July/August 2008
Training workers and providing them with the right protective equipment are not enough to keep them safe, experts say. A scrapyard must create a culture in which safety is second nature.
By Lindsay Holst
The turning point for Grossman Iron & Steel was in fall 1976, when one of the company's young mechanics was making a boom-brake adjustment on a locomotive cable crane. The employee was improperly standing on the crane's hoist line cable drum, and he gave an incorrect hand signal to the crane operator. In an instant, the mechanic's body became wrapped around the drum. Cap Grossman was plant manager back then, and he remembers the day vividly. "He was performing a routine task for which we had properly trained him, and yet he was still standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He still miscommunicated with the crane operator, and in a split second it was over," says Grossman, now company president. The result was a fatality. "Up until that point, I thought our yard was way ahead of everybody in rules and training. But then I went to this employee's funeral. I apologized to his wife. The fact was, we had a lot of [safety] bells and whistles in our plant, but we didn't have the culture to back it up."
Walk into any scrapyard and you will find a mosaic of personalities and backgrounds. Newly hired mechanics work alongside seasoned industry veterans who seem to understand the facility inside and out. Some employees have advanced degrees; others are fresh out of high school. Not everyone speaks English as a first language. And on the surface, not everyone seems to share the same values. All yard employees have one thing in common, though: They all want to get home safely to their families at the end of the day. And if you ask most safety professionals, this is the only goal you need to fuel an effective safety culture. An outstanding lock-out/tag-out program, an exemplary accident reporting system, and an extensive safety manual are not enough if a yard's workers lack a fundamental understanding of their primary goal, one equal with—if not above—the yard's productivity and profitability. As Grossman puts it, "it doesn't matter how good you are on paper if your employees still aren't buying into the safety culture."
Right now, safety culture seems to be the scrap recycling industry's trendy phrase. The meaning depends upon whom you ask. "If you were to do an online search for articles on safety culture, you'd find hundreds," says Fred Rine, founder and CEO of the safety and health consulting firm FDRsafety (Brentwood, Tenn.). "And after reading most of them, you'd be more confused than you were when you started. How can you possibly define a culture in your organization? If you've got 500 employees, well, don't you have 500 cultures?" he asks.
"Is a safety culture a set of goals for your yard?" asks Fred Cornell, the safety, health, environment, and community manager for Sims Metal Management (Jersey City, N.J.), who has spoken on this topic. "Is it a skill? An approach? A mindset?" A safety culture is all of these things, Cornell says, but in the scrap recycling industry, the meaning can be simply, "It's just the way we do things around here."
Behavior-Based Safety
To categorize the scrapyard work environment using a set of concentric rings, the outermost ring would likely denote it as an industrial workplace. The next ring might be an industrial workplace with potential falling material. And, still further, a high-traffic industrial workplace with heavy machinery, potential falling material, and the potential for slips and falls. The further the categorization goes, the more hazards it encompasses. Most safety programs start with the innermost, most specific ring and train workers to address all the enumerated safety hazards. The programs are getting more complex, and manuals are getting thicker with checklists and diagrams in an effort to address every safety issue in a yard. And yet, all of these programs might fall short unless the company has scrutinized the bigger picture—the way its employees interact. In this way, the scrap recycling workplace isn't so different from any other occupational setting. It consists of a diverse group of people working together toward a common goal.
"When you're addressing the issue of a safety culture, you have to remember that people want to do what everyone else is doing," says Jerry Sjogren, safety director at E.L. Harvey & Sons (Westborough, Mass.). "It's a real herd mentality. A new employee comes in and will quickly assess the other employees' behavior." If the experienced and established employees regularly engage in safe behaviors, the new employee will likely do the same. If the experienced employees are cutting corners, though, the new employee will follow suit. After all, no one likes to stick out. "It's really tough for some of these guys to actually speak up when they see someone committing an unsafe act," Sjogren says. "Most of the time, everyone is swimming together. How often does someone swim against the current?"
Harry Garber, director of safety for Grossman Iron & Steel, refers to this unfortunate behavior as "tattletale syndrome." Sjogren says simply that "no one wants to be a rat." No employee wants to upset the order of the herd, and reporting a co-worker would do just that. A safety program would correctly punish the offending employee, and most employees simply won't risk the tense social situation that could ensue.
Sjogren urges employees to stand up for what they believe in to protect one another. You'd think the solution to tattletale syndrome would be to instill in employees the idea that, in the long run, by reporting unsafe practices they're just looking out for their co-workers' safety. Given the variety of dynamics and personalities at work within any given scrapyard, it's not always that easy. "Sure, there are employees who will call me on the radio and say, 'You better get down here, there's a guy standing on a conveyor who doesn't have his fall protection on,'" Garber says. "But then there are also employees who will apply their own kind of peer pressure, saying, 'I'm not going to tell the boss, but I don't want to see you out there walking around without your hard hat or your safety glasses on.' Still further, there will always be someone who doesn't care, who will just look the other way. That's just human nature. An effective culture addresses all those forces."
One of the greatest challenges in creating an effective safety culture is "making safety everyone's business," says Joe Bateman, the regional health, safety, environment, and transportation manager at PSC Metals (Nashville, Tenn.) and ReMA Safety Council chair. "We have to get away from the attitude that safety is just the safety guy's job. Every employee is responsible for his or her own safety and for the safety of his or her co-workers." Because at the end of the day, "when someone gets hurt, every employee in the yard feels it," Grossman says.
Providing Incentives
So how does a yard effectively deal with the third type of employee, the one who just doesn't care? At Grossman, it's simple: "You get rid of him," Garber says. "You catch someone not wearing a hard hat or other personal protective equipment the first time, and you'll give him a warning. But when it quickly becomes obvious that this guy can't be safe, I'd rather have him going home to his family and saying, 'I lost my job today because I wasn't safe,' than me calling his wife and saying, 'Meet me in the emergency room.' Because we will not tolerate people who work unsafely. We can't tolerate it."
The company offers positive incentives as well. Grossman employees who work incident-free for three months receive a $100 savings bond in a celebration at the company's quarterly safety meeting. For the meeting, the company shuts down its operations for two hours, closes its gates, and lets the customers line up outside. "We literally show the employees that their safety is more important to us than running the shredder," Grossman says.
The program has helped to steadily improve the plant's safety record, and the rewards create a second incentive—peer pressure. "When maybe 98 percent of our employees are standing up front alongside one another, receiving their savings bonds and shaking hands with Mr. Grossman and me, that sends a pretty quick message to the three or four guys still sitting down," Garber says. "They were the ones who weren't working safely. And they probably feel a little uncomfortable."
E. Scott Geller, a behavioral psychologist and distinguished professor at Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, Va.) who specializes in behavior-change interventions to improve occupational safety, says incentive programs work best when they are based on proactive behaviors. "If a supervisor drills into employees that the company's goal is simply to have fewer injuries, then people will just stop reporting their injuries," Geller says. Yards must encourage employees to be proactive, reporting even the most minor accidents or equipment malfunctions. Currently, "a lot of companies won't record their smaller problems," Cornell says. "Say a truck driver backs into a bollard. It doesn't seem to be a serious issue, but what if a person were standing there? The driver still would have backed up unsafely, but he wouldn't have hit the bollard—he would have crushed someone." When a company sheds light on such seemingly minor accidents for their potential to have caused greater harm, it not only helps to account for hazards, but demonstrates its investment in its employees' safety, he explains.
At E.L. Harvey, Jerry Sjogren keeps a pair of dark glasses in his top desk drawer, along with an eye patch and the sort of folding cane often used by the visually impaired. He brings them out occasionally during safety meetings with employees. "I'll hold up the safety glasses first and say, 'Well, we'd really like you to wear these, but sometimes you don't want to because they're uncomfortable, or because they don't look cool,'" he says. "So then, I'll put on the dark glasses and hold up the cane. I tell them that, unfortunately, that's the alternative to correctly wearing your PPE." The message might be blunt, but it reinforces the potential negative consequences of failing to comply with safety rules.
Sometimes, an employee will approach Sjogren with a damaged piece of PPE that has quite obviously prevented an injury. He views this as a measure of the success of E.L. Harvey's safety culture. "It's really amazing when an employee will step forward and say, for example, 'look what happened to my safety glasses,'" he says. "And then he'll hold them up, and there's a huge scar in the middle of one of the lenses because something flew at them, something that could have gouged out an eye. And then to hear the employee tell the others, 'Boy, I'm glad I had these things on.' … That's the kind of success story that will help you immensely."
Another key to an effective culture of safety, safety professionals say, is reminding employees constantly of the real consequences of their actions. Just as the young mechanic at Grossman probably wasn't thinking about his family when he stood on the crane drum, an employee who neglects to put on eye protection probably isn't thinking about going blind and how that will affect his ability to work or support his family.
Delving into an Accident's Roots
Consultant Fred Rine, who has spoken with groups of safety professionals at companies including Wal-Mart, Delta Air Lines, Honda, and Mittal Steel, put the safety culture problem into perspective when he spoke at ReMA's Safety Council meeting in May. "I'll bet the conditions in your workplace today are better than they've ever been," he said. "Today, we train our employees on more things than we've ever trained them on before. And yet they still get hurt. What is still controlling their minds and allowing them to take risks?" Though he notes the importance of identifying and correcting unsafe conditions and providing adequate training, Rine believes that time and comfort are the two factors that govern most unsafe decisions in the workplace.
Many scrapyard workers say their PPE is not comfortable, and that's why they often forgo wearing it. Hard hats dig into the scalp, flame-retardant clothes are heavy and hot, and safety glasses slide down the nose and fog with perspiration. Moreover, a pair of gloves a worker accidentally leaves in a locker will in all likelihood stay there for the entirety of the shift. The in-the-moment rationale for that decision? It takes too much time to retrieve them.
Rine encourages managers to delve into the way employees think in the moment rather than demand that they undergo additional training. He illustrates his point with this example: "How many of you have ever sped in your car on the highway?" he asked a crowd of ReMA safety professionals. A few audience members sheepishly raised their hands. "Now, did you know the speed limit? Were you trained properly to obey the speed limit?" A few more heads bob. "So why didn't you follow your training? I'll bet you wanted to get there faster. I'll bet it was about your time and comfort. And every time you ask an employee to make a safe decision in the scrapyard, you're competing with their time and comfort, too." To carry that example further, however, most people will slow down when facing hazardous road conditions to ensure they reach their goal or destination. Ultimately, Rine says, in an effective safety culture, the workers act with one goal in mind: getting home to their families.
Do the Numbers Matter?
On a sunny May morning in the Grossman conference room, Harry Garber walks over to a bulletin board hanging next to the coffee machine and pulls down a piece of paper. It's Grossman's list of OSHA recordable injuries for 2007. Garber spreads it out on the table. "We had 15 recordables last year," he says. "That's not very good. Out of these 15 injuries, only three were lost time. But it's still not very good." Garber and many other safety professionals say that yards with successful safety cultures must be open about such numbers—revealing them not only to employees, but to other yards as well. But many scrap operations won't talk about recordable injuries and DART rates (the measure of a worker's days away/restricted or transfer), Garber says, because they're ashamed of looking careless or unsafe compared with other operations. In an industry long accustomed to dwelling under the radar, there seems to be a belief that sharing such numbers is bad for business.
Bateman finds this frustrating. For the past two years, he has been asking ReMA member companies to provide him with their OSHA recordable and DART rates so that the safety council can compile an industrywide set of benchmarking numbers. He hasn't had much luck. "Sure, some companies will give you their [recordables and DART rates] without question," he says. "But unfortunately, they're in the minority. You'd think we were asking for personal, intimate details. But recordables and DART rates are public knowledge." A company is required to post its OSHA recordables and DART rates at its facility for three months, he explains, and it must submit them to OSHA if the agency requests them. "Yes, the numbers are public knowledge," in that anyone might see them posted, but "they become broadly public [only] when OSHA asks for them," says ReMA Director of Safety John Gilstrap. Companies sometimes tell Bateman that their legal department advised them not to share the numbers beyond what the law requires. "There's an inherent fear that somehow the numbers will be used against the very company that produced them," he says. But Bateman calls this a misconception.
Right now, he explains, the OSHA recordable and DART numbers for the scrap recycling industry fall into SIC code 5093, which also includes warehousing operations, waste haulers, and other businesses categories quite unlike recycling. The safety council hopes to eventually get a separate SIC code for scrap recycling within the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Our hope is that if we can segregate our numbers into our own category, we might discover that we have far better rates than, say, waste haulers," Bateman says. "Because as of now, you look at the rate for that large group, and it's easy to pass the blame onto another industry. Now, these separate numbers could bring good news or bad news. But at least we would know." This information would give scrapyards a comprehensive look at common hazards and injuries industrywide, Bateman says, which could in turn help them hone in on potential problem areas in their own operations.
Numbers don't tell the whole story of a company's safety performance. If yard owners and operators were to focus solely on DART rates and OSHA recordable rates as measures of a company's safety success, Bateman says, issues like injury severity are left out. Let's say an employee strains his back. The strain requires back surgery, which takes him out of work for three months, resulting in lost time and an increased DART rate. Strictly from a statistical standpoint, for OSHA, a fatality has no more weight than a recordable injury. Of course, in reality a fatality can indicate greater problems in a company's safety methods than a strained back or a cut that requires a few stitches.
Gilstrap says that he fears that "lucky" yards with good recordables will use their numbers as an excuse not to have an aggressive safety program. "In Russian roulette, the odds are one in six that you'll kill yourself, and those are odds vastly in your favor," he says. "However, that doesn't make it a safe game." Though a yard's safety numbers might do a great job of illustrating trends, they don't necessarily demonstrate the strength of a yard's safety program or illustrate why injuries occur.
Take the PSC Metals yard in Nashville, for example. Last year, this yard's OSHA recordable rate was 3.9. "Does that mean that the safety program at PSC is nearly five times better" than a company whose rate is 15? Bateman asks. "Not necessarily. A company with one of the best programs in the industry still finished last year with a recordable rate of 15." So even though he believes it's important to know the numbers, "you have figure out what other factors come into play in determining a good culture of safety."
Safety and the Bottom Line
Recordables aren't the only numbers that get management's attention. The costs associated with on-the-job accidents do as well, and this frequently frustrates safety professionals. It also can detract from attempts to build an underlying safety culture. If upper management seems only to care about the costs associated with accidents rather than the lives they threaten, employees question its investment in a culture of safety. And if employees don't feel that their company's leaders "buy into" safety, then they certainly won't, either.
"You've missed the boat if you're tracking accidents and injuries with cost," Sjogren says, because the same unsafe action can cause two separate injuries that differ hugely in severity. "We know it's dangerous to stand on the top step of a ladder," he says. "In one case, this action could sprain the employee's ankle. In another case, it could break the employee's neck." The first injury costs perhaps hundreds of dollars; the second could render the employee a quadriplegic, costing millions. But the unsafe act is exactly the same in both scenarios, and "it's ultimately the root cause of the accident that matters. If you tackle near-misses, close calls, and unsafe acts at the root and minimize them, the cost will take care of itself anyway," Sjogren says.
ISC meetings are rife with accounts of safety personnel clashing with other personnel over matters of PPE, fall protection, and other safety issues that have the potential to slow production. After all, the idea that time spent retrieving a hard hat is lost production time often comes from a supervisor looking at the bottom line and instilling that belief in his or her workers. "One of the biggest safety challenges in the industry right now is to get front-line supervisors to really look out for themselves, their people, and the safety of their operations," Bateman says. "And it doesn't happen overnight."
But it does happen, gradually, in the moment when an employee reminds his co-worker to put on an orange vest. Or when another employee turns around to retrieve his cut-proof gloves. Or even in the moment when a supervisor fires an employee for neglecting to use fall protection for the second time. Ultimately, a yard's safety culture can't be found in its manuals, policies, or recordable injuries. The culture dwells, instead, in the decisions its employees make every day.
"What we need to be asking our employees is not, 'How many injuries did we have today?' but rather, 'What are we doing for safety today?'" Geller says. "We need to encourage them to look out not only for their own safety, but for each other's. And that might require them to tell someone to put on their PPE. Or to buckle their safety belt. To risk personal confrontations that might be unpleasant. But you know what? That's courage." •
Lindsay Holst is assistant editor of Scrap.
Training workers and providing them with the right protective equipment are not enough to keep them safe, experts say. A scrapyard must create a culture in which safety is second nature.