The Importance of Safe Work Procedures
In many lines of work, safe work procedures can make the difference between going home at the end of the day, or going to the morgue. Safe work procedures are not just a bunch of rules made by the overly cautious. There is a saying in Navy that the “procedures have blood on them.” What they mean is that every rule that you come across in the naval code got there because at some point someone was hurt or injured by not following it.
History of Safe Work Procedures
Back in the Bad Old Days, there were no safe work procedures. Bosses ran without regard to safety considerations. The bottom line was all that really mattered. There had not been a need for codified safety regulations (or so it was believed) back when just about everyone worked in the fields because most people worked with their families and so were watching out for each other. (In addition, they didn’t really keep statistics on farm accidents so people weren’t aware of the dangers they faced.)
As the Industrial Revolution swung into full operation by the beginning of the 19th Century, and the factory system began to take over, problems started to pop up. The migration to the cities meant that workers and factory owners were largely strangers to each other. The distance between the managers and the workers increased with specialization making each member of the factory more cog-like and less important in the overall operation of the industrial machine.
This mechanical way of thinking about workers made it easier to ignore the normal laws of biology. Factories demanded that workers operate at temperatures and for lengths of time they had not been asked to face in the past. The result was what we would expect: accidents began to happen. Tired workers had limbs mangled by machines, factories caught fire destroying the machines and killing workers locked inside by callous factory managers, and workers revolted. (The word Luddite comes from this period. The Luddites were semi-anarchists who destroyed machines in an attempt to arrest Progress.)
Such tragedies brought a growing consciousness of the plight of workers and with this consciousness a growing labor movement. Fearing unions and the specter of communist revolt, governments began to pass laws protecting workers, and companies began adopting safe work procedures. Therefore, it was that in the 1830s, for example, English mines stopped using child labor and that later in the century chimney sweeps (children placed in chimneys to clean out the soot) stopped being used. In the Twentieth century, governments extended child labor-laws and added limits on the number of hours workers could be expected to work.
Safe Work Procedures Today
These days rules governing workplaces shape almost every part of the workday. Just as in the past, these rules all have blood on them. We are reminded of this every time we wash our hands in a restaurant or board a plane. Not only are there rules because of Terrorism, but also because of the many safety accidents of the past. For example, that rule about not smoking in the lavatory in planes came about because of air accident that happened near Lyon, France in 1974, where a Brazilian Airlines flight had over two hundred fatalities because of a fire that started in the bathroom.
Even with all these safety procedures, catastrophes still strike. In the recent mine accidents, for example, it should come as no surprise to us that government overseers cited the mines involved multiple times for safety violations. The safety violations cited at the offshore drilling platform that ruptured spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico should not surprise us either. When we ignore safe work procedures, the risks of disaster increase precipitously.