Maintaining Interest In Safety

THE subject of this paper involves the crux of the industrial safety problem. It is not overstating the fact to say that "a plant can be made as safe as the management and the workers want it to be;" if such desire is not in evidence and it is not possible to maintain interest in the work of safety, there can be practically no headway beyond the first few steps. These first steps may be said to embrace simply the mechanical or equivalent guarding of tools and equipment and may be taken in a more or less perfunctory manner; but, it has been estimated, they will not effect a reduction of more than 25 to 35 per cent. in the accidents likely to occur in an unguarded plant. The question therefore may be pertinently asked, "Whose interest is meant in the title of this paper, employers', employees?, or both?" It has been repeatedly stated that no safety work of any importance can be carried on: in a plant unless the employer believes in the value of such work. Such statements are true, but have become threadbare with constant repetition and the public is led to believe, that employers differ from ordinary human beings, that their sympathy for their fellowmen has become dulled, and they can be awakened to a sense of the fitness of things with respect to safety, health, sanitation, working hours, etc. only by legislation. There will undoubtedly be found an employer, now and again, who measures down to such specification; but the speaker, in a number of years of close contact with large employers (and his experience has been duplicated by many others) has found that the employers are usually far in advance of the general public in matters affecting the welfare of their employees, including their safety, and not from a selfish viewpoint, but from the humanitarian, economic, etc. If, at times, there is an apparent lack of headway in the solution of some problem connected with employees' welfare, it is not so much due to indifference or a failure to be awake, on the part of the employer, as it is to a lack of knowledge of the way in which to proceed to its successful accomplishment. Further, employers are, only human and cannot follow. every one of the innumerable matters connected with an industry down to their minutest details; they must delegate certain individuals as their representatives, clothing them with the necessary authority to act. These representatives should be looked upon as the Management in their respective fields and the