Safety at Risk
Safety as it stands and how it is known (as a brutal embuggerance) is impossible to defend. When your global mantra is the insane ideology of zero, you are set up for a hiding to nothing. In the face of fallibility, it is impossible to defend zero. Yet, the global industry busts its boiler trying to defend the impossible. What an amazing amount of energy for nothing.
Of course, those ‘inside the fold’ understand their zero view of safety to be at risk. Such is the nature of the binary nature of zero, it creates enemies and insiders, extremists and critics, political allies and enemies. Trust Safety to chose such a semiotic to divide itself. Anywhere you find the delusional ideology of zero, you will find division and factionalism. Such is the nature of that dumb binary question anchored to injury rates, ‘how many people do you want to harm today?’
Yes, make sure you book your seat for Safety Congress May 2021 in Spain, (http://visionzero.global/vision-zero-safety-future-congress) Zero Vision spectacular. Advertised as a ‘progressive event’ there can be nothing visionary or progressive about zero. When you frame your worldview by a number in denial of fallibility you are on a hiding to nothing. Advertised as ‘progressive thinking’ it is regressive thinking. The semiotic of zero is anathema to any critical thinking. Such is this dogma of perfection, the foundation for many a mental health condition (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/62642699.pdf ).
And of course the AIHS, NIOSH, ASSP and NSCA will be there with bells on.
I can’t wait for the reports coming out of Spain in May, about how zero improves safety (with no evidence) and how you can join the cult of zero. I can see now the huge stage slide ‘Just Believe’ (https://safetyrisk.net/no-evidence-for-the-religion-of-zero/) and all the Hillsong ecstasy just like a Billy Graham Crusade. Even now we see the propaganda flowing (http://visionzero.global/news) as if zero holds some sense of vision.
Of course, all this propaganda claimed to be some ‘transformational force’ is nothing (http://visionzero.global/why-vision-zero ). There is no strategy beyond the traditional methodologies of protection and bullying. There is nothing new or visionary about any of this. Please look anywhere globally and show me something that is visionary and transformative and send it to me, I’d love to see it.
Everything associated with Zero Vision is mythology and spin. Do yourself a favour and watch the little cartoon video here http://visionzero.global/why-vision-zero and tell me what think? And this is vision?
How embarrassing! Don’t you love a crusading animation about zero harm using a forklift with no PPE, exclusion zones, risk assessment or precautions, all to move a sign about health and safety. Classic vision, super dumb! The animation ends with health and safety broken because of a petty risk, what a symbol for where the industry is at! Is this the industry you identify with? No wonder safety is at risk! Zero vision indeed.
BTW, don’t forget to do the zero vision survey too (https://safetyrisk.net/take-the-zero-survey/ ). With over 2000 respondents still over 90% of the industry doesn’t believe in it. So is it just the 10% going to the zero vision congress?
Bernard Corden says
The following is an extract covering the conceptual structure of the OHS BoK:
……….Work impacts on the safety and health of humans who work in organisations.
Organisations are influenced by the socio-political context.
However, the rise of neoliberalism and lobbying has ensured the sociopolitical context is influenced by organisations such as BHP, Rio Tinto, Anglo Coal, Alcoa, Wesfarmers and Boeing and many others.
Bernard Corden says
Much of this neoliberal malaise is mirrored throughout the occupational health and safety sector in Australia. The relentless propaganda is inculcated via a parochial and shallow curriculum administered by the Australian OHS Education Accreditation Board and supported by a parboiled and immature OHS Body of Knowledge. It places an inordinate emphasis on scientism, statutory legislation, metrics, rational decision making and the black box psychology of behaviourism.
This is reinforced via a remunerative displacement activity masquerading as a professional certification scheme, which provides naïve acolytes with meaningless post nominals and authorises the indoctrinated SHEeple to drink the Kool Aid from its fountainhead of safety. It disregards the inherent subjective nature of risk, fallibility and the enigmatic power of the collective unconscious, which eventually extirpates learning, communities of practice and tacit knowledge.
This renunciates wisdom and a miasma of despair, distrust, intimidation and fear eventually enshrouds a carousel of culpability. The positivist stem worldview is regurgitated at national and regional safety conferences or via zoom webinars. It typically consists of a formulaic and relentless stream of turgid sesquipedalian sludge from cohorts of mirror wanking solipsists or narcissists, who would shout out their own name when making love.
Most presentations are littered with pseudo-academic cowardice and rarely challenge the prevailing stem or antediluvian behaviourist ideology from John Broadus Watson supplemented by the mechanistic sorcery of Burrhus Frederic Skinner via operant conditioning. This was satirically and somewhat ominously depicted by Aldous Huxley in the dystopian novel, Brave New World.
This typically enables many disingenuous proselytes and their band of caliginous parasites, gutless panjandrums, public serpents, delusional bloggers and circle jerking sycophants to wallow in the micturating patronage and accrue credits under the chimera of continuing professional development.
Over several decades the response from our peak safety body towards this sustained sociopolitical and economic neoliberal offensive with its malevolent freedom to harm has been a resounding silence and merely substantiates its collaboration and complicity in the sinister crusade.
This reticence and pusillanimity with an extreme reluctance to challenge the orthodoxy has generated inertia or stasis and constrained meaningful change or progress. It is often underpinned by vanity and exacerbated by a brutal fatwa of zero harm, which enables authoritarian sociopaths to masquerade the turpitude under a rubric of righteousness.
Peak safety body fees covering annual membership, professional certification and continuing professional development are typically incurred by brainwashed crusaders and subsequently redeemed from their employer as expenses. These are eventually approved provided the safety proselyte preaches the zero harm fatwa, embraces the black box psychology of behaviourism and never rocks the corporate boat. Indeed, most corporate brigands acknowledge the Lyndon Baines Johnson maxim and believe it is much better to have safety evangelists…..”Inside of the tent pissing out than outside of the tent pissing in.”
Moreover, no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it and the sinister objective of every tyrant is to curtail free speech, crush rebellion and disenfranchise dissidents. The vision or mission statement of most corporations, which even includes some not for profit organisations, mirrors shareholder theory and it is incongruous with the primary object of preventive occupational health and safety legislation.
Most corporate brigands and socially autistic executives remain unconcerned or even apathetic about the devastating consequences resulting from their plundering escapades because they are unlikely to experience any pain and are often rewarded with a golden parachute. The ultimate objective is to accrue satisfactory returns for its shareholders, which is typically accomplished by whatever it takes and delay deny and die tactics.
This was quite evident following the Upper Big Branch underground coal mine and Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig explosions in the United States and Rio Tinto’s desecration of cultural heritage rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia.
Other significant events include the failure of the BHP Billiton and Vale mining dams at Samarco and Corrego do Feijao in Brazil, the Boeing 737 Max airline disasters and the catastrophic carnage resulting from excessive ammonium nitrate storage at the Port of Beirut in Lebanon.
Much of this destruction and desolation is nonchalantly categorised as a cost of doing business or collateral damage and………….All it takes for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing or zero.
Rob Long says
Just read the propaganda on the last line of the promo: ‘Vision Zero is beneficial to any workplace, enterprise or industry in all regions of the world’. All my evidence shows that zero ideology is dangerous and harms people and makes workplaces toxic. How about they run a survey to see if anyone believes in it? They wouldn’t dare, they do’t want to know. It would get smashed. Our survey keeps growing and the results at 95% don’t vary.
Zero spruiks all this stuff without evidence and noone raises a question as if asserting something makes it a fact. Safety indeed has no idea about evidenced -based science yet proclaims it is both scientific and professional when it is neither. THis promor and website is evdience of that.
Rob Long says
Yes, once you commit to dumb and politicise loyalty, the last thing you can confess is that you did something dumb, especially if you chase a dumb idea with sunk cost in money. Worksafe NZ seems to specialise in dumb as evidenced by their silly videos.
When you don’t have vision and have no idea what to do, you pay some marketting company to bring out the bells and whistles. Dumb ways to die is a classic example, completely unethical.
This is what I mean by envisioning risk, you can’t find it anywhere in the safety sector, even though they give out all these awards for it. It’s a grand recycling scheme. Same with conferences, no vision.
Rob long says
Any bets for how long the animation will stay up?
Admin says
Mmmm, not sure – they’ll probably just say that we must want people to get killed. The WorkSafe NZ pickled video is still up despite a considerable backlash