The concept of personal and environmental safety is no longer a luxury to be applied by manufacturers when and if they choose to. Society, as well as customers and business partners, are increasing their demands in these areas. Safety awareness has become important to modern corporations.A century ago, in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, workers were largely seen as expendable. Accidents leading to injury or even death were frequent and viewed simply as part of doing business. Even during more enlightened times in the 1950s, productivity was still the driving force: The goal was to press more widgets out of assembly line workers at a faster rate. The health and safety of individual employees mattered little.
   Times have changed. In the past 30 years or so, health and safety issues have gradually moved up the legislative, public and corporate agenda. Consider what society is demanding today in terms of automobile safety. Not only do we have seatbelts (and laws to enforce their use), but we have air bags and electronic surveillance systems that can pinpoint a driver’s location and automatically send a message to emergency personnel in the event of an accident. For many consumers, the available safety features outweigh even performance in choosing a vehicle, along with fuel efficiency and other environmentally friendly features.
   A similar change in attitude can be found in the workplace. Society is demanding safer places in which to work and live. Companies are hiring experts in behaviour-based safety or ergonomics, a branch of science that applies knowledge of human abilities to people’s interactions with products, systems and environments. It is generally recognised now that injuries due to poorly designed equipment and work systems cost employers money in terms of lost productivity. This factor, along with increasing legislative, societal and market pressures, has caused many companies to take their health and safety responsibilities more seriously.

Legislation at last
Founded in 1911, the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE), is the world’s oldest and largest professional safety and health organisation, with 32,000 members around the globe. The organisation’s history and its work reflect the gradual progress of health and safety in the workplace, from the development of plastic eye protection in the late 1940s to the use of fall protection belts and harnesses a decade later. It wasn’t until 1970, however, with the passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in the United States, that health and safety in the workplace was backed by strong legislation.
   A similar development was taking place in Europe during the 1970s, as governments began to pass laws that put teeth into the enforcement of workplace safety. In Britain, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 differed slightly from previous safety legislation by putting the responsibility for workers’ health and safety squarely in the lap of the employer. This law required employers to own the risks for worker safety and work with employees to devise actions to minimise those risks.
   “I would say that the key to the increased awareness and action on behalf of companies in the area of worker health and safety is legislation. Without some kind of legislative framework, we have no sense of direction or sense of proportion,” says Paul Faupel, president of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).
   Based in the UK, IOSH is Europe’s largest body representing health and safety professionals, with more than 24,000 members working in industry, commerce and the public sector. Their vision is to promote a world of work that is safe, healthy and environmentally sustainable. Others factors are also helping to improve workplace safety, Faupel says. “Suppliers don’t want to be associated with companies who have a poor record in health and safety management,” he says. “And by the same token, larger companies don’t want to work with suppliers who can’t live up to their health and safety standards.”
   Investors are also exerting pressure, as corporate governance plays an increasing role in a company’s value. Blue-chip companies are being forced to look at their risk exposure across all their activities, including health and safety.
   Finally, society is demanding that safety take precedence – at home, in the office, in public places and particularly in public transportation. Railway and ferry disasters in recent years have galvanised public attention to the need for more stringent safety standards and raised their expectations accordingly.

Improved statistics
While professional safety experts argue that there is still much to be done, improvements in worker safety in the past century have been dramatic. For example, in 1992, there were 86,777 injuries leading to deaths in the US, which was the lowest number recorded since 1924. This positive trend was broken in 1998 however, when the number crept up to 92,200 deaths. A fatal injury occurs every six minutes and a disabling injury every two seconds, costing Americans an estimated 480.5 billion dollars in 1998.
   Such costs are making governments around the world take notice of the cost of workplace health and safety. In the developing world, organisations such as the International Safety Council, the global subsidiary of the National Safety Council, are working to set high standards for workers in those countries. If best practice is instilled at an early stage in these countries, developing world projects can sometimes outperform European and US projects in terms of safety, says Faupel of IOSH.
   “Of course, cost is always a concern for developing countries as they try to catch up economically with the rest of the world, and this may put pressure on them to limit their investment in areas such as workplace safety,” he says. “But nevertheless, I think it can be shown that in the long run a good health and safety record can contribute to their competitiveness on the world market and in their own regions.”
   In both the developed and developing world, keeping workplace safety in the limelight will require dedication by management to make this a top priority, say professional safety experts.
   “Holding management firmly accountable for worker and workplace safety plays a key role in the whole process,” says Samuel J. Gualardo, president of ASSE. “Once they’ve seen how much they can increase productivity and add to the bottom line by reducing worker injury, their attitudes and beliefs change quite dramatically. It’s about making workplace safety a corporate value.”
   Equally important is the human factor, adds Faupel. “The human factor will always be a problem for health and safety. A building is safe until you put people in it. A machine is safe until someone starts to operate it. A car is safe until someone gets behind the wheel. We continue to see complacency on the part of managers and even workers, who think, ‘I don’t need to wear a safety helmet because nothing will ever fall on my head.’ While that kind of macho attitude is less pronounced than it used to be, it still plays a part in workplace injury.” Training and education for both employers and workers is a way to counter complacency. So is an attitude in which management and employees work together to create a work environment that is friendly rather than hostile – and dangerous – to the worker.
   “We must learn to fit the environment to the people, and not try to force people to fit the environment we’ve created for them … without consulting them,” says Faupel.
“I think we will see a much more holistic approach to the issues of health and safety in the decades to come.”

Amy Brown   
a business and technology journalist  
based in Stockholm