By Art Fettig

Hot buttons are the things that advertisers try to press to get you to buy
the stuff they sell. They're also what you, as a safety director, need to press
to get your CEOs, CFOs and directors to invest in your safety program - and to
get your workforce to follow it. In my years of experience, these are the four
hot buttons that I think work the best:

1. The Money Hot Button

It's hardly a secret that companies are in business to make money. The flipside
of the desire to make money is the fear of losing money. That's where safety
comes in. They tell me that an average U.S. corporation makes a profit of about
five percent on sales. In other words, a company has to sell a million bucks
worth of goods or services to make $50,000 in profit.

In my book, I describe an accident involving a 21-year-old single woman who
was crushed to death after getting her hand caught in a machine. The accident
cost the company $150,000. To make up for the financial losses of this accident,
the company would have had to sell $3 million worth of goods!

When pressing the money hot button, remember that corporate officers often
overlook the hidden costs of accidents - like loss of morale, retraining, overtime,
etc. They therefore underestimate just how much accidents cost the company.

2. The Love Hot Button

I'm often amazed at the love and concern workers feel for one another. When
a worker gets hurt or killed, the pain is felt by the entire workforce. Owners
and CEOs often feel a certain love and concern for their workers. This is something
that a safety director can appeal to.

3. The Self-Preservation Hot Button

Human beings have a natural instinct to survive and avoid injury. The mantra
"obey the safety rules and stay alive" thus has a potency that belies
its simplicity. And, while workers strive to protect life and limb, CEOs and
executives are driven to preserve the existence and financial soundness of the company.

4. The Vanity Hot Button

People love to be recognized for their achievements. And so do corporations.
A safety program should press this hot button by providing recognition and rewards
for those who follow the rules and contribute to the health and safety of the
workplace.

Conclusion

Being a safety director is in big part a sales job. So emulating the tactics
of advertisers is a good way to pitch your program and thereby ensure the health
and safety of your workforce.

SAFETY & NATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS

The Readers Fire Back

We received lot of mail on the article about the impact of workplace safety
on a nation's competitiveness in last Wednesday's Economics newsletter, including
the following:

Statistics Are Deceiving

While I support safety in the work place, I have to take issue with your conclusion.
Statistics can be deceiving. For instance, I can prove that consumption of carrots
causes blindness by noting that all blind people have eaten carrots at some
time in their lives. This is an extreme example, but it makes the point nonetheless
that reliance on biased statistics can be deceiving. The source you quote has
a vested interest in supporting worker safety, and the information that you present
supports their interests.

Common sense and a review of the movement of manufacturing jobs in the last
decade shows that more jobs are moving to countries with a lower level of worker
safety. Just this week it was noted that China has an abysmal record, yet it
is one of the fastest growing economies and more manufacturing jobs are being
created there than in most other industrialized nations.

While I again wish to reiterate that I support your goal of promoting job place
safety, I feel that you do a disservice to our position by presenting information
that flies in the face of reality.

William P. Hawkins
Project Manager
Kevco Construction, LLC
Louisville, KY 40201-3243

American Arrogance

I think the plot on competitiveness and safety is misleading. It suggests,
with use of the trendlines that the US is one of the safest countries to work
in. However, as your data show, this is incorrect. You should be careful not
to assume that the US is the best at everything. This would also suggest that,
as many Europeans would agree, we are arrogant. I think the plot would have
been more reputable had the trendlines not been inserted, regardless of the
order of the countries.

Name and company withheld at the writer's request.

The Author Responds

Thanks for the notes. I agree that statistics can be manipulated; I also agree
that the ILO has an interest in promoting workplace safety. But I hasten to
add that the statistics the ILO used to plot its graph came from the International
Institute for Management Development, a huge business school in Lausanne, Switzerland,
that trains executives from major corporations across the world. The IMD's position
on workplace safety is much less clear than the ILO's.

I also suggest that creation of manufacturing jobs is not by itself a reliable
indicator of a nation's competitiveness. As I noted in the first part of the
article, workplace accidents represent a severe drag on the national economy.
China's level of global competitiveness is a matter of debate for the
economists. But I can say - and I think you'd agree - that its appalling fatality
rate of 136,000 per year is not only a brake on economic growth but a national
disgrace.

If saying this makes me an arrogant American, so be it. All I can say is that
it derives not from being an American but a human being.

Glenn Demby
Editor-in-Chief
SafetyXChange

HISTORIC MOMENTS IN WORKPLACE HEALTH & SAFETY

The Creation of the HMO

Henry J. Kaiser: American industrialist who pioneered the HMO.

Most American workers get their medical care from a health maintenance organization,
or HMO, sponsored by their employer. An HMO is basically an insurance policy:
In exchange for paying a set fee or premium, the member is entitled to a set
of specific medical benefits. Each HMO has a network of doctors, hospitals and
other caregivers who get paid to treat HMO members. Many HMOs also let their
members go to outside--or out-of-network--caregivers (although the member has
to pay more for this).

Early forms of the HMO began in the 1930s in the Pacific Coast states and Oklahoma.
In 1937, employees of the Federal Home Loan Bank organized the Group Health
Association, a non-profit healthcare cooperative for government workers.

The shipbuilding giant, Henry J. Kaiser, was the first employer to organize
an HMO for his employees. In 1938, he created a prepaid health plan that would
evolve into Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest and most influential
HMO. During World War II, the Kaiser health plan enrolled more than 100,000
employees in California and Oregon.

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