Taking The Next Safety Step
Jun 9, 2014, 09:20 AM
September/October 2005
At the end of the day, workplace safety is all about communication.
My job is 90 percent dedicated to making managers in this industry care enough about safety to actually do something to make their workplaces safer. People seem to read this column, they seem to watch the videos we produce, and they say all the right things when the right people are listening, but when they’re faced with the day-to-day grind, they return safety to the spot where it has always resided—on the back burner of the great management stove.
The markets are in flux, after all, and trucks are lined up in the road out front. The scale operator is out with a cold, rain has turned your yard to soup, there’s not a railcar to be found, and some neighbors who built $500,000 homes a mile away are trying to evict you from the spot where you’ve been in business for 80 years. Do I really expect my voice to be heard above that kind of noise?
Actually, I do, even if I have to shout from one rooftop at a time.
This column is but one of my rooftops. The new ReMA safety posters are another. Soon, you’ll be receiving a new publication called The Monthly Safety Meeting, which will help managers communicate with their employees.
But while ReMA has provided such invaluable safety resources for years, there’s no replacing old-fashioned one-on-one, eye-to-eye communication. That’s the primary impetus behind the new ReMA Safety Consulting Services program, and that’s why I’m attending as many ReMA chapter meetings as I can. All of these efforts are designed to get scrap managers to inch safety closer to the front of the management stove.
It’s a necessity of association work, I suppose, that so much of my time and effort is focused on managers when, in fact, they’re the least likely to encounter the hazards that drive our industry statistics closer to those of miners and construction workers than to those of factory workers. I depend on these managers, in turn, to pass the word on to their employees who, in a perfect world, would be inspired to do their jobs more safely.
Regrettably, that system doesn’t work. There’s a huge break in the communication chain, and the cause is best demonstrated by that telephone game we used to play as kids. Someone whispers “Have a nice day” to the first person in the line, and by the time the message gets to the other end it has morphed to “The monkey played poker till midnight.”
It’s every bit as unreasonable for me to expect you to run an effective safety program after listening to a 90-minute presentation as it would be for me to run a scrap facility after a similar orientation. There are just too many details to be managed between the understanding of a concept and the implementation of that concept in the real world. And if you’re the senior guy, you’ve got so many fires to put out in any given day that you’ll never be able to break free long enough to bring yourself up to speed.
The solution is to designate someone to be your safety coordinator. It should be someone with authority who commands the respect of management and workers alike, and it should be someone who is willing to dedicate some time to making the yard safer.
And I’ll make a deal with you: If your company or your region can pull together seven safety coordinators, I’ll fly out and bring them up to speed with an OSHA 10-hour training class at no charge beyond negligible printing costs and the like. The session will have to be off-site, and the region (or someone) will have to cover the costs of the meeting room (two days).
Wait, there’s more: On Oct. 18-19, the inaugural meeting of the ReMA National Safety Committee will be held in Chicago. Anyone with safety responsibility or authority at any ReMA member company is eligible and invited to join this committee. The National Safety Committee is intended to be a structured, nonthreatening forum in which safety issues can be discussed openly and thoroughly among safety professionals and coordinators, with the goal of making the recycling industry a safer place to work. (For more information, contact Anne Marie Horvath at 202/662-8511 or annemariehorvath@ isri.org.)
Imagine what we can accomplish when we all move together toward a common goal. Imagine the lives saved, the tragedies averted. You’re that close to making a real difference, that close to moving safety to the front of the management stove. Just one more step…
—John Gilstrap, director of safety for ReMA
the end of the day, workplace safety is all about communication.