Fast Facts About Safety
Notes, quotes, anecdotes and other safety-related stuff
The best Valentine's present: An all-time workplace safety record of more than four million incident-free hours!
Valentine's Day '07 was especially sweet for the Stow, Ohio laboratory of DuPont Performance Elastomers when they gave the gift of completing 60 years without an occupational safety and health lost working day, setting an all-time workplace safety record!
The lab, which focuses on developing technical applications for elastomers, reached the landmark of 4.4 million exposure hours with zero lost working days to injuries.
The synthetic rubber industry's comparable injury rate for workers was 2.9 hours per 100 workers in 2005, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Translated: If the DuPont lab had followed the industry standard, they would have experienced 64 injuries over the 60-year period - instead of the zero they actually logged.
For more stats about workplace accidents, read our article, "America's Most Injured".
Top 10 safety slip-ups
In 2006, the most common violations detected by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) in the United States were:
10. electrical (general)
9. ladders
7. electrical (wiring)
6. powered industrial trucks
5. lockout/tagout
2. hazard communication
1. scaffolding
Quotables: Hard truths about safety
OSHA the consultant, not the enforcer
"OSHA has become increasingly irrelevant to workers' everyday lives … I would like to see employers who violate the law be given high criminal penalties. Every time a worker gets killed or becomes hurt due to employer negligence, that should be treated as a crime."
- Joel Shufro, Executive Director, New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health
Safety first … as if!
"Of all the platitudes automatically embraced in the workplace … there is none more pervasive, erroneous, overused and dangerous than 'Safety First!'… Safety, while always a major consideration, is never the priority. Never. Never, ever."
- Mike Rowe, host of "Dirty Jobs", Discovery Channel
Not the only tool in town
"I think regulation is a necessary tool in reducing workplace injuries, but not by any means the only one. Education, training, consultation all can help play a role, along with the economic incentives that exist."
- John Mendeloff, director of RAND Corp.'s Center for Health and Safety in the Workplace and author of Small Businesses and Workplace Fatality Risk: An Exploratory Analysis , published in 2006.
No O.T.? Then you'll get T.O.
Five bucks can help make a safer world
Prevent injury and death with the flick of your wrist
As young people say today: "Snap!"… that's the sound of you supporting safety.
For a cost of only five dollars, you can buy a Make a Safer World wristband marketed by the National Safety Council.
And it's good to know that every single penny of your wristband purchase goes to support the National Safety Council in their work to continue preventing accidental injury and death.
