Research Team Offers Healthy Take on Workplace Wellness Programs

In a national survey of workplace wellness programs in municipal governments, researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas identified five best practices that reduced health care costs and improved productivity.

…The UT Dallas team identified five components of successful programs that reduced health care costs and improved productivity:

Workplace safety education and awareness programs are significant factors. Conscientious employees who understand risk help to prevent injuries and subsequent hospitalizations, Kiel said.

2019 ‘UAE Year of Tolerance’ - How Tolerant are UAE Motorists? (Research Study)

Dubai: 2019 marks the ‘UAE Year of Tolerance’ and this begs the question of how tolerant are we to each other on UAE’s roads? Obviously, a caring attitude is the foundation of a good road safety culture and one dimension of it is how tolerant motorists are to each other. This ‘first-ever’ behavior research study tries to shed light on motorists’ tolerance when it comes to true mistakes of others, deliberate bullying behavior, and what makes us fall into road rage.

“The idea of a positive road culture based on tolerance, empathy and ethics is very close to our hearts as the deepest-rooted value of our company is to practice ethically,” said Sudharsan Narasimhan, Chief Underwriting Officer of Noor Takaful | Ethical Insurance. “We’ve partnered with RoadSafetyUAE to research, evaluate and analyze this very subject as this is especially relevant with 2019, the Year of Tolerance.”

Thomas Edelmann, Founder & Managing Director of RoadSafetyUAE states: “We wanted to understand how tolerant UAE motorists are to each other in the case of true mistakes and in the case of deliberate acts of bullying, but also how prone we are to road rage and in which situations we are losing our temper. In order to craft the right communication and engagement initiatives to raise awareness and consequently better the behavior on the roads, we need to understand the motivators for the behavior we experience on the roads. Hence, this piece of research will add a lot of value in understanding.”

The Thorny Problem of 5G Security

Reading through the reports from any country with a well-developed system of rules and processes for safety reveals a recurring pattern. Nearly every incident is the result of people not following the rules; management not listening to concerns or pressuring employees to ignore safety to meet deadlines; or rules not being in place even when the safe approach already is known. These failings are cultural and are summed up well by this quote from ACSNI:

“The safety culture of an organization is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior … . … Organizations with a positive safety culture are characterized by communications founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety, and by confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures.”

U.S. Civil Aviation Fatalities Increase In 2018

“It is disappointing to see the fatal general aviation accident rate increase after two years with the rate below 1.0 per 100,000 flight hours,” said NTSB Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt. “Aviators in both the general aviation and Part 135 communities need to renew their emphasis on building and sustaining a safety culture, and recipients of our safety recommendations in this area need to implement those life-saving recommendations.”

The NTSB’s 2018 statistics show that deaths during Part 135 operations decreased from 16 in 2017 to 12 last year. The board also noted that 2018 included the nation’s first airline passenger fatality since 2009, which occurred when Southwest Flight 1380 suffered an uncontained engine failure.

China launches new crackdown on chemical safety

SHANGHAI, Nov 14 (Reuters) - China’s cabinet will begin a nationwide safety crackdown on its massive chemical industry after an official investigation into a deadly plant blast that killed 78 people and injured dozens more in March.

The explosion, at the Tianjiayi chemical factory in Yancheng in eastern coastal Jiangsu province, has already resulted in the closure of dozens of small plants and China expects to relocate more than 80% of hazardous chemical production by the end of 2020.

A meeting of the State Council chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday said an inquiry into the blast revealed local authorities had failed to implement safety rules or crack down on violations.

[Harmony Gold reduces losses, vows to put miner safety first]

(https://howebusinessdaily.com/2019/11/11/fin24-com-harmony-gold-reduces-losses-vows-to-put-miner-safety-first/)

Commenting on the financial year, Chief Executive Officer Peter Steenkamp extended condolences for the lost lives in mining accidents and reiterated goals to ensure a safe work environment. The lives of 11 employees were lost during the year.

“I wish to extend my personal, heartfelt condolences to the families, colleagues and friends of the employees who lost their lives in mining accidents in FY19.

“Together with each and every employee, my aim is to ensure safe production, by preventing fatalities and embedding a proactive safety culture. It is important that every employee returns home each day – both safe and healthy,” he said.

For the year ahead, Harmony intends to focus on “safe, profitable production,” he added. “Value – rather than volume – will translate to shareholder returns in the long term,” Steenkamp said.

OSHA FILING: Whistleblowers allege TVA downplayed concerns

The 36-page complaint levies a number of allegations at TVA, including that a “chilled work environment” existed within the utility’s Nuclear Oversight department. It also alleges TVA remains on regulatory “probation” with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “regarding its inability to establish and maintain a healthy safety culture.”

In May, Fults filed an allegation with the NRC noting “irregularities” in the way TVA management had addressed the chilled work environment at Watts Bar. The complaint goes on to say management also interfered with ECP investigations.

www.propublica.org/article/i…

“Any whistle-blowers who may have been fired, and maybe have a gag order pursuant to a settlement — who have complained about safety issues with regard to the 737 MAX — should be called to testify, with protective subpoenas, so the public can hear what they have to say,” he told the subcommittee. “The aviation software writers — do they have the same level of engineering safety culture as regular aviation engineers?”

followup aviation

There’s something unsettling about a private firm making powerful autonomous machines – but what’s scarier is who’s building them, and why

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/10/hyena-robots-marketing-boston-dynamics

Bootstrapping the narrative of robot apocalypse into discourse about real technology pervades the discourse of hi-tech. Elon Musk talks endlessly of the singularity; even the more measured Sundar Pichai anthropomorphizes AI. Ultimately, this distracts us from thinking about digital infrastructures built out of unaccountable practices. It makes it harder for us to think through complex cases, like when Uber’s self-driving car hit a pedestrian. As recent documents show, this had nothing to do with the robot car and everything to do with shoddy engineering and a bad safety culture.

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