Occupational Risk Control

Predicting and Preventing the Unwanted

Derek Viner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317086222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

Occupational Risk Control contains a practical theory of risk based on the principles of the physical sciences. The book provides details of the implications of such theory for real-world practice that will be of value to the legislator, general or specialist risk engineer, scientist, academic, student, risk/safety practitioners as well as managers of industrial or commercial undertakings.

The contents are a result of over 40 years of experience in researching, teaching and consulting. The theoretical base is relevant peer-reviewed physical sciences literature. Such literature points out the necessity of understanding the principles that enable processes resulting in damage and loss to be explained and it enables the risk arising from the uncertainty of these processes to be objectively defined, described as well as estimated using real number values. Of these principles and their applications a student once remarked "this should be compulsory study for all engineering students".

A critical assessment of the pervasive but unscientific accident terminology is included to assist the reader to reflect on the value of this. In a field in which there is a plethora of commercial and pseudo-academic practical tools based on accident theory, this text provides a foundation for the thinking academic and practitioner to critically evaluate the meaning, scope and value of such tools.

The text has chapters on accident theory, damage process models, risk, risk estimation, risk control, risk evaluation, the classification and analysis of risks, risk numeracy, the management of risks in general and the management of technical risks in particular. There are notes on accident investigation and the role of the risk adviser. A substantial glossary of terms is included.

The text is supported by a dedicated web site (www.derekviner.com) which contains discussion and examples of topics as well as a blog.

1
History: The Historical Origins of the Management of Risks

Introduction

There was once a time when the survival of individuals was threatened only by exposure to extreme weather, wild animals, hostile groups, disease and hazardous environments. Early technology created new ways in which people could be hurt: fires for the smelting of metals and the production of pottery and glass; primitive weapons with increased speed and sharp points to increase the intensity of energy at the point of application to the skin; boats with which to explore the sea beyond the safe havens close to the shore. In some parts of the world, population centres became possible as farming and the specialisation of work drew people away from nomadic hunting and gathering. With this came the diseases that attend dense populations in unhygienic conditions and the ever-present chance of fire in buildings made from wood.

Technological change became dramatic with the industrial revolution, which began in the mid 18th century in the United Kingdom and spread rapidly to other developed nations. This revolution was chiefly made possible by the development of steam power, but also harnessing power by water and wind turbines. The resulting processes of mass production exposed workers to the power of rotating and reciprocating machinery, the chemicals used in various processes and levels of noise and atmospheric pollution never before seen.

The rate of growth of industrial technology would have seemed astonishing then, but even more significant changes took place in the 20th century, picking up pace in the period between World Wars One and Two and exploding in the period after 1945 and the Vietnam War. The industrial technology we now know and its reach into every facet of our lives, from food to medical treatment, transport, war, recreation, communication and touching even the health of the planet is unprecedented in its nature and its effect. Industrial countries with the longest experience of technology, meaning those of the Western world, have only 260 years of experience in managing the effects, and the greatest effects by far have arisen only in the last 65 or so years. Currently developing industrial societies have been doing so only in this last 65 years at the most and in significant cases, for example India and China, the greatest part of this is in the last 30 years. Not all parts of the world have undergone these changes and even today we can meet peoples who retain the culture of the hunter-gatherer or small-scale farmer.

It is useful to recognise this history as we study the science and psychology of risk, if only for the purpose of understanding how people today respond to the need to manage these artificial risks. We can learn much about the origins of our attitudes by looking at those of peoples who have not participated in this technology journey, as well as by knowing something of the history of our own society’s attempts to manage the adverse effects of it through legal and other means.

For many years our natural desire to reduce the incidence of injury and illness has been frustrated by the difficulty of formulating a coherent philosophy of the problem. This has not been helped by the widely held belief that ‘safety’ is, after all, just common sense. Our individual and collective ability to be wise after an event is nothing short of astonishing and we appear to experience no disquiet as a result of contemplating, if we ever do, why we were not so wise before the event. As growing industrialisation led to demand for industrial practitioners of applied science (in various branches derived from chemistry and physics), manual skills, accountancy, law and eventually even in management, there has been one area, namely safety, in which the need for specialisation has been ignored for the large part of the industrial revolution journey. Everyone has a personal skill, originating in the warnings of parents from the very earliest days, in negotiating the common hazards of modern life: how to dodge cars on a road; use stairs; manage household electricity and cleaning chemicals; and so on. How easy it must be for us to just assume that this mindset is all we need to manage safety in a modern complex industry, or even for the planet. There is a subtle trap in this extrapolation from personal to industrial. Our personal understanding is that it is we ourselves who are responsible for crossing the road safely, we cannot rely on some kindly person to help us. We extrapolate this view to the bigger picture of industry and the planet at our peril as it is far too simple. Yet extrapolate it we do.

From the earliest times of the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom, the law of employment began with the idea that an employee accepted the risk of their employment by agreeing to work and was therefore responsible for doing something that brought about injury to themselves. The injured person was, by definition, to blame for their injury.

Societal Attitudes to Injury and Disease

Historians have documented the social response to disease of the European cultures of the 14th century onwards, showing how disease was seen as retribution from God, imposed selectively to punish improper behaviour (Nohl, 1926). As faulty personal behaviour was seen as a causal factor, control strategies were developed which attempted to minimise such behaviour by the imposition of social punishments, some of which are summarised in Table 1.1. It is true that other control strategies documented by Nohl included the quarantine of sick people, suggesting a coexisting belief that disease could also be transmitted from one person to another. Nevertheless, faulty personal behaviour was seen as a significant reason for the disease.

There is some reason to believe that pre-scientific societies draw little distinction between injury and disease. In such societies, supernatural forces are believed to be responsible for any phenomenon for which no obvious cause exists. People with the power to understand or influence these supernatural forces become powerful within the community. Anecdotal information records that in Africa witch doctors have been known to be employed as safety officers on mines. Their role was to seek mercy from the supernatural forces to ensure the safety of miners at the beginning of a shift. I have been told that in some of the isolated areas of Papua New Guinea, injury, like disease, is seen as being a reflection of personal fault or disability of the stricken individual. I am also aware of individual cases in our own society where a serious injury resulting from an accident has led to the affected individual losing image, status and self-confidence as a result of the personally held belief that the accident in some way is evidence of a personal failing.

Table 1.1 Plague regulations in Europe

Source: Nohl (1926).

Since that pre-scientific time in Europe, medical science has developed an understanding of the causation of diseases based on the existence of microbiological organisms acting as vectors. Despite this scientific fact the social response to disease is not uncommonly affected by our perception of the role of behaviour in exposing ourselves to the vectors. The AIDS situation is a recent example in which religion and attitudes to sexuality have played dominant roles in community attitudes and control strategies.

During the industrial revolution the relationship of work with disease and injury attracted attention due to the squalid and dangerous conditions, the use of children and the visual evidence of maiming which became so prevalent on the streets of the great industrial centres. An interesting review of the period is to be found in Wigglesworth (1978). In England the first attempt to regulate these conditions was the Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 which aimed to provide a basic standard of life for the numerous poor and parentless children from workhouses who were used in industry. A legislative framework of the ‘prescribe, police and punish’ type developed from 1837 onwards (Eddington, 2006). In 1833, the first Factories Act was passed and the first four factory inspectors appointed to enforce it (HSE, n.d.). These inspectors recognised the need to fence the ubiquitous dangerous machinery to prevent serious maiming and deaths resulting from their use, with the result that in 1844 a revision of the Act created the first legislative requirement to guard machines. However, these requirements were resisted by employers on the basis that accidents were a natural part of work and that they could not be held responsible for the acts of their employees. The result was the development of a trio of mostly short-lived legal doctrines, namely:

1. Voluntary assumption of risk in which it was held that injury and health risks were inherent in the processes of industry and that when seeking employment in a particular industry the employee had in effect accepted that they would be exposed to the risks in that industry. Thus, the more common the injury in that industry the easier for the employer to invoke this doctrine in their defence.

2. Common employment, which held that an employer could not be held responsible if an injury to one employee was due to the negligent actions of another employee.

3. Contributory negligence, which held that employees had a duty to look after themselves and could be held negligent for not keeping a look out, or for some other personal failing.

Of these, only the last remains a feature of the common law to be found in many countries. An excellent documentation of occupational case histories covering the modern period in Europe is to be found in Weindling (1985). One such of particular interest is of the Welsh slate industry, which had a history from the 17th century to the late 1930s. In 1933 a study of tuberculosis ‘black spots’ indicated that the death rate per thousand population was 0.724 in England and Wales on average. In the slate quarrying districts of Wales it rose to 2.052 in one area and 1.718 in another.

In 1882 the tubercle bacillus was discovered by Robert Koch, showing that the disease had a physical basis similar to others. In the 19th century it had otherwise been generally regarded as an inherited disease of the poor. A link between the disease and exposure to the slate industry was suspected in the late 19th century and a government study in 1926 showed that the slate dust contained up to 50 percent quartz (silicon dioxide) which irritated the lung, causing a build-up of tissue. The conclusion was that this silicosis predisposed the miners to tuberculosis. The study also concluded that the miners’ tuberculosis was not less infectious than that of the public generally (as had been believed) and that consequently the miners were an important source of infection.

Interestingly, the medical practitioners of the area disagreed with these conclusions, with one even claiming that slate dust, far from being a problem, was beneficial to health. The more general view amongst medical practitioners of the cause of the high incidence was influenced by the perception of the time that tuberculosis was a social disease associated with poor hygiene conditions. However, the majority of their attention was focused on a number of other personal factors, particularly those listed in Table 1.2 (Bryder in Weindling 1985). The quarry owners also disagreed with the results of the study, although for different reasons, suggesting that slate dust was probably no more harmful than road dust and that the prevalence of tuberculosis in Wales may well be a coincidence. The owners warned that if all sorts of fantastic rules and regulations, incurring considerable expense, were foisted upon employers, the time would come when their business would not be worth continuing.

Table 1.2 Medical community perception of the causes of tuberculosis in Wales

All this discussion continued despite the discovery of the bacillus in 1882. It is noteworthy that the medical opinions of the time (apart from those of the medical scientists who researched the problem) conformed with the fault of the victim doctrine and the case study shows that the majority of the preventive effort was directed towards influencing these perceived behavioural causes of the disease. The most commonly advocated social solution to the problem was the education of housewives. This is despite the fact that regulations had been passed under the British Factories Act in 1864 and 1867 requiring the containment of dust at source. However, little was done to allay dust hazards even by the 1930s. Sadly, even the union was not active in promoting change because of the fear of unemployment if additional cost burdens were placed on the industry. At an individual level there was fear of unemployment if the disease was diagnosed, to prevent infection of others.

It seems that little change had occurred in society since the times of the great plagues, with social solutions being advocated even in the face of scientific knowledge indicating the need for engineering strategies. In 1986, in the New Scientist magazine, an almost exact parallel was reported in the wooden furniture industry around High Wycombe, England (New Scientist, 1986). Here the high incidence of nasal cancer has, on scientific evidence, been linked to exposure to some wood dusts. The factory owners were reportedly fighting hard to avoid having to provide respiratory protection to the employees, also on the grounds of excessive financial hardship. It was not reported what, if any, social causal factors were being implicated to remove the blame from the employers on to the workers affected.

The Birth and Growth of Organised Occupational Safety

In the USA, according to the National Society for the Study of Education (1926), ‘There was certainly no organised safety movement before 1910’. This date marks the time when, according to this source:

A few far-sighted employers began to realize that accidents were wasteful, that they interrupted production and that it was expensive to break in new men. They began to study their accidents, asking not ‘whose fault was it’ but ‘how could it have been prevented’. They concluded that, even though legally it might be negligence for a workman to put his hand into unguarded gears, nevertheless the simplest way to prevent such an accident was to guard the gears … They began to study every industrial operation from the standpoint of the safety of the workman, as well as of speed and economy of production, and of quality of the product.

Also according to this source, the first safety organisations began to be formed from this time, involving a safety committee of executives responsible for the direction of the safety programme, a safety engineer or director to carry out the work and committees of foremen and workers to report problems and suggest improvements. After guarding powered machinery (being the most obvious hallmark of the industrial revolution) they discovered that still some accidents remained and attacked these by education and promotion, emphasising the serious effects of an accident on the economic health of the organisation and the workman’s family.

In the 1920s in the USA, workmen’s compensation laws were also enacted, resulting in a direct charge on industry for injury to their workers leading to a greater interest in the safety movement in industry and, it is reported (National Society for the Study of Education, 1926, p. 7), even insurance companies became less interested in fighting claims and more in helping their insured to prevent them.

Also reported by this same source (p. 8) is the role of legislation. In the USA at that time, the role of labour departments was the enforcement of guarding legislation, but ‘this policy never produced results in accident prevention’ and it was replaced ‘in the more progressive state departments’ by a role of encouragement and assistance to industry and workers. No doubt this early attention to the guarding of machinery was a necessary outcome of the industrial revolution, essentially characterised, as it was, by the provision of previously unknown powered machinery.

By the early 1970s, however, the US Department of Labor formed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is today known for the publication of numerous prescriptive standards for the management of specific hazards as well as the general duties of employers to ‘keep their workplace free of recognized hazards’ (OSHA, 2012). In the USA, a full circle has been experienced, from prescription (of guards on machines) to organisational and consultative processes to prescription again, in the space of 50 years. It is interesting to note that the enlightened approach of consultation, adopted in the USA by the mid 1920s, took 50 years to be adopted across the Atlantic Ocean in the United Kingdom. It was only in 1974 that the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act of that date, arising from the 1972 report of Lord Robens (1972) into workplace health and safety, replaced the emphasis of government instrumentalities on inspection and the enforcement of prescriptive and hazard-specific regulations with providing for a process of consultation between employees and employers and setting up a commission (to determine strategy) and executive (to implement the strategy). The Act defined in detail the duty of care of employers to make sure their workplace was safe ‘as far as is reasonably practical’.

We now have the interesting spectacle of these two influential English-speaking developed economies each making use of different overall strategies for the management of occupational safety and health; one with prescriptive statements of the minutiae of risk control and the other supportive of the efforts of those exposed to the risks. As with all simplifications, it is entirely possible that the brevity of this comparison ignores the complexity these two jurisdictions have developed since the origins of their systems, but it is sufficient for the present purposes of sketching the history...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary: Definitions Reduce Confusion
• Abbreviations
• 1 History: The Historical Origins of the Management of Risks
• 2 Accident Theory: Dominos and Triangles – Enduring Influences
• 3 The Origins of Damage and Loss: Understanding the Processes
• 4 Risk: Damage and Loss Processes are Uncertain to Occur
• 5 Identifying and Describing Risks: Prevention Depends on Knowing What Could Happen
• 6 Risk Estimation: How Significant is the Risk?
• 7 Risk Control: Understanding Prevention and Cure
• 8 Risk Evaluation: How Safe is Safe Enough?
• 9 Classifying and Analysing Risk: Damage Aetiology through Logical Analysis
• 10 Risk Numeracy: Numerical Insights into Failures and Incidents
• 11 The Management of Risk: Strategy and Tactics
• 12 Engineering and the Management of Technical Risks: Prevention by Technical Management and Design
• Appendix 1: A Note on Accident Investigation: Why Did the Horse Bolt?
• Appendix 2: The Role of the Risk Adviser
• Bibliography
• Index