During the Shutdown this summer, I had the privilege of attending the USW International Health and Safety Conference in Houston, Texas. It was a huge conference and big name guest speakers spoke daily. Many hot topics and contentious issues were discussed. It was a truly humbling experience and it put into perspective the struggles every workplace has when addressing health and safety. Rather than bore you with the details of my trip, I thought I would write about one issue that stood out in my mind. That issue is Behavioural Safety (BS for short).

To summarize briefly, BS holds the belief if you manage a person’s behaviour, you can effectively manage safety problems. The main flaw with this approach is that it holds a person responsible for safety and does nothing to solve the root causes of incidents. It only allows for the incident/conditions to happen again.

It was during the conference when I wondered to myself where does our well known "Safe Production" model fit in to the grand scheme of things? Well, let me start by saying there is a huge consensus who think Safe Production is a joke. In my opinion, the theory of Safe Production and some of its principles have some merit. However, it is the practice of Safe Production that leads to this widely held view. This is due, in part, to the BS.

One only has to look at the Refinery for an example, more specifically, the Tank House (Yes. The infamous Tank House where we lead the way in incidents, injuries and the number of SAF 079's Safety reports.) For those of you who don't know the Tank House, it is not ergonomically designed at all. There are constant incidents/injuries, mostly due to repetitive strains. The place operates like a turnstile, with injured employees coming and going constantly. (If you are qualified on the Tanks, it is almost like a curse because it pretty much means you are stuck working there until you get hurt.) What's happening in the Tank House and the Refinery is a big rush to sign off 079 reports. In their rush to get the 079's off the books, it is easier to blame someone rather than fix the problem. Shift bosses are quick to use terms such as: Employee did not S.L.A.M. the area, among other excuses, to cite the employee as root causes and use the "S.L.A.M." card as the corrective action. The workers behaviour is becoming the default answer as to why incidents happen. There is a lack of digging deeper and correcting the root causes.

Another disturbing trend I also see happening is safety "interventions". Employees who have filed too many 079's are called into the S2 office to discuss their incidents and what the worker can do to stop them from happening. I have talked to people who have got the so called "intervention" and asked what they learned from the experience. The common response was "I will not report anything ever again." How does this make any sense? Safe Production encourages the reporting of unsafe conditions and incidents. However, employees get in trouble for reporting too much.

In addition to all this, there is the threat of discipline, which is becoming more frequent. Discipline does nothing to correct the problem. You can never eliminate human error; it is inherent in the way we function. Nobody is perfect. If anything, it creates a situation where a worker will not report something in the future. A worker will be less productive because he/she will be more concerned about not getting disciplined than doing their job.

At the end of the day, Safe Production gets the bad rap because there are far too many problems that go uncorrected and the same incidents keep happening over and over again. Workers are frustrated with the lack of action in getting stuff fixed and all the "band-aid" solutions that never work. Ask anybody in the Refinery what they think about safe production and I am sure the response will not be positive. As a committee, we lose credibility when workplace issues and conditions are not addressed. Until there is a significant shift towards fixing the problems and not the workers, things will remain status quo.

cl/cope 342