The Bottom Line on Safety

On July 14, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed fines of $221,600 against Clint Horn, doing business as Sturgis Tuckpointing, alleging that he repeatedly exposed workers to fall hazards while they worked on scaffold structures.

The alleged violations included misuse of portable ladders, no protection from overhead hazards, unsafe scaffold protection, lack of fall protection on a scaffold, and lack of or deficient scaffold training.

"Falls remain the number one killer of workers in the construction industry," Charles E. Adkins, OSHA's regional administrator in Kansas City, MO, said in press release.

"OSHA will not tolerate employers who repeatedly fail to provide and ensure the use of fall protection," he said.

 One week before OSHA announced the citation against Sturgis Tuckpointing, emails circulated among St. Louis contractors warning that OSHA would be conducting a sweep of all construction sites in eastern Missouri from Hannibal to Cape Girardeau starting on Monday, July 12. According to the emails, OSHA inspectors would be looking for proper personal protective equipment, fall protection, and fire extinguishers, and they would be looking for excavation and electric hazards.

OSHA confirmed to CNR that penalties are going up, stating:"OSHA is implementing long-overdue administrative modifications to its penalty calculations, which will have the effect of raising OSHA penalties."

The agency said that, "Penalties are meant to be punitive, and act as a deterrent to future violations by the fined company and from other companies as well."

The agency added that a proposal in Congress, the Protecting America's Workers Act, "would bring the penalties more in line with inflation and therefore serve more of a deterrent effect."

Safety Pays

For all the talk that OSHA's more aggressive posture and higher fines has generated, however, there are more important reasons to have a good safety program.

"When I set-up this company 12 years ago, my philosophy was that OSHA was the primary cause of why you should have safety program, you would have a program to avoid a fine," said Walt Taliaferro, safety director at National Safety Consulting and a retired pipefitter. "But after we got companies into the program, I found out that injuries are the cause of the majority of their financial losses, not OSHA and penalties," he said.

The most obvious savings that a formal safety program can bring a contractor are in the form of reduced workers compensation insurance rates.

"Every insurance application has the following question: do you have a formal safety program in place?" said Michael Sicking, president of Safety International.

"Improving your safety record lowers your insurance rates," he said, and also improves a contractor's ability to get work.

"Major owners are telling general contractors that no company will be allowed on their property unless their EMR (experience modification rate, a comparison of their annual insurance claims against their policy premiums over a three-year period) is less than 1.0, or in some cases less than 0.85," he said. An EMR 1.0 is considered average, so owners who want contractors with lower EMRs are looking for contractors with better than average safety records.

 "So general contractors are looking at subcontractors' EMRs. If they have an unfavorable rating, they won't get the job, even if they are the low bid," said Sicking.

 But less obvious savings are far more important than the obvious savings, according to Ray Boehm, president of Safety Education Consultants.

 Productivity and Profits

 "I've found that if you really follow a safety program through, you get a more productive workforce," Taliaferro said."Removing injuries from the workplace maximizes internal profitability," Boehm said.

 "When you get injured employees you have to replace them, take care of them, and retrain others to take over their work. You also get lower productivity from the other employees because injuries lower morale. Those indirect costs from a loss are about 10 times greater than the direct costs of medical care and higher insurance premiums," he said.

 Len Toenjes, president of the Associated General Contractors of St. Louis agreed. "A contractor with a revolving workforce is not as productive as someone who can keep their core group together. When folks are gone from the team because of injuries, it affects the productivity of the entire team," he said.

 Two more ways in which safety programs save contractors money is in litigation and OSHA fines."As society has gotten more litigious, it makes a lot of sense to keep legal fees down. A safer work force minimizes risk and cuts legal expenses," Toenjes said, including by avoiding OSHA fines. And those companies that work on heights have seen safer equipment give a huge boost to productivity.

 "The whole accessibility area, the area of moving people into a position of work, is where you've seen productivity growth with safety," Toenjes said. "In bridge work, for example, in order to meet OSHA requirements, painting companies came up with different ways to paint the undersides of bridges with different equipment and machinery that not only makes it safer but increases productivity," he said."I can tell you that we used to spend days and hours to put scaffolding together to do a 30 minute job and then hours to take it down, but now with a JLG lift it is a piece of cake and much safer," said Taliaferro, the retired pipefitter. "But one bad part is that now you have generations of young men and women who have never put scaffolding together and when they have to use scaffolding, they don't know how to use properly. So we get called out a lot to make sure they are putting scaffolding together correctly," he said.

 Help for Smaller Firms

 Toenjes said that when the AGC of St. Louis began its safety program in 1966, "almost nobody had a full time safety director." Now, he said, "I will bet you that every one of the large companies has a full time safety director."

 As a result, most safety consultants, including the AGC, target small and mid-sized firms that can't afford to have their own full time safety director. Sicking, for example, said that his target market is companies that have annual revenues between $1 million and $25 million. "We represent about 130 companies," Taliaferro said of National Safety Consulting.

 "We set up a program following the guidelines of OSHA and then assign a man to that account. He performs audits, writes up how well they're doing, sends out "huddle  talks", and conducts an annual review," he said.

 "We've found that if you adopt a policy that all injuries must be reported before quitting time the day they happened and you enforce it, you will over time reduce the injuries you have," he said.

 "And if you disallow smoking in the break trailer on construction sites, you will have fewer illnesses. Cigarettes spread germs around in trailer," he added.

 Boehm has been providing safety education since 1982. "Not training, education. You train dogs, but you educate people," he said.

Boehm said that safe work practices come from giving employees the tools they need to make the right decision, not from telling them exactly what to do.

 "Safety is a decision making process that employees go through based on conditions presented to them at the time they do their work," he said. "Safety is making the right decision based on knowledge of the hazard as well as what people do to prevent the hazard. With fall protection, for example, OSHA has a number of different trigger heights, but I believe it begins at zero.

 "A one-size answer does not fit all circumstances. The employee has to have the knowledge base to make a decision as to which is right. With a painter, for example, the right personal protective equipment depends on the materials and chemicals he is using. Knowledge of material safety data sheets and what they are telling you is essential to making the right decision," he said.

And the foundation of all good safety programs, he added, is, "you have to believe that all accidents are preventable. By nature, accidents are defined as unforeseen, but, I believe, if you understand safety processes, there is a system of analysis that keeps looking at the problems you're involved in to identify hazards and control them, whether they are physical, such as tripping hazards, or behavioral, such as improper lifting. We can identify them and remove them.... The more attention you pay to the work process, the more you find snags and then you can find better ways to do things, and that makes for a more attractive work place."

 Taliaferro said that finding better ways to do things is the legacy of OSHA. "In 1970 (when President Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act) we were losing about 15,000 people a year in construction, last year it was under 7,000. Over the years we have doubled productivity and cut deaths in half primarily because of safety, I think," Taliaferro said.

 "OSHA was divisive at the time. The Chamber of Commerce fought it, contractors fought it, but it was good for them in the end. The safety and productivity improvements we've seen would not have happened without OSHA being in business," he said.

 The bottom line, said Boehm, is, "everyone deserves a safe place to work, and deserves to get home to safe to his or her family everyday."

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