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March/April 2023 issue

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Review

The Safety Anarchist: relying on human expertise and innovation, reducing bureaucracy and compliance

Open-access content Wednesday 13th December 2017
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

book-review-the-safety-anarchist-sidney-dekker

Rating:

His latest book offers inspiration from the brighter side of anarchism, encouraging the reader to reconsider human autonomy and self-determination, appreciate the pride of workmanship and visualise a world of work free from the coercion to comply with corporate policy and ridiculous rules in which the workers themselves had no say.

Dekker starts with a compelling overview of an organisation rooted in a compliance culture, exploring how its insistence on rules and regulations has crippled efficiency, paralysed thought and numbed the workers. He goes on to consider why we have become bound up in red tape, analysing the origins of rule-making and criticising the absence of workers in discussions about workplace safety.

The central tenet is that, on workplace safety and health matters, organisations have been making work more difficult for employees and harder for them to carry out their duties. He points fingers directly at the policymakers and practitioners in equal measure with an assertion that the "health and safety business" has sprung up and created the tension that we now feel.

Dekker despises the bureaucratisation of safety: he slams the way we measure progress, ridicules the traditional approaches to behavioural safety, and asserts that safety and health practitioners and their organisations treat employees like infants.

There is no shortage of historical references to underline his points, he draws on global politics, the Vietnam war, government taxation schemes, ancient philosophy and even comparisons between the priesthood and the safety profession. This all makes for a varied and interesting read -- though with a strong bias against the way safety and health is managed around the world. At times the depth of reference and explanation feels a little unnecessary and challenging, though the provocation from the text is useful and supported by academic research.

Dekker strives to direct the reader to his long-held view that workplace safety needs to be more human-centric. In this sense, it is much aligned with my own perspective -- that it's time for an evolution towards a focus on positivity and on creating safety by identifying what constitutes a great culture and working on achieving this goal.

There is deep and meaningful content in here -- though the articulations on issues such as authoritarian high modernism, synoptic legibility and the superiority of rationality certainly had this reviewer reaching for a reference book. As respite, the book closes with suggestions on a new way forward -- each well-positioned, timely and relevant.

Routledge (www.routledge.com)

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 Simplicity in safety investigations

Monday 11th December 2017
Rating: Long makes a virtue of this “recombinant innovation”, making new techniques by combining existing ones.
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 Fire safety and evacuation: Rapid response

Wednesday 13th December 2017
Imagine the scenario. As the building manager in a large five-storey, urban office building, which is staffed by 650 workers covering multiple shifts, you are responsible for managing fire safety.The building is equipped with multiple fire escape routes and is covered by an automatic sprinkler system, which is linked to the evacuation alarm. Fire alarms are tested every week, and twice a year there is a fire drill during which staff evacuate to a hall area elsewhere in the building rather than an external assembly point.
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 Managing the wellbeing-stress-mental health continuum

Monday 18th December 2017
The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) issued Stress Management Standards in 2004 as a framework for employers to check whether they were putting workers under unreasonable pressure and depriving them of the support and resources that would allow them to work efficiently.In the global recession at the end of the decade, the corporate interest in stress waned as many organisations adjusted to budget cuts by retrenching to safety management.
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 X is for expertise* (and Y is for you)

Thursday 7th December 2017
Is there a difference between “competence” and “expertise”? Should we present ourselves to our colleagues as experts, with a ready solution to their problems, or just as competent peers who can provide support?A typical dictionary definition of an expert is “a person who is very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area” and definitions of the noun “expertise” all share that pairing of knowledge or skill. The use of “or” is perhaps surprising; can you be an expert with only knowledge but no skill, or skill but no knowledge?
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 Nancy Leppink, International Labour Organization

Tuesday 12th December 2017
In 2009 Nancy Leppink was appointed by President Obama to the Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor. Her job as acting administrator was to help revivify the regulatory agency responsible for enforcing national labour standards including the minimum wage, child labour restrictions and statutory working time limits which had been almost dismantled under the previous administration.
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 Why OSH need not be a second career

Monday 18th December 2017
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