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Comment by jeromegv | Hacker News Reader

You are proving this is a management issue. You took steps to address the issue. Fired people who didn’t listen. The fact they thought they could do it without consequences means they never got into trouble by management at other job sites. If your industry has a culture of not following safety procedures it’s only because bosses don’t enforce it.

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Sure, in theory you are correct, but it misses the nuances of human reality.

Flipping back to my day job, a counter example is security people covering any edge case so that everything grinds to a halt or lawyers over processing everything and stifling creativity.

The same people that might grumble about something being a management issue sometimes also complain about bureaucracy and process when things go the other way.

There aren’t simple trade off free answers to this stuff.

Yes, a top-down safety culture entails some level of bureaucracy and process overhead. That is the price that must be paid for jobsite safety. No one is saying there's a free lunch.

If safety is cheap but overcoming culture is expensive, at some point it becomes misleading (wrt ethics of participants, not correct course of action) to say the problem is that management doesn't care enough to spend money on safety, even if management is the only lever we have to fix the issue.

Telling people to wear a harness is not "covering every edge case so that everything grinds to a halt". It's just ensuring that the bare minimum is being done to prevent workplace deaths.

I think the interesting part of the comparison was the following two sentences.

I think it's a misleading argument because it compares things that aren't alike.

On the one hand, we have management telling workers to use safety equipment that basically everyone agrees is necessary. That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, it's about preventing people from cutting corners.

On the other hand, we have clueless interns sending questionaires to vendors, who then tell their own clueless interns to fill them with some buzzwords, just to be filed away without anyone actually looking at the completed form, in order to check some compliance checkbox somewhere.

These two things are nothing alike.

That depends on what level of the RCA you are looking at it. It can be simultaneously true that workers dont want to wear them and bosses dont enforce it. Understanding both facts is important for risk reduction.

There were still no real consequences. At least today, that crew has a several month long waiting list and will just shrug and walk over to the next job. You really need to get OSHA involved and for it to start costing companies money.

What does OSHA do in this situation? The roofing worker was fired for safety violation but can find work elsewhere.

In this example it isnt about the company.

Unless I read it wrong, OP fired the whole company/crew, not individual workers.

The company is responsible for workers that are improperly trained or out of control. If the supervisor can't enforce workplace safety rules, then the supervisor isn't doing his job, and if the company does not have process in place ensuring the supervisor is doing his job, then the company needs to be fined, too.

I can't believe we have this attitude of throwing up our hands and saying "Aww shucks, ya just can't convince those darn individual machismo men to do their job right. What can ya do?"

OP wrote "One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him." He fired the offending worker, not the whole company. Though in general I agree regarding supervisors.

Yes I fired the specific worker. It was my own crew, not a 3rd party company.

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