Safety Culture in the News

Safety Culture in the News

'3 didn't make it home tonight'

‘3 didn’t make it home tonight’

Experts have pointed out that the lack of safety culture and safety climate are the direct causes for workplace accidents in construction sites. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in the U.S. defines these terms as follows:

“Safety culture” involves deeply held but often unspoken safety-related beliefs, attitudes, and values shared by employees and employers that affect how things are done in an organization. Safety culture is a subset of, and clearly influenced by, organizational culture. Organizations often have multiple cultures or subcultures, and this may be particularly true in construction.

A “safety climate” is defined as the shared perceptions of safety policies and procedures by members of an organization at a given point in time, particularly regarding the adequacy of safety and consistency between actual conditions compared to espoused safety policies and procedures. Homogeneous subgroups tend to develop shared perceptions while between-group differences are not uncommon within an organization.

What’s not said, especially in Korea, is that both safety culture and climate are themselves subsets of the national culture on this issue, one that doesn’t believe that human lives are paramount to economic activities. It’s one of the unspoken and pernicious side-effects of the Miracle on Han River in which the “Ppali, Ppali” and “Get it done at all costs” spirit took precedence over human safety and lives. This wasn’t just rogue companies cutting corners. This was a national philosophy and policy to prioritize economic growth at all costs. Human lives, especially those of the blue-collar laborers, were a commodity that could be cheaply replaced. Safety was a luxury that couldn’t be afforded.