Myth number 1: An accident in the workplace is accidental and unpredictable.
One of the most dangerous myths. It allows the employer to deny the need to create labor protection services, to attract labor protection engineer , development of instructions for labor protection, briefings on labor protection and fire safety. The employer, instead of taking on risk management obligations in the field of labor protection, takes a step back from such responsibility. In fact, this position of the employer simply shifts the responsibility from him to his employees, who in this case must take care of their own safety. At the same time, the statistics of injuries persistently shows that at the enterprises where work on labor protection is carried out, accidents occur 80 percent less frequently.
Myth number 2: This has never happened here before, so it will not happen further.
According to statistics, the most frequent accidents occur with employees who have just started their work activities (with work experience up to 2 years ) and with employees who have been performing this work for a long time (with work experience of more than 14 years). The first type of accidents results from the fact that a young worker has not yet sufficiently studied all the requirements of labor protection at a given workplace. The second type of accidents is that the employee has too well studied the requirements of labor protection at this workplace. And what’s more, he now knows which of these requirements really work and which ones can be considered a formality. Unfortunately, the formality sometimes becomes a sad reality.
Myth number 3: We have instructions, and we even sign in magazines.
Unfortunately, at many enterprises, all the work of the labor protection service comes down to a trivial collection of signatures. It is very good if, at the same time, the workers are given to read some printouts from the Internet, which are called instructions in this enterprise, but this happens very rarely. As a result, we have three negative trends on this kind of objects.
Trend 1 – Deceptive calm.
It seems to the employer that once the signatures appear in the journals, the issue with labor protection is resolved. The fact that the issue of labor protection can extend beyond formal paper work, he does not think. And since the problem has already been solved, the very formulation of the problem – “And is everything in order with labor protection?” At this enterprise is not possible. Yes, everything is in order!
Trend 2 – Legal nihilism.
it is not for nothing that the OSH management system is called a system. All documents on labor protection , starting from the regulations, ending with instructions, programs and procedures, are related. A line of one document suggests the presence of another, and so on. As a result, all documents are a closed, autonomous legal system. Samples of documents downloaded from the Internet need serious adaptation, both for a particular company and for the current requirement of the legislation. But: “After all, we already have instructions at the enterprise, why do we need some more pieces of paper? It’s enough!”. It’s quite difficult to kill such arguments.
Tendency 3 – Illusion of action instead of the action itself.
Employees who are accustomed to simply sign every six months in boring magazines, it is already difficult to inculcate some kind of industrial culture. Each line of instructions and orders written by someone’s blood. If this is not explained at the very beginning of work, then it is difficult to convey to adults the meaning of these or those papers from the Labor Protection folder . Instead, you can often hear: “Yes, let’s sign and go.” Strange, but when you visit the doctor, none of them says: “Doctor, let us have a prescription, and I went.”
The most dangerous type of inactivity is conscious inaction, confirmed by previous favorable experience. And unfortunately, such a leader will learn only after one of his employees pays for his legal nihilism with his own health.
