Let’s start showing an honest regard for safety

Sidney H. Goodman, Las Vegas

Friday, July 25, 2008 | 2:03 a.m.

Regarding the Las Vegas Sun’s Monday story (“Safety engineers say they get little respect”) and an editorial on Tuesday (“Elevating safety”).

With respect to OSHA and industrial safety practices, during my 40-year career in plastics and aerospace industries, the most common sequence of events was 1) serious accident, 2) investigations, remediation and talk about prevention, and 3) assigning the task of safety to a senior executive. The latter set rules and committees for a new “safe” policy for lower-level managers. They would pass on the new regulations to the lower ranks and occasionally get action at the “working” level.

I believe the plastics industry demonstrated an honest regard for safety. Chemicals are dangerous and everybody knew it. DuPont procedures were used as a gold standard because that company made explosives and corrosives. Its consultants would advise us on best practices and we modeled our process instructions accordingly.

In aerospace, the safety vice president and staff were viewed as powerless, dead-end jobs of little relevance to day-to-day operations. Safety meetings were considered a boring waste of valuable resources that should be applied to the real job. Contractually, if safety requirements were even addressed, it was boilerplate fine-print stuff you ignored as best you could. The only important parts of a contract were delivery, cost and performance. No one I knew ever got an “attaboy” for preventing accidents.

As for OSHA, when they appeared on the scene, it was an “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” moment. Findings and citations were automatically treated as negotiable issues.

In the future I hope that companies, unions and the government make safety a priority for the benefit of all three groups.