NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006
BY JOHN GILSTRAP
When ReMA Gulf Coast Chapter President Manny Bodner told me he wanted 100 percent of his chapter members to sign the ReMA Safety Pledge, I genuinely appreciated his commitment and his enthusiasm, but I never thought he could deliver.
Well, he did it. They all signed. (Well, all but seven, but let’s not quibble.) As of October, 174 member companies of the Gulf Coast Chapter had signed the pledge.
Manny, president of Bodner Metal & Iron Corp. in Houston, is a man of consistently good humor. For years he has championed causes he believes in. As I found out, when he sets his sights on a goal, the goal should commit itself to peaceful surrender.
In a recent conversation, Manny insisted he had done nothing “every other chapter president isn’t already doing.
“Signing the pledge is just the first step toward concentrating our attention on things that many of us have been doing all along. I did not see why this could not be 100 percent.”
To achieve his goal, Manny wrote to every chapter member directly and followed the letters with personal phone calls. “It was a wonderful opportunity to speak with other members,” he said. “It was exciting. We’d begin on the pledge, and then the member would go off on another tangent. Discussing the pledge turned out to be a tool to continue a good dialogue.”
Manny found ways to counter just about any argument for not signing. “A few of the brokers, for example, maintained that they don’t have yards and that this does not apply to them,” he said. “I’d ask them, ‘Don’t you go visit your consumers and your customers? Surely you agree that safety is a part of that. You’re not going to visit a processor and not comply with his local policies. As a broker, it might be even more important to sign the pledge.’” For associate members, he’d emphasize how the pledge is their commitment to making safe products for the industry. Once they understood the concept, they willingly signed.
Liability was another concern among those who had put aside, or in some cases refused, to sign the pledge. They worried what the pledge might obligate them to do. Manny reasoned that if he were testifying in a lawsuit, he would have to acknowledge that he’s aware of the Safety Pledge. Knowing about it—and not signing it—might put him “in a tough spot,” he said.
He admits that he, too, had some reservations. “I don’t like signing negative statements,” he said, “and I was bothered by the last line of the pledge, which reads ‘If we cannot do it safely, then we will not do it at all.’
“We’re entrepreneurs in this business, and entrepreneurs do things that no one else will do,” he said. “How could I say that if we don’t do it safely, then we won’t do it at all?”
Upon further consideration, he said, he realized “it’s a very positive statement, not a negative one. We still have to get the job done, but now we have to think about it. Therein lies the challenge: How am I going to do that job safely?”
For Bodner, the light-bulb moment came when he was reading about a recent major oil spill caused by a rusted pipeline. When the oil company’s executives testified in WashÂington about what happened, Manny said, he realized they could have prevented the spill. “All they had to do was follow their own procedures, but they kept putting it off, day after day. They needed a safety pledge.
“Safely or not at all means doing the smart thing,” he said. “When you’ve got a fraying cable and you keep using it, it is going to break on its timetable; if you fix it on your timetable, you’re in control. On its timetable, it’s going to cause damage; you’re going to lose the magnet. You’re still going to have to replace the cable, only now what should have been a one-hour job is going to expand into a four-hour job.
“This stuff just makes sense,” he added. “We all tell automakers, ‘If you can’t design a safe car, then don’t design one at all.’ Once you see how everything is interrelated, then it all becomes very exciting.
“We talk about safety being a priority,” he said, “but safety is more than that—it’s a core value. This is one of the easiest things that ReMA has ever asked of us. It’s not just to get people to sign, it’s to create awareness. Once we get everybody to sign, you’ll never know how many lives we will have changed.”
— John Gilstrap, ReMA director of safety
When ReMA Gulf Coast Chapter President Manny Bodner told me he wanted 100 percent of his chapter members to sign the ReMA Safety Pledge, I genuinely appreciated his commitment and his enthusiasm, but I never thought he could deliver.