The Molding of a Movement

By William C. Pope

The mission of industrial safety has undergone a series of subtle but important changes over the past 75 years. It started out as a noble crusade to cut down on the horrendous number of work-connected injuries and deaths. Today, many see it as a viable tool to improve a sick way of managing. How did this strange metamorphosis come about?

The transition has been compared to the history of preventive medicine. The business enterprise that some might call a “corporate body” is not unlike the human body when accidents are compared to disease. Injuries and other signs of corporate illness are, after all, only symptoms of a much deeper problem. What is needed now is a scientific means for diagnosing what is going wrong within the corporate “body.” In their opening statements concerning accident research, Hadden, Suchman, and Klein allude to the similarity of the accident-prevention problem today with that of preventive medicine a century ago. “What little research is under way [today],” they claim, “is being done largely by dedicated but often irrelevantly trained [safety] professionals whose daily work has brought them face to face with the accident problem.

The authors repeatedly show throughout their text that there is a definite parallelism between managerial sickness in the corporate body and those “infectious and other biological insults” in the human body. “In short,” they conclude, “the professional, scientific, and technological climate is becoming more favorable to accident research and the systematic design and evaluation of safety programs.”

Slow Evolution

Unless one is familiar with the historical development of the safety movement, the change in thinking about industrial- accident prevention from one point in time to another would hardly be noticeable. The practice of industrial safety has slowly evolved from injury to accident to total loss control, and now, to management improvement.

If asked to pinpoint where it all began, and why, the answer must be with the formation of our workmens’ compensation laws in the early part of the twentieth century. To cite an event, it would be the first meeting of the National Safety Council, which resolved “to take the first steps toward the formation of a national organization for the promotion of safety to human life.” In the beginning, the mission of safety was to reduce industrial work injuries and deaths. To consider any other reason over the next 30 years would have been unthinkable to most safety practitioners.

By the 1930s, a general feeling began to surface among many safety people that accidents might be a more worth- while target than “injuries.” Some began to experiment with the idea. They were materially helped by a textbook written by Heinrich, whose concept of a new ‘basis and philosophy of accident prevention” influenced the whole movement for the next quarter of a century.

Credit must be given to Heinrick’s famous foundation of a major injury concept when he said that “in a unit group of 330 similar accidents occurring to the same person, 300 will result in no injury, 29 will produce minor injuries, and 1 will cause a serious injury.” This ratio, he claimed, “spells opportunity” to expand the concept of work-injury prevention. If, for example, the 300 no-injury accidents were being reported, the true accident researcher would have a greater base for extracting the “vital few” from the “trivial many” which is so badly needed for a scientific approach to accident problem solving.

Total Accident Prevention

Those who believe in expanding safety programming to include the causes of property damage were helped materially by the findings of Bird and German in 1954. They conducted series of studies at the Lukens Steel Company Coatesville, Pennsylvania, which, in effect, bridged the gap between accident and total accident prevention. “All too often companies fail to recognize the extent and frequency of industrial accidents,” they said. “Usually only personal-injury accidents are reported, investigated, and analyzed and frequently others are ignored as ‘near misses’ despite the fact that they indicate potential hazards and cost thousands of dollars in property damage alone.”

In the next decade, there was a change in the subjects written about safety from pure injury to property damage prevention. Safety titles began to accent “loss” prevention and “cost” control, coming closer to the fundamentals of the business enterprise. With the smoldering problems related to our environment, there were some who went so far as to consider safety as a “total environmental control” activity.

Fletcher and Douglas considered “total” to embrace the prevention of all business costs arising from unplanned events downgrading the management systems that are related to work injury, property damage, fire, security, hygiene, dust, air, gas, and water pollution. Such a broad concept of the “safety mission” comes naturally to grips with the field of “risk management.”

In his treatment of “redefined terminology,” Dr. Marcum takes a dim view of the term “loss control” as being a substitute for the word “safety.” “The first of these two words,” he says, “is an ‘effect,’ and the second word should be recognized as a well-known ‘subfunction’ of management practice.” Acceptance of this concept is grossly detrimental to other principal subfunctions of management, which include planning, organizing, leading, and evaluating.

Progress Continues

The feeling that safety could be a fundamental way to improve the management function started in the early 1960’s. Roots of change started with the transition of safety from an outside governmental and insurance force to a staff management support role “inside” the business enterprise. For example, a state safety inspector had the force of law to back up his recommendations. The insurance safety inspector could threaten cancellation of policy if his suggestions were ignored. The plant safety official, however, had no authority, and very little concern from his peers as to his place in their functional missions. “Safety,” he found, was not first in the production environment. “Reason,” not law, he noted, was the only way to obtain “top management” support.

“Management must always, in every decision and action,” says Drucker, “put economic performance first. It can only justify its existence and its authority by the economic results it produces.” If Drucker, a leading authority on business management, is right, profit, not safety, has to be the means for enticing managerial support. This thought, of course, violated all safety principles up to the middle of the twentieth century.

To some, this apparent lack of managerial concern for safety offered a challenge. Was it possible to change the means to gain the same end? “In a corporate system, management tends to support its component parts or functions in direct proportion to what each contributes to the success of the basic mission.” Therefore, should any safety professional feel that management is not giving him the proper support required, then it might be that the work being performed in the name of safety is not worth much to top managers or the several functional peers.

The function of safety is not all inspection for unsafe acts and conditions held so dear to those who promoted our mission in the 1930’s. Neither is it entirely a technical adjustment to physical protection, as was held so strongly by safety engineers in the 1950's. It is, in fact, a combination of each, plus a large dose of managerial knowledge to skillfully deal with the desires and phobias of other team members, while still remaining true to the ideals of accident prevention.

Management Keyed

One would have a difficult time finding management in any of the safety literature produced in the first half of the twentieth century, other than complaint about the support it didn’t give to the safety movement. But the word began to appear in small print here and there by the early 1950's, as some safety professionals were finding their way up to the higher echelons of management. They were no longer technicians, but worked as managers with other managers. This new relationship fostered for many, a feeling of helplessness because, as engineers, they could not speak the language of management.

Heinrich, father of the scientific concept of accident prevention, wisely sensed the coming change in 1955 by saying:

“Of necessity, safety began with the emphasis on mechanical engineering. . .the first step was to clean house. . .to do the engineering job. . .at the same time, they (safety experts) are not all convinced that the degree or extent of pure engineering required to deal with these physical matters must be greater than salesmanship, management, etc..."

A year later, Simonds and Grimaldi surprised many safety professionals with a new textbook, Safety Management. Admittedly, the authors gave more than half their attention to physical-problem solving, but some chapters dealt with safety administration “to justify study by upper classmen in schools of engineering and business.” Here we find the first feeling, in print, that perhaps the students of business administration might have some part of their undergraduate education devoted to safety management concepts and principles. As Peter Drucker has said many times in his many books on management theory, no administrator can manage well a function he knows nothing about.

Simonds and Grimaldi visualized their work as a “special contribution to the understanding that all executives should have of the place of safety in the operation of business.” Combination of ideas from a safety engineer and a professor of business management gave the movement a tremendous thrust.

An article on safety management by Dr. W. A. Cutter and Tom Wilkenson in 1959 was probably the first public statement asking that engineering and management be made separate professions within the field of accident prevention. This was important, since both men had considerable status in the safety world: Dr. Walter Cutter being head of the New York University’s Center for Safety Education, and Tom Wilkenson being the safety director of probably the world’s largest organization—the United States Department of the Army. “This is a day,” they said, “when management is coming into its own. We believe industrial accident prevention should achieve the status of a separate profession, and in achieving this status, its direction should be towards the management concept rather than remain exclusively by title of engineering.”

Time of Dissent, Opportunity

In the next decade, from 1950 to 1960, many papers were written and speeches made on pros and cons of safety engineering vs. safety management. This was to be expected. Any activity rooted in traditional values, such as accident prevention, is bound to become disrupted when change is introduced. The safety profession does not lack for ideas on how individuals can be protected or how mechanical processes should be guarded. What is not so clearly understood is the means by which we should manage our affairs to get the organization to do what we know must be done.

Proponents of both schools of thought began to appear, and considerable turmoil resulted within the profession. There was a strong feeling by some that engineering and management could not be compatible in industrial safety circles. The American Society of Safety Engineers quite naturally gave its support to the engineering viewpoint. Writing on the subject of professional development, W. E. Tarrants described the Society’s policy: “The term ‘safety engineering’ is used in its broadest sense to identify the safety profession as practiced by the regular members of the American Society of Safety Engineers. It is used because of its current general acceptance as a label for the profession.” The implication was that unless an individual was an engineer, he would not really be a member of the safety profession.

In the same paper, however, Tarrants advised the reader that while the Society represented the professional safety engineer, less than 20 percent of the membership were graduate engineers. Furthermore, he stated, most ASSE members were not actually “doing much engineering work.” The question naturally arose from this statistic as to how the non-engineers, or the 80 percent membership, could be fairly represented in a dedicated engineering society.

Proponents of the non-technical school of thought, like C. F. Schlueter, questioned the need for a scientific background to deal with all aspects of accident prevention: “A man with an engineering background cannot effectively function through the use of engineering knowledge alone.” Schlueter, like many others, began to sense that the safety professional should have managerial skills in order to work closely with top management, on even terms. Pointing out that it would not be prudent for a safety technician or specialist to be making management decisions in the guise of an engineer, one highly respected leader of this period voiced the concern of many, C. R. DeReamer voiced the opinion that if ASSE were to be composed only of “engineers,” odds were high that such an arrangement would not benefit the Society of the profession as a whole.

And so it went, back and forth. And proponents of both views were right. There is a need in the safety profession for both managers and engineers. But the feeling of a few who could not visualize the professional distinction of both working the same field brought amusement to academicians. Within institutions of higher learning, there were no negative feelings about the coexistence of schools of engineering and business administration on the campus. Why couldn’t this tranquillity be transferred into industry by safety people? Cooler heads began to see the distinction and started preparing for a new rung in the career ladder of the safety professional.

Total Integration Into System

W. C. Pope and T. J. Creswell saw this turmoil as an impetus to start a new movement. “Total solution to the problem,” they said, “must ultimately be founded on integration of safety concepts and principles (not rules and regulations) into the management educational system.” When management understands the role of the safety professional as a systems evaluator specializing in identifying operational errors related to the way management manages, they said, he (the safety expert) will become a full partner on the decision making team— "not just a social-welfare worker operating in an organizational vacuum.”

Cole Allen, then vice president, American Mutual Liability Insurance Company, concurred with the idea that “errors” rather than “accidents,” might be a more viable target to aim for when working with top executives. “In many instances,” he said, “there is not a complete understanding in management of the important linking of safety with industrial efficiency.” He cautioned against thinking of accidents in prosaic terms when working with top management. They tend to think in terms of production-line interruptions, he said, such as bad policy, poor decisions, wastage, slippages, over-runs, increased costs, etc. The key point in his presentation was the “need for an awareness of the numerous accidents that fortuitously produce neither injury nor damage, but do, nonetheless, cause production delays and loss.”