Working People : Worker Safety: ‘It Pays’

Earlier this month, three workers died at a Ventura County oil drilling site. In Los Angeles, Cal-OSHA concluded that contractors working on the Los Angeles Red Line Line tunnels violated more than 80 safety regulations. Two experts comment:

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Year in and year out, (my industry,) construction, ranks as the first or second-most dangerous to work in. We came to realize many, many years ago that safe environments are productive environments, that safety and quality are interchangeable and that there’s a link between good safety and positive morale.

Certainly we’ve got to realize there are also tangible bottom line benefits. Accident prevention is, in our opinion, the only sure-fire way to control workers’ compensation costs. Safety also sells and certainly it pays. More and more of our clients are focusing on safe contractors in the pre-qualification process.

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In Southern California, where we have a vast immigrant work force, you have a lot of smaller industries that are basically unregulated. I was a Cal-OSHA inspector for five years. The conditions I saw were shocking, not much better than non-industrialized Third World countries. There’s no excuse for it.

You can bet that employers who do not care for workers’ well-being don’t care how they dispose of hazardous waste that affects us all. We live in an area where major industries are located very close to residential neighborhoods and I worry about a major tragedy.