Safety Wars
Safety in the News 6-13-2022
June 13, 2022
Jim is changing the format a little on the podcasts, you will hear “Safety in the News” stories, and then you will get commentary Today’s stories for June 13, 2022. 1. Workers almost drowned in vat of chocolate 2. OSHA record keeping not happening according to the government accounting office 3. US Navy Safety Stand Down Commentary: Safety Stand Downs, successes and pitfalls. #USNAVY #Safetypause, #safetywars #safetyfm #jayallen #safetywarslive #recordkeeping #jimpoesl #jcptechnicalservices #safetywars www.safetywars.com www.jcptechnical.com jim@safetywars.com 845-269-5772
[00:00:00] :  This show is brought to you by safety warning. The following broadcast contains adult language, adult content frank safety discussions and stories that might sound unbelievable. But believe me every one of those stories is true. We didn't start the safety war, but we're going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives. Hi, this is jim proposal. We're trying something a little bit different here. We're going to switch up our format a little and we're going to have some safety in the news. Then we're going to have some commentary on at least one of the stories. According to a report in many news outlets, a pair of people fell into a chocolate tank and a candy plant. They were rescued by first responders who had to cut a hole into the side of the tank. They worked for an outside contractor. Our next story is from our government Accounting Office from May 25th. Workplace safety and health data and enforcement challenges limit ocean's ability to protect workers during a crisis from the fact fast facts section We testified about the occupational safety and Health Administration's efforts to protect workers from covid 19 and its preparedness for a new crisis. For example, OSHA issued to emergency standards. One to protect health care workers and another for vaccinations and testing at large employers. But OSHA face challenges implementing both standards and withdrew most of their provisions, employers must report injury and illness stated to OSHA. However, noncompliance is potentially widespread. Tell me something that we don't know already. As a result though. She may not be able to target inspections or injuries and illnesses are highest. Our early recommendations address this and other issues. The government accounting office estimated that employers did not report injury and illness data for more than 50% of their establishments for which they were required to do so for the calendar years. 2016 through 2018 G. A. O. Found that OSHA signing employers for nearly 35,800 recordkeeping violations in fiscal years 2005 to 2019. Among these violations, 65% occurred in the 7.5 years before a court decision effectively limited the time period for signing these violations. The remaining 35% occurred in the 7.5 years after that court decision. Xi AO also found that OSHA had limited procedures for encouraging compliance with injury and illness is reporting requirements and for penalizing noncompliance kind of disheartening here. Recordkeeping is one of the basic requirements if you're an employer and it's also part of any OSHA outreach course. If you're interested in taking any type of ocean outreach course, give us a call that's either construction, general industry, maritime or disaster response worker. You can give us a call at 8452695772 or email us at jim at safety words dot com on to our main story here is the stand down by the US Navy after two significant air mishaps in the last couple of weeks resulting the fatalities of five marines in California. So today, on monday june 13th we're doing a safety stand down or what they're calling a safety pause and I guess that sounds better than a safety stand town and I'm sure that documentation requirements are a little bit different. During the pause. Units will review risk management practices and train on threat and error management processes. According to Naval Air Forces statement, we've all been involved in accident investigations. I'm sure most of us are safety professionals who listen to this podcast. What's some of the things that go on when you're doing a accident investigation or anything like that mitigation, remediation doesn't matter what we call it. There has to be a lot of checklists in there. One of the things that OSHA requires is an ongoing training and communication program for for your employees throughout employment career. You have to communicate hazards. You have to do all different types of stuff. We could say that often this stuff is a checklist. What happens? What I've seen happened is that this all comes into a thing where you got to have a safety stand down that way. When the higher ups go in there and say, well, what did you do to address this accident? What did you do to do? You could then say we had any safety stand down. We took it so seriously that we actually shut down operations for five minutes, half an hour a day for a major one. We spent company time and resources and addressing these safety hazards. And guess what? We take it so seriously that we took it away from production and what happened to the upper level management often. Oh well look at us, we're so serious about safety. We took off from doing our regular stuff and we did safety training or we did this. And of course at last, you know, you get people in the back of the classroom, usually supervisor and they're like, man, how long is this going to take in your area? Come on. So what was supposed to be a half an hour meeting may have turned into a five minute meeting over that. And this is what happened, say rely on often the least experienced person on site which is a safety manager to go and do the safety stand down, giving them very little or no resources. So they now and of course no authority. And what does it end up having to do? End of the day, you like the navy statement said, when I see a statement like that, that says, we gotta try harder, You gotta try harder on not hurting people. You have to try harder or not doing whatever and no, this accident happened because the employees were not focusing on what they were doing. This is some of the other stuff I hear this is from a nationally recognized safety organization here and they talk about complacency and this is one of the things that came out with the navy stuff up front again. We gotta wait for the report to find out what really happened here, what they say really happened. However, no complacency we have to fight complacency. What's the sign of a complacency? You have employees dissatisfied with the work or a lack of motivation, missteps and work processes, frequent near miss or incidents since it can be difficult to recognize these signs in yourself, you should also learn to spot them in your coworkers and then it has a whole bunch of stuff set yourself up for success at work by consciously focusing on your tasks. Bottom line is they blame the workers. What happens with a lot of these accidents? What do you know, first of all, how do you do an accident investigation? We always hear root causes and this and that and root causes as was pointed out to me fairly recently that was dealing with machines and processes, not people. When we talk about people, we talk about a remote, you talk about incentives. We talk about the context of what they were doing and that we try not to blame the person because you blame the person, you're not solving anything and you're not trying to improve things because it's really easy for management to say, well it was frank's fault frank did this. So now we got rid of frank, so we're not gonna have any more problems. How many times have you heard that? I've heard it lots of times. That's really not effective in doing anything. So you have a safety stand down. What does that mean? You have to go out and you have to make sure you're organized? You have an accident investigation that's complete. These are what the causes are. You want to go and find out some what happened here. I doubt that it was employee to blame for this stuff. But what else happened? Maybe it was management and I'm gonna tell you chances are, was management of some sort that is to blame for a lot of these problems because they don't keep an eye on their employees. They don't train their employees, they have an incentive to take shortcuts. They know employees are taking shortcuts, they don't say anything, They set up Uh antiquated processes. I've gotten to places that gives safety training. Yeah, we got a boom truck, we need some safety training on it, we go out there and it's a 1974 boom truck uh or older with missing safety features on it doesn't work broken down and I'm supposed to do training on it. And I'm like, no, I really can't do training on that, that happened a couple of times and then you learn to ask questions when you line up the training class, What kind of equipment do you have, that sort of thing? Uh, You, uh, an employer may go out and buy, for example, fall protection equipment at a state sale or at a sheriff's sale for a business. Someone's going out of business and this actually happened 35, 40 year old safety equipment. Now. Hey, you gotta do training on that. No, I don't really have to do training on that. Um, if you want me to do training on it, I'm not your trainer for that. Well, we had an accident and we got to do training and we got to have a safety stand down. Well, I don't know what do you need? You need to be organized. You need to have a program in place. You have to have, I say, donuts, water coffee, choose your poison on this to try to get workers to come a nice area to have this in. You have to have a sound system. So you're heard if you're, especially if you're dealing with a large crowd, like I often am many different elements go into this, but you want to make uh, sure that people are not wasting their time with the stand down with any meeting. The biggest thing that my wife is an event to meeting planner. The big thing that you have to do is going to organize ahead of time and make sure you start and finish on time and if you can't do that, get someone else to do the meeting organized better. That's what you can do. There are a lot of resources out there things on how to have a successful safety stand down. Here's a couple of them. This is from urban dot com. How to hold the safety stand down one, decide what the safety stand down topic should be. That's a really important thing. You have to have a focus number to determine who should participate. This is a little bit tricky and I'm just commenting on their items here. This is not what they're saying. So who's gonna participate? Will be management. Will it be shop stewards, Will it be the entire workforce? Who's going to be there using basic sociology techniques and other organizational techniques. Most workers are going to be followers. So this is the question, do we have leaders of the workforce or lead people or do we have the whole workforce? I tell you what there's arguments for and against both. I try to include everybody because often when I give meetings and stand down information and everything, the leaders or so called leaders never gets down to the workforce. So you may want to have two of them, one for the leaders, one for the workforce. And then I always follow up at the end, your leadership will be talking to you about X, Y and Z. So Now this puts them into forcing them into talking about things reviewing your safety program and materials. # three. Again mentioned, these are the rules, This is why we're or this is why we're doing X, Y and Z. This is the system we have in place have some type of presentation or activity movie, personal story. Uh personal stories always work better, especially if they're not from you promote the safety stand down, spread the word, make flyers, emails, text messages, announcements on the way in to a facility. So for example, I worked in an oil refinery, they made sure that whenever there was going to be a safety stand down on the way in, everybody on that, that facility was told there's gonna be a safety stand down at X and X. Time at X and S location or during your lunch hour, your employee will your employer will have a safety stand down. That was a good way of handling that. Again, hold the safety stand down, make sure it's on time, that's jim speaking. And of course seek feedback from participants. And again, what I normally have is me talking and someone else observing This way because you can't really keep track of four or 500 people that one shot, have someone else there taking pictures documenting this thing, I record all of mine that I have and that's what goes into a safety stand down something meaningful. Now don't confuse the safety stand down from safety training, let's say that you have an accident or an incident and you want to have, this is more of an awareness thing for safety stand downs for training. That's a little bit more in depth. That's where you want to have smaller groups of people involved in training. You're going to be changing a procedure. You're going to be changing requirement, a workplace requirement of policy. At that point you need to have some type of a actual training section session for safety worse this is jim proposal. See you later this week. Is your safety training old stale and Hackney is your safety trainer still preaching a warped version of behavior based safety. How about safety training that actually addresses your hazards in your workplace is and it's not standardized bologna from 25 years ago. Contact the safety wards team at safety words dot com or call jim postal at 845 2695772. Remember if you're receiving this message, you are the solution to unsafe workplaces. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. 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