The Cost of Safety

What is the true cost of safety? I was just reading a chapter from my book titled Winning the Safety Commitment. The chapter titled Hot Buttons covered finding the right hot buttons to push when you are endeavoring to sell a safety program to your employer. Money is one of those hot buttons. Somehow I have always found that corporations fear the loss of money and if you can somehow demonstrate how much money a corporations loses when they have a serious injury on the job then just maybe you might get through even those bean counters who seem to specialize in idea blocking. . I listed eleven hidden cost of accidents or serious incidents and such but one thing I found interesting in my own work was the fact that at the time I wrote the article the average corporation was earning about 5% on sales. If a workers comp case cost you $150,000 then it would take about $3 million in sales just to pay that one part of the cost of an injury. When you factor in other hidden costs such as retraining a new worker, lost production, medical costs, costs of investigation, absenteeism, loss of employee loyalty, overtime, cost of added state and federal investigations and those are just a few you could soon run that $150,000 into a cool million dollars. You do the math if you care to but I’d stop right there. Unsafety is a rotten investment. I recall flying into Atlanta one day and having lunch with the president of a major American railroad and I learned that they had brought in some 500 workers from all over their system, put them up with private rooms at a first class hotel and gave them the first class treatment. I remarked that they must have made quite an investment in that meeting and I was informed that the meeting was costing over a million dollars and that wise railroad president remarked, “And we plan to spend even more next year. We find that this is one of the wisest investments we make all year long.” Oh, if there were a million corporate president in this world with such wisdom.

Recently I offered our readers this book free and a number of you took me up on the offer. It now sells for $29.95 plus $7 shipping. I just wanted to demonstrate that you can’t even give away a 420 page book that could have a giant impact on the readers future these days. The title is Winning the Safety Commitment and my phone is 919 732 6994. You can e-mail me at artfettig@aol.com.