Union Approach to Health and Safety: - United Steelworkers

workers are blamed for workplace injuries, accident prevention focuses on the least
effective methods of hazard control. Workers are blamed for not wearing personal
protective equipment or for not following safety procedures.
Behavior-based safety programs undermine health and safety by excusing management’s
past and current shortcomings. These programs focus attention on workers, who in most
cases had little or nothing to do with the selection of machinery, equipment, work
processes, work organization, materials or methods of safeguarding.
When workers believe they will be blamed for an accident or injury, and may face some
type of inquisition or discipline, accidents and injuries go unreported. Problems that go
unreported will not get addressed, and will certainly result in future injuries and even
tragedies.
Regarding “accident-proneness,” every one of us is “Accident-Prone Andy” at various
times in our lives. We are distracted by family issues and relationship problems. We may
not have gotten a good night’s sleep. We may be having medical problems. Or sometimes
we just have a bad day. All these conditions are absolutely normal. Safe design of
machinery, equipment, work processes and work organization assumes that workers will
have occasional bad days and will make mistakes. When a workplace is designed and
maintained safely, workers do not need to be blamed, fixed or fired. It is the workplace
that gets fixed, not the workers.
Questions To Ask When An Injury, Incident, Accident Or Near-Miss Occurs
To get to the root cause of a problem, and get past efforts to pin the blame on “worker
carelessness” or “accident-proneness,” make sure that questions get asked about why a
worker did or did not do a certain thing.
“But Why?”
An effective method for getting to the root cause of injuries, incidents and accidents in
the workplace is to ask the question “but why?” as follows:
Carol got something in her eye at work.
But why?
Because a metal chip went flying through the air and landed in her eye.
But why?
Because there was no enclosure around the machine to contain the metal chips.
But why?
Because the company didn’t want to spend the money on this kind on this kind of
engineering control.
But why?
Because the company knows it costs less to have workers wear PPE than to fix
the problem machine by enclosing it.