[00:00:00] :  This show is brought to you by safety FM. 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 are going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives, treat people with some respect especially if they are offering free safety advice. That is actually correct today. On safety wars, I received a letter from a listener last month on a situation they experienced while getting their breakfast at a strip mall realized I'm only getting one side of the story here. But it makes some sense with some information that I was able to verify independently. They were looking at a new retail location that was being built the rougher and this should be no big surprise was not using fall protection when they should have been. The listener went over to the site looking for a possible business opportunity for like fall protection training politely as reported by the listener pointed out the fall protection issues and the contractor rather than being open polite, nice. Even blowing them off a little bit was would have been probably appropriate here. Told the guy to get lost in the most forceful way allegedly the contractor is yelling, screaming, cursing and mapping him, You name it what ended up happening. The guy took photos and sent them to OSHA and to date and I was able to independently verify this. The host employer. The other contractors on site and the retail establishment Have been hit with a total proposed list of proposed citations and excess of $100,000. The retail client was whacked with literally hundreds of thousands and proposed citations since at least 2015 now I'm not advocating people start calling 1 803 21 OSHA because I don't think it's really necessarily constructive to do that. A better route. Would have been to train the employees follow the laws and do everything else to protect. The workers are not being done by the employer. But let's talk about something else. Do your employees especially the managers have the knowledge the training or anything else on how to deal with the public and regulators when they show up and if not then you're running a big risk of what they're going to be saying and doing for example these employees are probably doing what their boss does which is yell and scream and know that they're doing what they were told. The boss is leading by example here by the way as an aside this company none of the companies involved construction company, the roofing company, the G. C. The retailer none of them were a little mom and pop companies. These are mid science construction companies and large retailer. Mhm. Starting in the mid 2000s we started to have cameras on cell phones. It became popular. There may have been some models that had it before that but none that I'm really aware of or none of really big note before smartphones. It would take several steps to take a photo on a digital camera, put it on a computer and email it. You would normally do it at the end of the day because there were no things such as public wifi wireless hotspots, anything like that, at least nothing that were really affordable to the normal person that's not today. Today, everything is done virtually instantaneously. And an altercation like this guy had with this construction company could easily go on social media. Uh, no, the whole video, if it was an influence, certainly might have been going out there to try to provoke the guy and put it on social media, make a couple of bucks at his expense. So my question is, and I'll ask this again, what are you doing to train your employees or instruct your employees on how to manage these situations? How are you training them to deal with regulators, town officials and any of the cast of characters we as an industry need to deal with. I'll give you a couple of suggestions here. First of all, don't cut corners and actually have your employees and direct your foreman to follow ocean regulations and laws. Again, ocean regulations and laws are just the minimum. You need to give them the resources. If they were following regulations, they would probably not have attracted attention in the first place or this could have been an entirely different type of interaction with everybody. Some more takeaways. One obey the law we mentioned, it's to teacher employees or find people in charge that can handle the public and engage the public nicely. There are cameras everywhere. Last year. On one of our first episodes we talked about a team falling from a roof and it was all caught on a surveillance camera down the street. No, from someone's doorbell. I believe it was always be polite. Be professional. Have a plan in place to manage and respond to accidents, injuries and other things that may arise on an emergency level. Have a plan on how to deal with the regulator. From your local town inspector. Up to federal OSHA or other regulators. There was one contractor up in my area that was a horticulturists were ann arbor where he would go and an arborist, he would go and cut down trees just about every alphabet soup agency showed up at his yard to see where the trees were coming from. I mean agencies that you only read about in a book in college for a week or something, what they do all these weird and obscure places. Came out doing an inspection and he had a plan in place and how to manage them. Smart guy. He was also a safety professional on the side if you are a host employer or like this retailer that was paying for those work, you still might be liable for the contractors you hire when things go to google, you know, so hire qualified contractors have a pre qualification less that consists more than just do they have enough insurance for the mistakes we know that they're gonna make and the people we know they're gonna hurt and the quality work now you're saying yourself jim that is way too much to ask for and I know that's what a lot of you are thinking. But consider this. The total cost of training and a robust human resources system is small compared to an OSHA citation litigation and everything else tangible and intangible that goes along with these problems. How much are the proposed penalties for retailer and contractor? The retailer is in the frequent violator program so they're already on the list and then I use air quotes. The contractor is also on the list right? Using air quotes again and has repeat violations. That means they are potentially on the hook for a lot of money here if you want to get into that C suite like J Allen had mentioned earlier this week on the rate of our safety show on our network safety FM. You really need to start thinking like one of the people who are already there. One way is uh you need to consider cases like this and how much it costs to your company or new york organization. A lot of these folks tend to be bottom line uh people if you give them a presentation or a statement with two or three bullet items, you may be able to get into that C suite or get in front of someone especially if you're talking numbers say look, we could save money on our insurance program. OSHA citations and everything else. This is all and there's more things right on how we're gonna get one step closer to winning that safety war. We're all talking about fighting here and of course keep us safety words in mind. Contact us at (845) 269 5772 or gym at safety words.com. We can schedule some training, some other assistance for your company and we get to see each other face to face rather than behind a microphone and a screen for safety wars. This is jim pozole. 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. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, J. Allen.