By Wayne Pardy, CRSP

One of the biggest challenges faced by safety directors, management and workers alike is coming up with a way to measure the success of the company's safety program. Many companies use accident and injury rates to determine if their safety program is working. Although this is crucial information that must be measured, focusing on accidents and injuries alone will give you a distorted view of the effectiveness of your safety program. Stated differently, high accident and injury rates don't necessarily denote failure. Conversely, low rates don't always equate to success. In Part 1 of this series, we'll explain why statistics aren't a reliable indicator of safety success. Next week, in Part 2, we'll outline an alternative model for measuring success.

5 Problems With Statistics

Here are five reasons why accident and injury data alone are an unreliable indicator of the effectiveness of safety efforts:

1. The Luck Factor

Since most companies have too few injuries and accidents there's not enough data to distinguish between real trends and random events.

2. The Workload Factor

If more work is done by the same number of people in the same amount of time, it may increase accident and injury rates

3. The Absence Variance Factor

The length of absence from work may be influenced not just by the severity of the injury or illness but outside factors such as morale, monotony of the work, poor management, the overcaution of doctors and the worker's age.

4. The Reporting Factor

Accidents and injuries may be under- or even over-reported. Moreover, levels of reporting can change depending on who's doing the reporting, levels of awareness and adjustments in recording and reporting systems.

5. The Latency Factor

Many occupational injuries and illnesses have long latency periods and thus don't become evident for months or even years. So the non-reporting of an accident or injury during the latency period may be a "false negative."

Next week, in Part 2 of this series, we'll discuss how to integrate multiple, performance-based measurements into your safety assessment system.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TERRORISM, PART 4

An anarchist assassinates President McKinley in 1901.

Populists & Anarchists

Terrorism, which began in the Middle East as a form of religious extremism in the first century, had migrated to Europe and evolved into a primarily secular phenomenon by the 19 th century. As we saw last time, the French Revolutionary Robespierre viewed terror as a political instrument to rid the state of its enemies--a theory that was about a century ahead of its time, anticipating the regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

For the most part, terror remained a means of opposition to the state during the 19 th century. The most famous practitioners of terror were the anarchists. In 1881, the Russian group, Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), made up of dispossessed intellectuals purporting to represent the peasant population, assassinated Tsar Alexander II.

Individual anarchists and malcontents also carried out terrorist acts on their own. In 1881, the same year that the Tsar was murdered, a deranged former civil servant named Charles Julius Guiteau shot and killed U.S. President James Garfield. Twenty years later, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz put two bullets into the chest of President William McKinley. Czolgosz said he did it because "I didn't believe one person should have so much service and another man should have none."

Such attacks weren't confined to the West. In the late 19 th century, political leaders from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), India and Japan were assassinated.

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