Walk me through this “Safety Third” thing (2020)

Health and safety is used as a tool by reactionaries who lie about what it is and what it means in order to avoid thinking about how they may be harming other people.

> What I suggested in my post last week, was that Safety is not a thing to be “ranked,” but rather, a state of mind, to be applied as needed to a myriad of situations in varying amounts. But if we were to rank it, it would rarely be “first.” Were safety truly “first,” no level of risk would ever be encouraged or permitted, and no work would ever get done. Or play, for that matter.

I work in healthcare safety. I speak to many people with a legal, professional, regulatory duty around safety in English NHS settings. Every single one of them describes the problems with people who assume health and safety in the workplace is about banning unsafe practice, instead of being aware of and assessing risk.

A healthcare professional wants to set up a group activity (for example, a gardening group) for patients. They ask someone in their management chain and they get told "no, we can't do that, because health and safety. Don't let people touch mud. All those sharp tools! Too risky". They ask someone with a health and safety role and they got told "yep, go ahead. You might want to aware of these things, and it's probably a good idea to get people to wash their hands afterwards, and you'll want to count out the tools and count them back in again at the end, but we have no problems".

Here he destroys his own argument:

> On Dirty Jobs, I was struck by the number of safety professionals who repeatedly insisted that nothing was more important to them, than my personal safety. “Your safety,” they said, over and over again, “is our top priority.”

> I usually heard these words moments before I was invited to walk up the cable of a suspension bridge, or field test a stainless-steel shark suit, or climb into a bosuns chair to wash windows at the top of a high-rise. I still hear them today from pilots who invite me to strap myself in as they attempt to defy gravity in a pressurized aluminum tube that travels through the air at 600mph. And now Roger, I’m hearing them from you. You’re telling me safety must always be first, no matter the cost.

So people told him safety was their main priority, and then they strapped him into PPE and allowed him to do dangerous things, because we assess risk and do things that are risky but as safely as we can.

He'd have a point if he talked about faulty assessment of risk.

If you take a bit more risk driving, you get a bit more hazard to yourself and other road users. If you take a bit more risk with COVID-19, you get an epidemic with thousands of mainly elderly people dying in an overwhelmed medical system.

With COVID-19, the relationship between risk and hazard is nonlinear in a way that doesn't apply with most personal risk choices. Analogies with driving, climbing ladders, etc. are false.

Besides the obvious reductio ab absurdum seems quite uninformed.

While things need to be done safety is considered the highest priority because of an obvious reason: money. A single accident is often much more costly then all safety measures put in place.

> not trying to be provocative

That's exactly what he was trying to be.

> I’m simply wondering why [redacted]? It’s a sincere query.

I like most of the article, but I've dealt with too many sealions online for that statement not to raise my defenses.

At some point we decide to re-open things, or incrementally re-open, and there is obvious risk associated with that. Each of us will eventually decide to eat indoors again, but there is no guarantee. even with the vaccine, that you won't continue to spread the virus. There exists a point at which the risk becomes worthwhile. For me and my COVID pod, that's probably when the weather starts to get nice, though we'll discuss more as we approach that time.

And for the record, I am suggesting that "we should change the way we drive in order to save 40,000 lives".

> Here’s an honest question – would you be OK if the government reduced the posted speed limits by 50%, required all motorists to wear helmets, and outlawed all left turns? If not, why not? Doing so would save almost 40,000 lives a year.

Rhetorical devices like this one are always telling. Rowe expects -- assumes, really -- that the answer is "no". It's a foregone conclusion. My answer, even as a person who made a living driving at one point in my life, where timelier trips meant more money for me, is "yeah, that'd be fine". (Do I want to be forced to live in a world where I'm made to wear a helmet, have my speed capped, etc, while the rest of the world goes on as it does now? No, I don't, but that's both contrived and fails to deliver the value of safety baked into the premise, although I suspect that there's a non-zero chance that upon hearing my answer ("yes"), Rowe or at least some of the folks he entertains would resort to a dishonest retort in this vein.)

There's an ignored factor here, too. I've done plenty of work in the scope of Dirty Jobs. Another implicit assumption from the perspective of Rowe and the producers is that the pool of people willing to do a lot of these jobs is so small -- that things are the way they are because stuff has to get done, but so few are willing to do it (in comparison to the people who are okay sitting behind a desk in an admin role, for example). In fact, the induced lack of safety is one of the reasons why the pool is as small as it is.

Just look at policing for example, putting aside the matter of safety for a moment to focus on something broader. How many people are willing to be cops? How many people would be willing to be cops if it matched the picture of the noble job we put into kids' heads, instead of working in the police departments that exist in the US? My guess? Easily >2x. One of the main reasons not to be a cop comes from the set of people who'd be your colleagues, and the policies that your superiors carry out. (Who wants to be an enabler for a system that allows mediocrity to rise to positions of power and then claim that its' workforce's actions are almost always justified, even when they clearly miss the mark of justice?) Lots of the dirty jobs are like this, too. The things that make them "dirty" (unattractive) are often the result of the people not the the job, and are usually entirely avoidable.

(Just about the only situation I've seen where the working compromises to "safety" don't raise my hackles was building cabinets. Every nail gun in the shop was rigged to disable the safety, for speed reasons. This was avoidable to a degree that seems silly when compared to the compromises of other jobs. Even so, this is the one that was justified and reasonable, but I'll omit the explanation for why, because that's a topic in and of itself, and this comment is long enough already.)

This seems like a (perhaps deliberate, but I'll assume good faith) misunderstanding of what "safety first" means. It doesn't mean we should prioritise any safety improvement above any other objective. It simply means that before we start on a plan or action we should minimise any safety risk as low as is reasonable. Clearly we can debate what reasonable means, and it will differ for different people, but it isn't an absolutest point or mantra.

FYI, Mike Rowe has been financially backed by the Koch brothers, and is a known right-wing commentator. Obviously this is ad hominem, but not necessarily a fallacious one: Context and financial incentives are important, after all.

https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koc...