The safety profession is rife with clichés. One of the most venerable: "Safety is everybody's responsibility." If safety is everybody's responsibility in general, then it is nobody's responsibility in particular. So be careful about using this cliché. Unless and until you define and assign specific responsibilities to the members of your "team," they won't know exactly what you expect of them, when you expect it and why.

Safety & Empty Rhetoric

Typically, many in senior management voice what I call the motherhood rhetoric of safety. Safety is "good" and "wholesome," they say, like motherhood and love of country.

But if you were to conduct a safety audit of the senior management folks who talk like this and ask them what they do on a day-to-day basis to demonstrate their commitment to safety, or to help promote and integrate a professional safety culture, what do you think they would answer?

Identifying Safety-Related Responsibilities Position-By-Position

Businesses that have taken the time to define clear expectations, responsibilities and accountabilities will start to get a good picture of how to go about setting up a meaningful system of responsibilities for safety.

Here's a test: Take each and every job description in your business and see if you can define clear responsibilities for safety within that job. The ground rules: Those safety-related responsibilities must be clear not only to you, the safety director, but to the person who occupies the job. That person must not only know what those responsibilities are but understand them and agree on their importance.

Take it one step further. Take the following job titles and ask yourself: "Have we defined safety responsibilities for these jobs":

• President
• Vice Presidents
• Managers
• Supervisors
• Workers
• Union

Conclusion

There's a tendency among companies that don't explicitly think through and parcel out safety responsibility to assume that safety is the "job" of the safety pro. Oh, yes! Don't forget to define the responsibilities for the safety pro as well. The safety pro plays a "contributive role" in the Internal Responsibility System (IRS), which we'll talk about in Part 2 of this series. Management and workers play a "direct role". There's a big difference between the two. Unless and until you define clear safety responsibilities, confusion in safety management will reign.

HISTORIC MOMENTS IN WORKPLACE SAFETY

A worker wears a mask to guard against silicon exposure, a protection not afforded to the Gauley Bridge workers of 1931.

The Gauley Bridge Tunnel Disaster

It happened in 1930-1931 at the start of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce. About 5,000 workers came with their families to the mountains of southern West Virginia to build a railroad bridge. The pay was low and the working conditions appalling.

The workers were ordered to pulverize rocks containing high concentrations of silica - up to 99.44 percent in some cases. Company officials who visited the worksite were given masks to wear. But workers were not.

By the time work ended, 476 workers had died of silicosis. Another 1,500 contracted the disease within a year or two. The Gauley Bridge Tunnel affair remains a monument to corporate greed and one of the worst industrial disasters in American history.

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