The focus of safety on performance has been about for 45 years. Tarrants’ book The Measurement of Safety Performance was published in 1980. The book was published by The American Society of Safety Engineers that changed its name in 2018 to The American Society of Safety Professionals. The name may … [Read more...] about Good Old Safety Performance
ASSP
A Guide to Tokenism in Ethics in Safety
I read this nonsense from the ASSP on ethics and of course, it is laughable (The Professional Ethics of Workplace Safety and Health). It is straight out of the AIHS BoK playbook on tokenism in ethics (https://safetyrisk.net/the-aihs-bok-and-ethics-check-your-gut/). This is typical of safety … [Read more...] about A Guide to Tokenism in Ethics in Safety
The ASSP Getting Complacency Completely Wrong
Editors Note: They’ve also gotten it very wrong before, see: The Complacency DelusionThere’s no doubt about it. When Safety doesn’t know something it just makes stuff up (https://safetyrisk.net/when-safety-doesnt-know-just-make-st-up/ ). And Safety is so good at it. Experts in spruiking complete … [Read more...] about The ASSP Getting Complacency Completely Wrong
Why Safety Loves Covid-19
I read with interest this piece by ASSP in EHS Today (Leading safety Professionals Into the Future). More propaganda from a sector known for its policing, paperwork and zero. Interestingly, the article confirms in its first paragraph that this is how safety people are perceived. The article goes on … [Read more...] about Why Safety Loves Covid-19
Three Lessons in How to be Unprofessional
Three Lessons in How to be Unprofessional One of the critical skills of professionalism is Discourse Analysis. It is through Discourse Analysis that we understand the power in messages revealing: ethic, politick and motive. Discourse Analysis is also foundational to Social Psychology. You … [Read more...] about Three Lessons in How to be Unprofessional
You Can Put Safety Into Engineering but, You Can’t Get Engineering Out of Safety
‘A person cannot possibly seek what he knows, and, just as impossibly, he cannot seek what he does not know, for what he knows he cannot seek, since he knows it, and what he does not know he cannot seek, because, after all, he does not even know what is supposed to seek.’ (Kierkegaard, 1844). If … [Read more...] about You Can Put Safety Into Engineering but, You Can’t Get Engineering Out of Safety
The Complacency Delusion
The Complacency Delusion You’ve got to hand it to Safety, it loves to talk about things it knows little about. Then it spruiks solutions based on ignorance and droves line up for snake oil and a feeding frenzy on dumb packaged as a solution. A good example of this is a recent, ASSP endorsed … [Read more...] about The Complacency Delusion