The Ethics of Safety

Introduction

The central topic in organizational safety is the ‘preservation of life’, and as such, it is a profoundly ethical goal, much like the Oath of Hippocrates in the medical profession. 

This paper will discuss the apparent fallacy of this principle, in the way that safety management is executed and operationalized. 

What is ethics in safety?

“Ethics is based on well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.”

In this narrow, generic definition, the keywords are: ‘what humans ought to do’ and this is the important aim of safety management as well, where the focus and emphasis of the profession is on people. On the surface of it, itis irrefutable, and should not even be questioned, but therein lies the problem…

Why is safety ‘non-ethical’ (as against unethical)?

Is safety an ethical endeavour? The first answer to this question is…no! In reviewing the history, methodology and goals of safety management, almost everything points to a functional discipline that is essentially an engineering approach, which is not directed towards ethical outcomes, but towards efficient outcomes. 

A well-known principle in safety management, the “ETTO” principle (Hollnagel), states that operations ‘vacillate’ between Thoroughness and Efficiency, and in effect, the more you lean towards the one, the further away you are from the other. Obviously. 

But when ‘thoroughness’ is seen as the equivalent to ‘safety’, the context changes, and the extent to which the operational manager deviates from thoroughness now becomes an ethical question, because now the principle of preservation of human life is increasingly compromised.

However, everything in the organization, from the way it is managed to how managers are rewarded/remunerated, is towards engineering efficiency, and the pursuit of thoroughness becomes a bolted-on process of controls and procedures and has little to do with the foundation of safety. The net effect is that safety becomes a separate discipline in the organization, with its own jargon, techniques and goals, counteracting the incline towards efficiency and promoting thoroughness. Safety is seldom seen as the ‘right thing to do’, mostly a balancing act and rarely viewed as ‘unconditional.  

Safety is not unethical, but rather lacks a clear basis in ethics and at best, non-ethical.

• Biased Approach

In traditional safety management, there is an abundance of ‘techniques’ for analysis of accidents, assessing risks, learning from accidents, and controlling the risky behaviors of the workers.  All of these are founded in the engineering or administrative disciplines and are directed towards the efficiency side. There are no ethical foundations in any of these, with safety (still today)  largely entrenched in the management models of Taylorism, where the main focus was/is to view the human operator as an ‘asset’ to be exploited, as a production element to be optimized, and as a hazard to be controlled. Many organizations still (proudly!) proclaim that “our people are our greatest asset”, and in safety, in the terms of the Safety II jargon, a capability to be ‘harnessed’.

• Human ‘fallibility’

The ‘control of workers’ is traditionally a large part of the overall effort, because their behaviors are seen to be the ‘tipping point’, where safe systems and processes are undermined and destabilized by ‘risk-taking’ – and this paradigm still defines current safety philosophy. Even though the more recent trends of ‘New View’ or Safety II criticize the labelling of the worker as the problem, they have progressed only as far as stating (correctly) that human fallibility is a reality and should not be scapegoated. They do not offer much in terms of practical deployment and have no ‘new’ techniques to change the outcome or the original stereotype of ‘human failure’, other than repeatedly saying it.

Most organizations are still conducting ‘accident investigations’ in which workers do not escape blame, and the prevailing philosophy in safety is still a behaviorist view: workers make mistakes, they have accidents because they are complacent, they are rushing, they don’t keep their minds or eyes on the job, they make poor choices, etc. The New View method of ‘learning teams’ tries to ameliorate the investigation process, to avoid blaming the human operator, but still has the Efficiency tag around its neck.

There are no ethical foundations in this approach, that values humans as capable, compassionate or in other holistic terms.  

• Systems for control

Most safety management or behavioral systems have the same engineering foundation, which is largely the deployment of standard operating procedures, checklists, regulation of conditions, deployment of safety legislation, and above all, the enforcement of these, to attain ‘compliance’. In the process of this enforcement (neatly rephrased as ‘work-as-imagined’), there is clearly little room left for individual choice, because workers don’t get to choose when to comply, or which rules to accept – for the greater good. Even when, like the wearing of a seatbelt in a car (or a Covid mask in a shop), there is no greater good built into the compliance, other than the potential cost exerted on society (the company) if you are injured/fall ill.

This again, is an efficiency issue and not based on ethical considerations. 

• Behavioral foundation

A valuable comparison can be made with an associated functional discipline, quality management. Previously, during the Taylor era, quality was an outcome that was achieved through checks, inspections and downstream controls – added on to the production process. The quality revolution was a change in the basic methodology which moved the process of improvement upstream, where it was built into the operational processes, as against bolted on to them, and used basic statistical methods to decrease the production system’s variability, and hence improve quality. The functional discipline of quality management disappeared, and so did the quality inspectors, managers, gurus, consultants, etc. Tremendous efficiency and thoroughness have been achieved. 

The safety function partly achieved the same improvement through process safety but has not changed the other fundamentals. A review of Demings 14 Principles shows that none of these has been established in safety – especially, glaringly missing: “Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship”. This principle espouses that people are able and willing to contribute, to be masters of their craft and can be given authority to make decisions. In safety, particularly in Behavior Based Safety (BBS), the most popular approach, we deploy methods to coerce and control behavior, we ‘gather’ employees in representative committees, we demand reporting of problems, even down to giving employees quotas, we reward people for not breaking rules and for not having accidents and we subject them to “peer observation processes”. This is a brutal, or at least a subtle, exploitation of people with coercion towards the organizational goals.  BBS has attempted valiantly to erase evidence of its brutality, by claiming, retrospectively, that it always had a systems or cultural methodology, or a person-based (Geller) not behavior-based focus, but the methods remained largely unchanged.

There is very little said about safety as a principle of care, of well-being, or about valuing the human being, morality of personhood and compassion. Safety II professes to do that, but it has  not changed significantly the way safety is being done! 

And now, safety is rapidly disappearing into the broader ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) focus of the organization – which is largely about fiduciary duties, disclosure, and again, regulation and compliance.

• Metrics

The most non-ethical aspect of safety is to be found in the way we establish metrics, or key performance areas, and how we set the system up in such a way that employees must achieve these ‘deliverables’. This can range from targets of accident rate improvements, or days without lost time accidents, reduction in Reportable Injury Rates – all with the apparent objective to prevent our employees from being injured. 

We ‘dress’ these up with slogans, such as “Nobody gets Hurt” (ExxonMobil) or “Everyone goes home in the same way they came to work” (used by almost every manager out there). The most condescending of them all is “your family cares about you”, which is still rife in the industry. On closer analysis of these and others, there is a central topic missing, and that is who is “cared about”. The message of care for the well-being and for valuing our people as human beings is not there or at best is a pretence.

Rob Long points out that a very well-known model, the Bradley Curve, set up by Du Pont, and widely used, is at its very basis grossly non-ethical, to the point of even being unethical. Its assertion is that the reduction in injury rates is associated with increasing levels of maturity, from a basic level, past a dependent level, past the independent level where individual choice and self-care prevails, to the highest level of mutual care, and others keeper (care of others.) This appears to be ethical, but the premise itself is however false, in that the reductions in injury rates are still the key metric, and were/are largely achieved through a reduction of reporting (modified work, statistics fudging, injury hiding), or as a ‘contraction’ of events because of a myriad of external controls, technology or apparatus (e.g. fall arresting harnesses, that prevent workers who are still falling from being a recordable injury). 

But more importantly, in the Bradley model, individual choice is overtaken and/or suppressed by “Organizational pride”.  It subverts scrutiny, challenge, freedom, honesty, transparency and daring to be different.

• The hypocrisy of zero

The actual pursuit of zero cannot be judged as non-ethical, because it captures the end-goal of ‘preservation of life’. But in reality, it is the statement of a false or illusionary goal of perfection, that sets an immediate mental trap for the organization, and crucially, for the front-line operators who are compelled by these expeditions to control risks, and, if events occur, to minimize bad news as much as they can. Clearly not the working conditions for an organization who wants to ‘learn, survive and grow.   

It results in a great deal of fudging and manipulation of data and performance indicators, not only in industries (like in construction, services) that are dependent on contracts from clients who insist on low/zero accidents in the contract selection, but also in organizations that must satisfy the governance of their Boards and investors. 

Acknowledging the “impossibility of zero” is interpreted as unethical, while pursuing it is leading employees on a religious pathway, a nirvana that they will inherit, as long as they show good (read: compliant) behaviour along the way. This creates the delusion that is rife in many organizations, that we ‘know we possibly can’t reach it, but we will continue to strive for it” and that the end justifies the means.

The Zero Vision is prevalent in every aspect of human life and endeavour…zero emissions, zero carbon, zero sugar, zero discomfort, zero virus…and it is becoming a hysteria that grips our thinking – in the servitude of which we cannot escape. 

The goal of zero itself is not unethical, but the attainment of it produces a brutal regime of control and unprincipled manipulation, and of human indignity. It inevitably results in a range of actions that can only be interpreted as fear mongering. A case in point, at a recent workshop with a large corporation, the CEO asked the audience (employees) to raise their hands if they don’t believe in zero harm…and when no one (predictably) reacted, he said: “Good, because if you don’t, you will not work at this company any longer.” and the next speaker praised the CEO for his passion for safety!

The zero vision espouses a magical world of perfection, righteousness and flawlessness, which is farcical. To continue the farce, employees and leaders alike engage in the pretence of perfection, as was the case when Transocean management on the Deep Water Horizon drilling rig pretended to BP that they had achieved the (impossible) target “7 years with out injury” and the BP management pretended to believe them with a reward ceremony, the night of the explosion…

In a recent interview, a dozer driver at a mining operation, where the vision of zero harm (inevitably) resulted into a program of Zero Scratches, summed up the non-ethical issue as follows. “In this company, on safety…management is lying to us…and we are lying to them”.

The most unethical aspect of the zero vision is that it sets a numerical goal into infinity and as such, a trap of infinite and continuous failure. It can never be achieved, because it simply cannot be defined: for how long must you ‘be at zero’ to qualify as zero?

It must rank as the most negative, most depressive, most destructive goal that we could have come up with …for safety!

The statement (falsely attributed to Albert Einstein) that “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that is counted, counts” rings hard and harshly, but we don’t (want to) hear it.  

Final words

In summary, the intent and purpose of safety is profoundly ethical, and the accompanying, typical, corporate vision cannot be denied as such. 

The approach, methodologies, and techniques (the application and deployment) are unintentionally, but viciously non-ethical and given the inherently coercive focus and outcome of these, verging on unjust and imprudent. The impact of these is a delusion of control and a paralysis of protection, that actually increases the threat to employees’ wellbeing.

The promise and demand of the zero vision is, cult-like, unequivocally destructive, and therefor unethical.  ‘Safety’ in the modern business is now a drift from Hippocrates to hypocrisy, from protection to pretention, from well-being to farce, from dare to achieve to terrified of failure.

The measurement of safety is downright false, farcical and routinely fudged, creating a mirage of safety, and enticing both management and employees to be willing or inadvertent participants in a ‘game of thrones’ – how do we ensure that Good (Thoroughness, we the safety professionals) triumph over Evil (Efficiency, the engineers and managers) and satisfy the Overlords with our glowing Reports. 

As we are stumbling from one safety era to another, from Safety I to Safety II, to the next Safety, grandly announced in book after book, and paper after paper, conference after conference, are we just changing one cult for another? Yet, the way in which each subsequent cult subdues their believers, just gets renamed, rebadged and recycled. 

It is just a new season…new players, but it’s the same old game.