The Dark Side of Safety, Part I

                This will be the first of what I am sure will be several chapters to adequately cover this topic.  At the outset, I will state on no uncertain terms that those who will make a concerted effort to misunderstand me so that they may subsequently misrepresent my positions are of no interest to me.  People who, for their own chaos of motives will attempt to distort my intent and meaning may go ahead and do so; I will simply not engage in a debate on a false premise. 

                With that in mind, I will further state that I am in no way dismissing or even trying to diminish the vital importance of safety in the workplace. My issue is when “safety” becomes a convenient pretense for authoritarianism and tyranny. The very word “safety” has taken on a near sacred, religious sanctity on many job sites and within many organizations. Simply dropping the word “safety” is often used as a rhetorical club to bludgeon opponents into submission and end all possible debate and assent. This is the mentality I will address here in this writing. Not so much safety itself, but the authoritarian and tyrannical behaviors and beliefs that “safety” serves as a cover for.

            We might want to start by considering the often-repeated cliché of, “safety first” and all its trite iterations. “Safety is our highest priority” or “Safety is our number one commitment”. No, actually; it isn’t. These premises are so obviously and blatantly false that it is truly alarming that people just accept these ideas unquestioningly. If safety were any given company’s first concern, you wouldn’t even allow them to go out onto a job site, shop or manufacturing facility. Why let workers even step onto a job site when there is even the remotest risk of injury if “safety” is in fact your “highest priority”? I’ll take it a step further. Why let a worker even drive to the work site on any given day, risking life and limb, serious bodily injury, even death if safety is your “top priority”? Obviously, because safety is not and cannot be your top priority. Profit is. As it should be. There is nothing wrong with that. That is why businesses exist in the first place. To produce goods or services in hopes of earning money. Production is any given companies’ top priority, as it should be.

Please click on the link below to read more about my principle of “Quality and its impact on Safety”, which was also published on the Fabricator.com.

Quality and it’s impact on safety

            If you accept the flawed premise that safety is your highest priority, not production, then you must confront a self-defeating, fatal flaw in this line of reasoning. The safest thing to do is absolutely nothing. If you don’t move, don’t work, don’t do anything at all, then you won’t get hurt. Your respective company will be in serious trouble indeed when the employees figure that out.

            So, let’s start by being honest with ourselves and each other. When you start with a deeply flawed premise, it stands to reason that all that follows is likewise flawed.  Furthermore, when you can’t be honest about what you’re doing and saying, please consider asking yourself why. Isn’t that what it means to be correct? That your ideas and beliefs are commensurate with the facts of reality. Any ideas, actions and beliefs that are counter to the facts of reality are WRONG, regardless of how noble the intent.

            It is perfectly reasonable to adopt the position that we must work in the safest manner possible. It is proper and rational to have safety policies to alert workers to hazards, eliminate them to the fullest extent possible, provide substitutions and specify Personal Protective Equipment required for the specific job tasks. Workers should have a say in their safety program and should have meaningful input in safety policy to the extent that the worker will be impacted by the safety policies adopted by the company. You can’t tell a worker one minute that “safety is everyone’s responsibility” and then, in the next breath and to the same worker, that he has no say in his safety. Safety goes beyond compliance issues.

            More on that to follow…