It is unnecessary to point out the importance of not losing workers due to accidents or poor health. Much progress has been made in recent years, perhaps more along the lines of health than safety. Safety is a very difficult thing to sell to either management or the workers. In the first place, it is the general attitude to accept the fact that accidents are a necessary portion of any job. In the second place, the worker is convinced that it could not happen to him. In the third place, the practice of safety requires a great deal of care-often the use of various types of guards such as goggles, gloves, and the like-and the attachment to machines of things which apparently make work a little more difficult. All these factors conspire against safety. In addition, due to the various state laws requiring workmen compensation insurance, management to some extent feels that its responsibility has been lessened and fails to realize how its insurance premium rates can increase due to a large number of accidents. At one time, in the drilling of water wells in New York State, compensation rates reached a point of over 20 per cent of the payroll, due to the very bad accident record in this industry.

Safety is important, not only from the point of view of the loss of the worker who is involved in the accident but also in the effect on the morale of the other workers. When a man is seriously injured or killed, the rest of the plant does not go on working as if nothing happened. Anyone who has had any industrial experience is altogether too familiar with the instant disruption of all normal activities that takes place.

The question of safety is so important that an example of this phenomenon of disruption is related. Some years ago at a manufacturing plant the foreman of the turbine erection division and the chief inspector, two of the oldest employees of the company, were killed. The only two men who could explain how the accident happened were the two men that were killed. There was a young cadet engineer with them who came out of the situation uninjured physically but shocked mentally. The accident occurred when a coupling burst on an over-speed test of a turbine spindle. This is a typical routine test in which the spindle is subjected, at a high temperature, to a speed several times the normal speed to make sure that it is satisfactory.

It is the spindle that is under test and not the coupling. By some error the coupling was made of cast iron, instead of steel as required. This tragedy disrupted the entire plant. It is perfectly understandable that no work was done after the accident, which occurred at about eleven o\’clock in the morning. Further, the funerals of the two men were held on different days; this also disrupted the plant. The plant was again disrupted by the investigation of the Labor Department into the causes of the accident. In giving this example, no blame is attached necessarily to either the company or even the two unfortunate employees, for they cannot tell their story; but the tremendous cost of this accident is a matter of record.

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Category: Business
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