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The question of why workplace safety has multiple areas of investigation. It appears failures in safety can be due to company climate, managers, and employee attitudes about safety. Pressure to perform due to finances can present an ethical dilemma in which a work practices may stray from safe practices. Issues such as repeated safety violations also appear in that most violations don’t result in detrimental damage to an employee and these violations are ignored until a more extreme accident occurs.
This paper is to examine possible causes to an ethical dilemma arising with potential solutions presented.
Why is workplace safety of concern, how prevalent are workplace injuries and fatalities? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a federal agency which is designed to help provide for employee safety through regulations and inspections of workplace environments. It provides a resource which can allow for employees to report negligent behavior by their company as well.
Statistic provided by OSHA from 2016 concerning workplace deaths totaled 4,693 deaths.
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One fifth of these deaths were in the construction industry. Top ten causes of death included falls, control of hazardous energy, machinery and machine guarding, and electrical wiring methods (Commonly).
proper personal protective equipment (PPE) and equipment safety mechanisms should reduce injury, illness and fatalities. Safety is more strongly embedded in industry and continues to evolve. The following chart from Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a decline in workplace injury/illness since 2003.
Minimizing hazards, keeping employees safe reduces the likelihood of financial hardship to families as well as blatant loss of life.
Company benefit as well. Employees out of work due to injury or illness reduces productivity of the company, increases insurance premiums, and potentially leaves the company vulnerable to lawsuits does this translate into issues of health and safety for its employees? This potential area of concern which may lead to higher accident incidence is explored by Caskey and Ozei in the Harvard Business Review. The authors assert that pressure to meet forecast predictions of company performance may lead to higher accident incident. A study was done in that OSHA statistics were examined for companies in which forecasts were missed, just met/ exceeded, and “comfortably” exceeded. The study found a 5 to 15% higher rate of sickness and accident rate for companies achieving the middle category. The idea is that higher pressure occurs for productivity and therefore less money was spent on safety paired with greater demand on manager and employee time.
Another interesting factor that Caskey and Ozei found related to cost of worker’s comp insurance. States in which insurance are comparatively high to others, the accident rate was approximately 5% lower. The authors point to higher premiums lead to more proactive management concerning safety of workers (pp 4-9).
The point of the research indicates an ethical dilemma for companies facing certain financial pressures. Shortages on expenditures for safety equipment, long working hours, and taking workplace short cuts to meet productivity demands can lead to higher rate of accident incidents. Conversely, accident rates lower with higher insurance premiums, creating a natural incentive to place higher importance on safety.
Working environments may convey underlying attitudes toward safety in negative or positive manners. Company climate that has a lack of concern for employees may exist at the top of the company, with the management, or with individual employees amongst themselves. This can lead to safety issues resulting from attitudes which can vary from unempathetic, to complacency, or to a more malicious nature.
A study was conducted in 2007 by K. Praveen, et. Al trying to link the ethical climate in the workplace with safety. This study attempted to prove that certain ethical climates precipitated or discouraged safety compliance as well as voluntary safety participation. Three climates referred to as egoism, benevolence, and principled were described. Egoism promotes more of the “self” with focus on profit and productivity. Benevolence focuses on the good of the greater group. Principled is concerned with following regulations (pp. 518-519). Each type was combined with what was described as a “local” subtype. Local refers to the values of the immediate group within the organization. If the local values are ethical it is expected to find a safer work environment.
The general expectations were as follows: egoism local would correlate with more injuries and less safety participation; benevolent local would correlate with less injuries, more safety participation; and principled local, less injuries with higher safety participation. The assumption is that benevolence and principled equates to higher ethics, higher ethics equates to less injury and more safety participation.
The results of the study were not all “as expected.” There did not seem to be correlation to either injuries or safety participation for the egoism. Benevolence correlated only to lower incident of injuries, but principled did correlate to lower injuries and higher safety participation “as expected.”
The study offered a few hypotheses for why not all results correlated to the initial hypothesis. The idea is that the principled local model is ideal. Further study was requested to further investigate reasons behind the results achieved (pp. 526-528).
This study demonstrates the complexity of human behavior and understanding correlations, or lack of, to predicted outcomes. Different dynamics will exist in group settings, which may be fluid and difficult to detect true patterns of thought and resulting behaviors.
In looking at different angles of ethics and workplace safety, a counter argument concerns overregulation of safety. Author Sidney Dekker goes into much detail to show aspects of what critics say concerning government and workplace regulations. In general over-regulation leads to high cost and lack of innovation. Overregulation can in some situations be counter-productive to safety as well.
In Dekker’s paper it become apparent that the safety industry is indeed a big business of its own. It is an industry of ever-changing regulations, making money in training and equipment. Fines can be imposed on companies and individuals within the companies.
Dekker explains that the pressure on leadership to enforce individual employee compliance becomes overbearing in some situations. Furthermore, regulations are not designed by “front line” workers; therefore, the regulations themselves may be short sighted. Some situations are described as more dangerous for the employee. An example is given of a field worker loaded down in an extreme amount of PPE. This can have the negative impact of potentially leading to heat stroke.
Another point of interest implied that overregulation can lead to doctoring of numbers. This would be to prevent a negative company reflection and potentially avoid fines. This could exaggerate future consequences of bad practice in that it may be unknown (Dekkar).
It is an interesting and important concept to consider that the very vehicle by which safety is promoted may actually lead to more problems in instances. This could further exaggerate ethical dilemmas which may arise in given work situations. Maintaining the balance of safety while remaining productive and innovative is potentially the heart of the issue.
Multiple factors can lead to unsafe workplace practices and violations. Many times, there is no consequence so overlooked until a devasting accident occurs. There can be times when safety violations may actually be the safer alternative situationally. Pressures of productivity and profit may cause a breakdown from management or the individual employee. Other times it may be company climate which exhibits a lack of concern for employees.
Solutions prove difficult as this is a multifaceted issue. Each company as a whole down to the individual will present unique character. Empathy is difficult to teach at a point, financial productivity will always be the underlying goal, and overregulation will always exist. Perhaps the most practical approach would be a true data analysis comparing companies of similar size and nature of those with successful track records in safety. Comparison of numbers concerning lost staff days demonstrating a potential payoff when injuries and illness are reduced should be factually presented. Educating and training employees to remain vigilant in routine tasks and rewarding good practice should be incorporated as well. Concerning company specific safety policies substantial input should come from the employees performing the tasks and working with specific equipment. Those performing the tasks have a better ability to relay the true practicality of policy and may have more creative ideas on maintaining safe practices.
Safety and Ethics in My Workplace. (2021, Dec 11). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/safety-and-ethics-in-my-workplace-essay
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