The Scars and Harm You Don’t See and Can’t Count
You don’t know what safety is. I know what real safety is, 1km underground in a grubby longwall, now that’s safety. Yep, 200 metres up on the end of a harness, now that’s safety. You don’t know what safety is, sitting for 3 days behind a desk filing checklists and preparing injury reports, at the end of a coal loader or on an oil rig, you don’t know what safety is. Ah, you don’t know what safety is, doing an incident investigation on a fatality or working a warehouse the size of the MCG.
Like a skit from the Four Yorkshiremen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k) this is the kind of infantile rubbish I get sent at times from safety people who want to display their intelligence about being the ‘safety tough guy’, ‘crusader’ and ‘safety hero’ and it’s always about the prevention of physical harm. It’s always about being tough and always about discrediting psychology or forms of knowledge deemed ‘academic’.
I remember running a training session for contract drillers once a kilometre underground and a safety advisor walked in and stated ‘I don’t need any of this pu#*y Sh$t!’, ‘I’ve got to be back out there where the real work is!’ I usually ignore macho bravado noise that often comes out from Safety when a 35 year old tries to tell me I haven’t lived, and don’t know safety. Usually by the end of the day you find out that all the bravado and noise is a smoke screen for deep psychosis and dysfunctionality. You learn quickly that workers on site have no time for the said safety advisor indeed, their safety bravado is laughed at.
The physical side of safety is straight forward when it comes to tackling risk. The tough stuff is the harm and damage you can’t see and it takes much skill to surface it and know how to respond to it. Most often safety crusaders (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-crusaders-anonymous/ ), who make the most noise, have the greatest collection of hang-ups. If you need to compete with others about the toughest or most brutal heroics in safety watch out, your psychosis is showing.
I have written before on the unseen scars and unseen harm in the risk and safety industry. It’s an area of harm the industry is simply incompetent and knows so little about (https://safetyrisk.net/scars-and-wounds-on-the-inside/). Whilst Safety is busy counting cuts and sprained ankles, the most destructive harm is unseen. If you ever listen to someone who has been destroyed by grooming and gaslighting (https://safetyrisk.net/personhood-and-risk/) for 10-20 years, then you might experience harm that is immeasurable. Whilst bones and skin can heal and leave scars that can be counted, the scars of psychological harm are much worse and can’t be counted.
When Grace Tame got up to receive her Australian of the Year award (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-25/2021-australian-of-the-year-award-recipients-named/13089884), you felt the years of harm and pain in her voice, the anger of having her personhood robbed by a 58 year old teacher who she trusted. Until such harm comes to the surface, you can’t see it. Often it’s only when someone suicides that their story of harm and abuse comes to the surface. And people with such harm would never speak to a safety hero or crusader, because they know they don’t listen.
Of course, at the heart of the problem is zero, the safety global mantra . When you define safety by the counting of observable injury then the real injury, the long lasting injury, suffering, pain and harm that remains unseen, fades into the background. This is the real harmful by-product of the zero cult. The more Safety promotes this bravado rubbish, the counting of numbers and objects, the more the most significant harm remains hidden.
Dr Rob Long
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Rob Long says
Closer to home, the Dreamworld fiasco and the way families were treated is horrendous.
The first response of Safety is always denial.
When the global mantra/ideology of zero commands all of safety including associations and regulators there is little chance of anything other than brutalism.
If you want to see the worst culture for blame and victimization go no further than safety.
Just ask anyone who has gone on long time worker’s comp just how good is safety?
Bernard Corden says
The following link provides access to a public hearing transcript on 15/03/2017 during the Queensland parliamentary inquiry into black lung:
https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/documents/committees/CWPSC/2016/CWPSC/CWP-trnsp-15Mar2017.pdf
Testimonies from several victims on pages 43-49 and 56-59 offer ample evidence of the scars you don’t see and cannot count.
Indeed most public inquiries or royal commissions merely establish the magnitude of the problem and enable the incumbent government irrespective of its political persuasion to protect the interests of the powerful over the powerless, which typically involves socialising the loss.
Several other examples over many decades include:
a) Aberfan
b) Piper Alpha
c) Hillsborough
d) Grenfell Tower
e) Upper Big Branch
f) Deepwater Horizon
There are many more detailed in my treatise entitled How Grim Was My Valley – The Great Safety Charade, which is available as a free download via:
https://www.humandymensions.com/product/the-great-safety-charade/
No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky – Bob Dylan
Rob Long says
Rob nails it except for one thing. Safety is not a profession. It has light years to go before it could ever claim the label with any meaning.
Rob Long says
Bob, you make some great points about organisational dynamics and systemic problems with how many companies and CEOs ‘use’ safety as a weapon or to gaslight populations of people. and yes, you could do similar profiles of law, economics, politics and discuss them as archetypes. Except to say, none of these associations globally organise around the ideology of zero. Yes, professions can be brutal too but then again they tend to be less fraudulent about what they do. IT seems crazy to claim you want to keep people safe and then harm them in the process. BTW, I get plenty of mail from supposed safety people who tell me I know nothing about safety and that psychology is ‘pu$#y s*^t’.
You also raise the important point about regulators and it seems their disdain for the great unwashed is a huge issue. If your foundation is zero, counting and engineering, its no surprise that brutalism results. The associations their love of zero is also a huge driver of this despite the fact that individual safety people in organisations mean well and work hard. However, the evidence is quite clear from the AIHS BoK and safety curriculum, there is no focus at all on personhood or an ethic of safety anywhere globally. Very different in the real professions.
Thanks for your comprehensive response.
Bob says
Anecdotal claims about the burly, monomaniacal, resistant, non-receptive ‘safety tough-guy’ walking out in a huff, while mild-mannered, humble, receptive, salt-of-the-earth workers eagerly await with baited breath to receive wisdom, seems a little far fetched to me. I have numerous anecdotes which could demonstrate the opposite. I’ve also had the pleasure of witnessing highly functional teams, where everybody shoulders a proportionate burden, and doesn’t expect others to rush in and fill vacuums of their own making.
If it is in fact true, then it’s likely a result of a highly dysfunctional operations management placing an undue burden of responsibility of ‘looking after the guys’ on the safety guy, while simultaneously setting expectations to ‘just get it done’ to line-supervision, and the workforce. This can only lead to utter dysfunction.
Who’s to say the safety guy hasn’t also been gaslighted, and his resistance is a result of him being told he has to simultaneously be ‘at the coalface’ peering over the guys’ shoulders, shoe-horned into a non-existent gap between supervisor and worker, while also getting all of his (largely unnecessary) paperwork done (paperwork imposed by management, client, or regulator) resulting in management-induced stress, confusion and disarray? Yes, workers and supervisors and management have paperwork too, much of probably also unnecessary.
The ‘safety guy’ may well be feeling that if he stands up to management and tells them that they should simply expect, and allow, the supervisors to supervise their guys in all aspects of their duties, and provide them with the guidance, support, and resources to do so, while he (the safety guy) assumes a more supportive, sideline, background (but still important in its own way) role, then he will be simply replaced by management, with someone who is willing to unquestioningly do their bidding, and be the nippy ‘safety guard dog’ which many in management seem to think gets the results they need.
I often see articles and comments here implying that this nebulous entity called ‘Safety’ has some kind of Rasputin-like mind control over company leadership, and that they are the real cause of many organizational woes, and that if we were to pull back the curtain, it appears to be that ‘safety’ is the one truly pulling all the strings and levers.
There never seems to be any kind of derisive criticism of other entities such as ‘law’ or ‘management’, who have demonstrably more influence over the goings-on (both good and bad) than mere ‘safety minions’. Yes, I’m aware that the focus of this website is safety, but if we want to actually improve what’s going wrong, there needs to be an acknowledgement that in the vast majority of cases involving dysfunction in the workplace, it’s management who are ultimately responsible and accountable, and it’s management and supervision who have fallen asleep at the wheel, or taken their eyes off the ball, and sometimes even deferred at least a part of their responsibility to someone who should not have it (the safety guy). It’s a case of ‘speak to the organ-grinder, not the monkey’. Yes, it’s an old saying, and it’s not intended to de-humanize, or un-person anybody.
Of course, there’s safety regulators, with no fear of, nor respect for company management, who can often arrive on site with diva-like behaviour, dangerously combined with absolute ignorance of the operation at hand, nit-picking minor, unrelated ‘non-compliances’, focusing only on things they know, and not on things which actually matter, and which could improve the safety of operations. Sure, these guys can be part of the problem, but that’s a ‘Law’ problem, not a ‘Safety’ problem.
Ultimately, the vast majority of ‘safety guys’ are in-house employees, and are working in dysfunctional organizations, getting it from both sides, having their goalposts often shifted outside the stadium, saddled with undue responsibility, yet they seem to be the focus of all the derision and criticism here.
Admin says
You make some great points. The Author often writes about these competing goals and the safety person needing to be a little subversive or “bipolar” in order to survive. You might enjoy this one: https://safetyrisk.net/safety-professionalspiggy-in-the-middle/