The Eras Of Safety Management

Without any financial incentive, little was achieved in terms of worker’s safety. The Workers Compensation Legislation provided the financial atmosphere to bring industrial safety to the forefront. The passing of these laws, starting from 1911, marked the beginning of the first era in industrial safety management.

1. The Inspection Era

Most management at that time found that safety and health legalities required them to pay for injuries sustained by workers on the job and decided that it would be financially viable to stop incidents and accidents from occurring. This decision has since improved industrial safety and health practices. In the early years of safety and health practices, management of companies concentrated heavily, if not entirely, on cleaning up the terrible physical conditions that existed. Remarkable results were achieved between the years 1911 and 1931. The number of deaths dropped from an estimated 18,000 to 21,000 lives lost in 1912 to about 14,500 in 1933. This reduction came merely from focusing on worker’s behavior by correcting or eliminating physical hazards and from cleaning up the working areas. Cleaning up physical conditions came first as this was thought to possibly be the actual cause of injuries. It was during this era that H. W. Heinrich published his text “Industrial Accident Prevention”. The principles adopted by Heinrich in 1931 are actually the foundation for most elements of our current safety programs. Heinrich’s text also welcomed the second stage of safety management.

2. The Unsafe Act and Condition Era

According to Heinrich (1931), most accidents are caused by people rather than conditions. He suggested that unsafe acts are the cause of a high percentage of accidents (88 per cent), while the remaining percentage is due to unsafe conditions. This notion along with his other thoughts at the time differed from the safety thinking of that era. This led the safety professionals of the 1930s and

1940s to start a two-sided approach in dealing with safety at work by applying action such as Cleaning up the physical conditions and trying to teach and train workers on the safe ways of working.

3. The Industrial Hygiene Era

Occupational diseases have been recognized since the beginning of civilization. Hippocrates wrote in 500 B.C. that many miners had difficulty of breathing, and by 100 B.C. respirators were used by miners to prevent the inhalation of dust. Ramazzini, in 1700, wrote a comprehensive book on occupational medicine in which he identified specific diseases related to certain occupations. In the 20th century, physicians were the primary group interested in occupational diseases. An interest in occupational illnesses was forced upon safety professionals when they became compensable in the early 1930s. Thus, safety managers of the 1930s and 1940s split concentration in concentrating at the physical conditions, focusing on the behavior of workers and monitoring environmental conditions.

4. The Noise Era

The fourth era of safety management began in 1951, when a worker in a plant in Wisconsin claimed that his hearing loss was related to his job. Prior to this, loss of hearing had not been considered as compensable because deafness did not impair earning power. Prior to this, the fundamental concept of worker’s compensation had been introduced and the purpose was to compensate for loss

of earning power as well as medical bills. After years of litigation, scores of articles and much debate, a law was soon enforced in most states that employees would henceforth be compensated on some level for hearing loss. This resulted in safety managers having to concentrate company efforts in yet another direction, including protecting workers from any hearing loss and protecting the company from paying for hearing loss occurred elsewhere.

5. The Safety Management Era

During the 1950s and 1960s, a period known as the era of safety management evolved. The term however is ill-defined and the concepts surrounding it continue to remain unclear from then until today. During the 1950s, safety professionals started to think from the viewpoint of the management for perhaps the first time. Safety engineers found that setting policies in place, defining responsibilities and clarifying the role of authorities, served their purpose. Safety professionals began to discover tools from other disciplines that might be adopted into safety and health practices. Statistical techniques used by their quality control counterparts were useful in making control charts and in safety sampling. The scope of safety management was also extended to include more than injuries to employees on the job. Safety managers began to look at fleet safety, property damage control, off-the-job safety and other areas. In the 1960s, safety professionals began to think about professionalism according to three actions such as attempting to better define the scope and functions of the position, developing curriculum for formal education to prepare a potential professional and evolving a professional certification program.

Safety had progressed markedly after 1931 and it eventually became a success story. According to the National Safety Council, frequency rates of accidents had dropped from 15.12 to 5.99 in 1961 and severity rates from 1,590 to 666. Those involved in safety had something to be proud of and this achievement had been made possible by doing what Heinrich had laid out in 1931. At the beginning of the 1980s, safety managers had evolved to the point where controlling physical and environmental conditions and the behavior of workers were given high consideration. Towards the middle of this era, a new concept in safety management was approached, the psychology of safety management. Within this psychology-based framework, safety programs evolved and consisted of new and different components, each based on circumstances that had proven to be effective in influencing people’s behavior.

6. The Occupational Safety and Health Era

In the early 1970s, with the passing of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the world of safety management changed, at least temporarily at the time and perhaps now more permanently. Much has been written and said about the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA)’s impact on safety, both pros and cons, for there seems to be a considerable amount that can be said for each side. The OSHA era appeared to emphasis on inspection, with federal and state control and to de-emphasis on the human approach. This does not necessarily mean that this approach was bad or should not have been; only time will be able to verify that. OSHA required safety professionals to concentrate on two primary things such as removing physical conditions mentioned in the standards and documenting everything that was done. The more competent safety professionals and the more successful safety departments found that they had two separate and different duties, complying

with the law (the standards) and controlling the losses, instead of only one controlling the losses. The OSHA era was marked by changing physical conditions to meet federal standards and by maintaining documentation to protect the respective companies.

7. The Accountability Era

During the later period of the 1970s, a new era took place which focused on the different ways to measure performance, new definitions of managerial roles and Better definitions of what is acceptable safety performance at all levels of an organization. It would seem that the key word in performance of that time was accountability. In earlier eras, we talked of management’s responsibility, however, today, the emphasis is on accountability. In the accountability era, safety professionals began to understand and utilize auditing systems, objective-setting approaches and building safety operations in a performance assessment system. In this era, the professionals began to shifted the emphasis from hazard findings to hazard correcting, focused less on how to find mistakes (inspecting, developing checklists and using job safety analysis approaches) and emphasized more on how to get things corrected and put in place (prioritizing, systems evaluations and organization).

8. The Behavior Based Era and Human Era

Sometime after the start of the accountability era (perhaps in the early 1980s), another direction emerged: a direction that again looked at the people side of the safety problem. It was logical in 1931 to start down the path of behavior-based safety approaches. When Heinrich suggested that 88 percent of all accidents were caused by unsafe acts, it should have been logical to dedicate 88 per cent of our time and efforts towards behavior-based approaches. However, we did not do this, until much later.

REFERENCES

• Mohamad A’azizan Mustafa & Azhar Ahmad Ahmed Rifaie (2010), Occupational Safety and Health Management 2^nd Open Universiti Malaysia.