Introduction to Safety Science

People, Organisations, and Systems

David O'Hare

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000563832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Science
• Index: Psychology

The book is designed as an accessible and readable introduction to a rapidly expanding area that is in demand worldwide. A variety of professionals from different backgrounds are being tasked with managing health and safety risks in a wide variety of settings. Many lack current and up-to-date knowledge of the key developments that have taken place in Safety Science in recent decades, as well as a sense of how these developments fit in with previous approaches.

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• This book takes readers on a 'journey' across three broad developments in safety science.

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• It covers topics that focus on the individual including human error, risk and the role of cognition in human performance.

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• It then shifts to research in safety science that uses organizations as the basic unit of analysis, questions about organizational decision making and the characteristics that dispose towards or against organizational failure and it introduces perspectives based on systems science that address issues that arise out of complexity and interdependence.

Those who will purchase this book are students taking courses in human factors, ergonomics, applied psychology, occupational health and safety management. Professionals working in safety management in any field from agriculture, construction, shipping, aviation, power generation, oil exploration, manufacturing to healthcare will find this book useful, as well as general readers interested in why systems fail.

1 Introduction to Safety

DOI: 10.1201/9781003038443-1

Throughout recorded history, the great civilisations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, China, South East Asia and the Indus Valley, South America, Renaissance Europe and others have constructed numerous impressive monuments. Some of these such as the Colosseum, Pyramids of Giza, Great Wall, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu and Notre Dame remain to this day, while others have vanished into the dust of history. Each project depended on vast amounts of human labour as well as extraordinary engineering and technical skills. Life for the labourers who worked on these projects would have been, in the words of the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, largely ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Workers on the Great Pyramid are known to have died at a young age (30–35) many with severe bone and skeletal damage.¹ In the 21st century, the conditions of workers engaged in similar enterprises vary dramatically from one part of the world to another. It has been reported, for example, that hundreds of young migrant workers are dying each year on construction projects in Qatar.² More than 30 have died working on stadium construction for the FIFA 2022 World Cup alone.

The Toll of Toil

In the most developed countries of Europe, North America and Australasia, legal protections for the health and safety of workers have grown over the past couple of hundred years. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, interest in worker health and safety was patchy and mainly confined to observed links between certain kinds of work and the occurrence of particular illnesses. Lead and mercury poisoning was noted by the ancient Greeks and by Renaissance physicians who noticed that medieval scribes who were in the habit of dipping their quills in metallic ink and then putting them in their mouths were exhibiting symptoms of what we now know to be lead poisoning.³ What is considered the very first book on occupational health by Bernardo Ramazzini appeared around 1700. He noted that working postures were associated with various health consequences.⁴ He was probably the first person to advise workers to vary their postures and not to sit or stand for excessive periods. His warnings of the dangers of a sedentary life now seem remarkably prophetic! He also noted the negative effects of frequent repetition of movement – now commonly referred to as repetitive strain injury (RSI) or occupational overuse syndrome (OOS), which are now seen as having a substantial psychological as well as a physical component.

In the 1760s the world changed dramatically. Historians refer to the period of rapid technological developments in machinery for weaving and textiles, the use of coal for iron smelting and the invention of the steam engine as the industrial revolution. In particular, the discovery of how to produce cast iron along with James Watt’s steam engine led to the building of the first iron bridge (1779), iron boat (1787) and, of course, the development of the railway industry. The growing population and need for raw materials as well as finished produce led to rapid market expansion and a new world of technological change. Inevitably, the new machinery and new ways of working led to new ways of becoming sick and injured. Child labour was exploited in factories and elsewhere. Life in the factories was ‘bitter and hard’.⁵ England introduced legislation to control the use of children as chimney sweeps in 1788 and this began the series of legislative controls over work and safety that have continued until the present day.

Further legislation to control the conditions of child labour appeared initially in England in 1802 and then in the form of the first Factory Act of 1833. The fact that it took legislation to ensure children under 18 did not work more than 69 hours a week provides a small glimpse into the conditions and expectations of work less than two hundred years ago.⁶ This act introduced the idea of an inspectorate whose job it would be to visit premises to ensure compliance with the laws and regulations. Successive Factory Acts in the late 19th century introduced further improvements to working conditions.

Sinking of the Titanic on Maiden Voyage, April 1912

The Titanic left Southampton on Wednesday, 10th April, and after calling at Cherbourg, proceeded to Queenstown, from which port she sailed on the afternoon of Thursday, 11th April, following what was, at that time, the accepted outward-bound route for mail steamers from the Fastnet Light, off the southwest coast of Ireland, to the Nantucket Shoal light vessel, off the coast of the United States. This track, usually called the Outward Southern Track, was followed by the Titanic on her journey.

An examination of the North Atlantic route chart shows that this track passes about 25 miles south (that is outside) of the edge of the area marked ‘field ice between March and July’, but from 100 to 300 miles to the northward (that is, inside) of the dotted line on the chart marked, ‘Icebergs have been seen within this line in April, May and June’.

The Titanic followed the Outward Southern Track until Sunday, the 14th April, in the usual way. From 6 p.m. onwards to the time of the collision, the weather was perfectly clear and fine. At a little before 11.40 p.m., one of the look-outs in the crow’s nest struck three blows on the gong, which was the accepted warning for something ahead, following this immediately afterwards by a telephone message to the bridge ‘Iceberg right ahead’. At 11.40 p.m. on that day, she struck an iceberg and at 2.20 a.m. on the next day she foundered.⁷ An estimated 1,517 of the 2,224 passengers and crew lost their lives.

The sinking of the Titanic was a significant international event and some immediate safety changes followed shortly thereafter. Chief amongst these were more frequent ice patrols in the North Atlantic, requirements for round-the-clock manning of the ship’s radio station and stricter requirements regarding the number of lifeboats and the conduct of lifeboat drills. The most notable and long-lasting impact was the creation of an International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, subsequently referred to as ‘SOLAS’ in 1914. This remains one of two major international standards governing the safety of maritime operations with the other being the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW; 1978). Both the SOLAS and STCW protocols are under the responsibility of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a body established in 1948 by the United Nations.

The regulation of safety at work which began in the late 18th and 19th century in England followed a similar pattern into the 20th century. Legislation was introduced by Act of Parliament to regulate safety in a particular industry such as mining (various Mines and Quarries Acts between 1954 and 1971) or manufacturing (e.g. Factories Act, 1961). The legislation would set out various regulatory requirements and an inspectorate would be established to visit premises and assess compliance with these requirements. Non-compliance could be punished with prosecution leading to fines or other sanctions.⁸ Shipping was regulated by separate Acts such as the Merchant Shipping Acts (1894–1906) which applied to the Titanic.

A major change in the regulation of workplace safety began in Britain in the 1970s. Although the rate of workplace injuries and fatalities had dropped dramatically from the early part of the 20th century, when it is estimated that the fatality rate for factory workers was 17.5 per 10,000 workers, to a rate in the 1960s of 4.5 per 10,000, there were still over 1,000 work fatalities and half a million injuries per annum.⁹ Many people including worker trade unions were questioning whether the existing patchwork of regulations and sporadic enforcement activities was effective in protecting workers and those exposed to workplace activities. In 1970, the UK government set up an independent committee to look at health and safety at work which was chaired by Lord Alfred Robens, formerly chairman of the British Coal Board.

The Robens Committee Report in 1972 proposed quite revolutionary changes to the philosophy and practice of safety regulation. The committee concluded that complex regulations propped up by inspections and punishments fostered a climate in the workplace that actively, if unintentionally, worked against the interests of safety. For management, the regulations could be seen as effectively setting the maximum standards which need only be barely achieved, and that the risks of discovery and prosecution from a limited and over-stretched inspectorate were also minimal. For both employees and employers, the existing approach encouraged them to view safety as an external problem looked after by the government rather than an intrinsic issue for themselves. Accepted by the government, the Robens report became the basis of the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974 which replaced the existing patchwork legislation under one umbrella applying to all workers. The Act also established the UK Health and Safety Commission (HSC) now known as the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) whose mission is ‘to prevent workplace death, injury or ill health … by working with dutyholders to help them understand the risks they create and how to manage them’.¹⁰

The philosophy advocated by the Robens Committee and enshrined in much work safety regulation ever since has been described as ‘regulated self-regulation’ or ‘meta-regulation’. The reliance on setting minimum standards and then policing compliance with those standards by an inspectorate was rejected in favour of an approach based on setting out the general health and safety goals to be achieved, and providing support and resources to workplaces to achieve those goals. Progress would be encouraged primarily by incentives and positive reinforcement rather than by fines and punishments, although these would remain as the ‘last resort’. From this brief summary, three distinct eras of workplace health and safety can be distinguished as shown in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 Three Broad Eras of Workplace Health and Safety Regulation in the UK and Elsewhere.

	‘Make Your Own Rules’	‘Command and Control’	‘Meta-Regulation’’
‘Who?’	Firm or industry makes the rules	Government makes the rules and enforces compliance through inspections	Government stimulates self-regulation by requiring safety management systems (SMSs) and audits
‘When?’	Industrial Revolution (1760 onwards)	Factory Acts (late 19th century) to various Acts of the 1960s and 1970s	Since UK Health and Safety at Work Act (1974). Pre-1980s, before Robens Report (1972)
‘How?’	Exploitative of workers except for rare examples of benevolent owners	Reactive and punitive. Firms aim for compliance with a minimum required by regulation	Proactive. Focused broadly on the identification and management of risks and hazards. Safety auditing

The emphasis in the 1974 legislation was that industries and businesses should be guided to take control of their health and safety performance. Measures were to be ‘proportionate’ and ‘sensible’ with respect to the risks involved. In other words, the costs of improving safety and health were to be explicitly weighed against the value of the potential benefits.

Workplace Safety Legislation Around the World

The United States: Economic historian Mark Aldrich of Smith College, a prestigious ...