Notes

Will be the Safety Professionals Going Soft?
Although I'm just a lowly shoe salesman, I've spent some time among the safety professionals these past few years. I figured because the CEO of a company that manufactures PPE i quickly had better brush-up on the culture, rules and regulations that govern all our endeavors. It was not easy, let me tell you. Like all laws, the various Acts and Regulations are full of challenging legal and technical terms. On top of that, many laws are written so that much of the responsibility for safety at work is put on the shoulders of employers but also open to interpretation. A good example of one such little bit of legislation reads like this, "It is the responsibility of every employer to assess the hazards that may arise and provide workers with adequate PPE."

I developed a way of treating all of this material that made it easier for me to absorb and retain. I reckoned if I applied "good sense" thought processes I would look out of the jargon and the politics. This helped me understand the fairly narrow field that was my domain - namely, foot protection. Once I realized that responsibility was grounded in "reasonableness", which complimented my common sense attitude, I started to obtain the hang of it. In the end, it's not rocket science protecting workers' feet and toes. If an employer has taken the time to review the work environment there can only just be few differences in the forms of safety footwear to be concerned about.

What I started to notice was the proliferation of "safety professionals" in the field. There is apparently a science to creating a safety culture. Safety professionals are trained to further the cause of safety and in the creation of a sustainable safe work place. The theory being, if all workers understand the key reason why a safe workplace is for the benefit of everybody then each will play their part. Phrases like, "educate the worker on the rules and the penalties for violation" are commonly used. That is to be achieved through "coaching", "teamwork" and "leadership". As with any discipline, enforcement is an essential section of the safety culture. Penalties are intended to be fair and consistent.

Recently, https://click4r.com/posts/g/9503515/ ventured on to a safety community website that was started by a large multi-national in the PPE business. It really is intended for "anyone for whom workplace safety is really a profession or passion" so I joined in a discussion on the forum for 'Workplace Safety'. Although I had made some contribution earlier, and had been a member for some time before, I was immediately made quite unwelcome. The debate was about why "safety cops" were unwelcome in the safety professional community. The safety professionals disliked the usage of what "police" or "policing" and contended that they would never be "safety cops". To them, being a safety cop was detrimental to the safety professional's standing in the workplace. It had been considered backward and out of date.

I couldn't realize why anyone calling themselves a safety professional would not include policing for safety in their daily work. I contended that less policing for safety could only diminish the overall safety in any workplace. If being a safety cop meant averting a major accident why not advocate for policing for safety? I wasn't even focused on only safety professionals being safety cops, I proposed that every worker ought to be one. It had been all to no avail. Rope Access Specialists Essex Road of the forum members resorted to personal attacks, calling me "just a shoe salesman" and having a "stunted personality". It had been at that point I realized I wasn't debating with safety professionals at all.


The recent dramatic increase in policing for safety by OSHA in Texas supports that my contention is common-sensible and reasonable. Texas has experienced a reliable deterioration in its safety record and the death of 3 workers in June was the straw that broke the camel's back. OSHA has stepped up the amount of safety cops, importing many from other States. According to Greg Smith, Austin-based regional vice president of the ASSE, whose members work closely with OSHA, "They have earned compliance officers from from coast to coast and paired them up with inspectors already in your community, and if they see an active job site, it's much more likely than not that they can visit. They are under a magnifier now."

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