Occupational Disobedience

Civil Disobedience is defined as the refusal to obey certain laws, or requirements of government. Employee Occupational Disobedience is a slowly encroaching behavior of disregard for the safety rules and policies in their workplace. It occurs when safety rules are unequally applied, or no one seems to notice if you comply or not. It starts small and, if not checked, spreads like Kudzu through your workplace. At best, it ends with your best employees moving to safer workplaces. At worst, it ends in fatalities.

The “low hanging fruit,” or easy to fix, examples of Occupational Disobedience:

Incorrectly or unlabeled secondary containers, messy workstations, cluttered walkways

o  Ineffective training by the Safety Manager

o  Failure to enforce safety rules by Supervisor

o  Failure to understand why the rule exists or failure to respect the rule by employees

Safety signage for conditions no longer present. For example, a room had been used for developing pictures, but the room was repurposed. However, the safety signs were not taken down.

o  Safety Manager neglect

o  Failure by Supervisors and management to notice

Multiple types of gloves are provided for chemical hazards but, when asked, employees cannot tell you when they should be worn, some skip the gloves, some wear nitrile for everything

o  Ineffective training

o  Failure to notice employee confusion

o  Supervisor has no time or support for safety

o  Failure to create a simple system to support employee compliance

Safety equipment, such as mirrors for blind corners, are to smeared with aerosolized grease from nearby processes to see anything

o  Untrained Safety Manager

o  Safety Manager micro-managed by non-Safety supervisor

Cluttered work areas, or employee/forklift traffic lanes

o  Safety Manager neglect

o  Failure by Supervisors and management to notice

When the “low hanging fruit” is allowed to rot employee disobedience branches out into risky behavior. I conducted a fatality investigation where the employee responsible for writing the Lock Out procedures for a machine ‘skipped the procedures’ when he crawled inside for a quick fix and was crushed. It was 15 minutes before end of shift on New Year’s Eve.  

Indications of more systemic, and harder to fix, safety implementation problems:

Dilbert and other anti-management cartoons posted by employees

o  Safety Manager efforts short circuited by upper management

o  Management says safety is important at the appropriate times but provides no support, verbal, budget, provision of authority to the Safety Manager

Local exhaust ventilation with holes

o  Management is comfortable with a certain amount of employee exposure, usually due to underestimation of risk

o  Safety Manager unable to get any cooperation from management, and often employees or

o  Safety Manager willing to let things slide either due to underestimation of risk or just too worn down to fight or leave

Safety Manager as a second or third set of responsibilities for an employee, signs of neglect visible everywhere

o  Management could make this work for a short period of time by providing personal and visible support, and assigning a few employees with time and authority to work with Safety Manager  

o   the year before and the neglect was visible everywhere, including the movement of good employees out of the workplace to safer companies.

Year by year upward trend in recordable and nonrecordable accidents, good employees are moving to companies where management supports safety

o  See any or all of the above working conditions

Since COVID the complaints about finding employees that come back the next day is a common complaint. They say “It’s hard to find employees willing to work” or other phrases that puts the blame on the employee instead of looking around at their workplace conditions. Some businesses, even after 20 or so of these ‘lazy’ workers, won’t look at their workplace with fresh eyes.

Contrast the above description with a fully implemented safety system and respected Safety Manager:

• Safety Data Sheets in the red binder in the yellow metal basket under the MSDS sign
• Where the forklift/employee walking aisle divides an effective and funny sign shows pedestrians running in front of a forklift, indicating the consequences of disobedience
• The corkboard for Safety information and status is the same size and in the same area as important management and production communications
• Employees obviously knew and respected, as well as liked, the Safety Manager
• Signs for fire extinguishers were not empty and had an inspection tag completed and up to date
• Employees could and would answer Safety questions with accuracy and courtesy

Employers, Supervisors, and Safety Managers need to be on the alert for signs of Occupational Disobedience in order to identify and eliminate the source as rapidly and visibly as possible. It is much harder to re-establish a healthy safety culture than it is to create one.

Some recent and  relevant case studies:

• January 26 - OSHA News Release - Federal investigators finds employee suffered fatal injuries while duct tape held machine safety guards open at Kingman plastics plant
• January 26 - OSHA National News Release - Facing manslaughter charges in worker’s 2021 trench collapse death, Colorado contractor who willfully ignored federal law surrenders to police
• January 23 - OSHA News Release - US Department of Labor finds lumber company failed to secure, service forklift that fatally struck 18-year-old worker at Arkansas yard

“January 26, 2023 Department of Labor announces enforcement guidance changes to save lives, target employers who put profit over safety, Seeks to hold employers to greater account for safety, health failures”

“OSHA Regional Administrators and Area Office Directors now have the authority to cite certain types of violations as "instance-by-instance citations" for cases where the agency identifies "high-gravity" serious violations of OSHA standards specific to certain conditions where the language of the rule supports a citation for each instance of non-compliance. These conditions include lockout/tagout, machine guarding, permit-required confined space, respiratory protection, falls, trenching and for cases with other-than-serious violations specific to recordkeeping.”

“In a second action, OSHA is reminding its Regional Administrators and Area Directors of their authority not to group violations, and instead cite them separately to more effectively encourage employers to comply with the intent of the OSH Act.”

"Smart, impactful enforcement means using all the tools available to us when an employer ‘doesn’t get it’ and will respond to only additional deterrence in the form of increased citations and penalties," explained Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health Doug Parker. "This is intended to be a targeted strategy for those employers who repeatedly choose to put profits before their employees’ safety, health and wellbeing. Employers who callously view injured or sickened workers simply as a cost of doing business will face more serious consequences."

Who decides that an employer ‘doesn’t get it’? Can the decision at one workplace for taking 1 citation for 4 power tools missing the ground in their plug and writing 4 separate violations with 4 separate fines be applied impartially across the United States?