. Wearing tight black jeans, the black boots with four-inch heels you see women wearing everywhere in Dusseldorf, a tight gray tank top and head phones draped around her neck, the DJ smiles and sways to disco beats. Next to her stand two technicians working a concert-size mixing board, and next to them, what else, a keg with a tap.
Germany and China were the two leading countries for number of exhibitors. Asia was well-represented with 62 exhibitors from India, 42 from Pakistan, 35 from Taiwan, 25 from South Korea, and 20 from Hong Kong. Eleven of the 37 U.S. exhibitors were grouped under the North American Pavilion banner. The North American hostesses seemed prudish in comparison to their international counterparts, offering coffee and Coca-Cola from a countertop.
OSH GEOPOLITICS
Far from the maddening din of the exhibit halls, at the south end of the Messe Dusseldorf “Kompound,” was the A+A 31st International Congress for Occupational Safety and Health. Here, in a dimly-lit room where attendees sat at long rows of white tables, many wearing headphones listening to translations emanating from a glass-enclosed booth with twelve translators at the back of the room, proceedings took on the air of a United Nations meeting. In fact, the accompanying conference of the International Labour Office (ILO), which is a sub-organization of the UN, had more than 300 delegates from almost 60 countries. The mood was somber and subdued. Several hundred attendees listened on Thursday afternoon to a series of short speeches all emphasizing the significance of the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work.
Crafted in 2008 in Seoul, South Korea at a world conference organized by the ILO, the International Social Security Association, and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the declaration states that promoting high levels of safety and health at work is the responsibility of society as a whole, calls for a national preventive safety and health culture, and emphasizes that continuous improvement of occupational safety and health (OSH) should be promoted by a systems approach to the management of OSH.
Culture. Management systems. Continuous improvement. Sound familiar?
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
The themes of the A+A Congress, attended by 5,000 registrants, could have come straight out of the National Safety Council’s Orlando meeting this year, or the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s 2009 meetings: “Economic Crisis and Safety and Health at Work;” “Safety and Health as Core Elements of Sustainable Corporate Action;” “No Compromise in Times of Crisis;” and “New OSH Culture and Strategies to Claim the Right to a Safe and Healthful Workplace in Times of Global Financial Crisis.”
Birgit Horn, the 36-year-old new project director of A+A 2009, spoke the universal language of safety when asked in an interview for her first impressions of the OSH industry. “The difference between safety and other industries is the emphasis OSH officers put into it,” she said. “People are really touched by the topic.”
Martin-Ulf Koch, manager of the Messe Dusseldorf press department, which oversaw a thriving press room with 300 reporters and journalists, added: “Safety is a mission for these people.”
“It is a very emotional topic I think,” said Ms. Horn. “It makes you really start to look at work differently.” She went on to say workplaces must change to meet the needs of German workers who are “getting older and older” and putting off retirement. “There is a need to keep strength and posture because we will work longer.”
In the states we call that “battling boomeritis.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
