A New Safety Age

Improving workplace safety is good for everyone, but issues and strategies can vary between younger and older employees

During factory safety audits, Michael Warren uses his “gotcha stick,” which has the dimensions of a human arm, to detect fencing that’s too skimpy or a light curtain with insufficient resolution. If Warren, a product manager for safety components and safety controllers at Omron Automation Americas in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, is able to bypass the safety measures and reach a machine’s work area, that’s a “gotcha” that needs to be fixed.

Warren’s efforts to promote manufacturing safety are more important than ever due to the ongoing worker shortage that has grown worse since the advent of COVID-19. Safety-focused plants and shops can improve quality and efficiency, and leaders who employ smart safety strategies are more likely to attract and retain workers, experts noted.

While work-related injuries persist (see sidebar on previous page), manufacturers are stepping up their efforts—with growing success—to prevent accidents. Efforts range from safety laws, industry standards, and audits to worker training and plant safety engineers.

Job satisfaction, including workplace conditions and safety, is especially important for Millennials (people born from 1981-1996) and younger workers.

“When you consider the defining moments of these workers’ lives—events like the Columbine High School shooting, 9/11, etc.—it only makes sense that safety is a priority to them,” stated an article on Alabama’s Columbia Southern University’s website. “It’s also important to note that many younger workers are among the first generation of children to have been closely supervised and provided with safety gear for common childhood activities. To them, taking safety precautions is simply a fact of life, something they have done since they first learned to ride a bike while wearing a helmet.”

In addition to tragedies such as Columbine, social media and the 24-hour news cycle also shape younger workers’ perceptions of safety.

“In this day of social media and instant information, the word would get out very quickly (that) this is a dangerous place,” Warren said. “When employers are trying to attract new candidates, it’s not going to be hard to learn about a dangerous company.”

He’ll get no argument from John Spik, technology coordinator at Ferndale Safety (Mirabel, Quebec), which produces machine safety systems. “I believe the new generation is expecting, right from the get-go, a safe and clean environment,” he said. “Besides that, it helps retain existing workers when they feel a lot better from knowing the employer cares about their safety and comfort.”

The phenomenon plays out with Ferndale’s own hires in its small manufacturing department, where workers are provided with ergonomic anti-fatigue floor mats, according to Spik, noting that management encourages suggestions on how to improve safety and ergonomics.

“And this may seem silly, you know—safety glasses,” he added. “I’ve been to companies where they give you the most uncomfortable safety glasses and you’re expected to wear them for eight hours a day, right?”

Comfortable eye protection is no small matter to Spik, who distributes five or six different pairs and looks for feedback on which are the most comfortable.

“Those are the little things that keep and attract talent for sure,” he noted.

Warren will sometimes do a walk-through in a plant prior to a formal assessment by one of his company’s safety assessors. He’s there to collect first impressions and look for low-hanging fruit in terms of safety.

“I walk around with customers, and they ask, ‘So, how am I safety-wise, you know, do you see a lot of problems?’ things like that,” Warren continued. “You start walking out on the manufacturing floor and you instantly see if they require PPE (personal protective equipment). Did they offer you earplugs and safety glasses? Are the floors marked off for walking lanes, robot lanes? Perhaps they were marked out once upon a time but now they’re worn out.”

For Warren, the way a factory presents itself to and treats its guests is a big “tell” for how they view safety requirements. Serious organizations offer safety glasses, ear protection, and a hardhat.

“And you instantly get a feeling that yes, these people are conscious of safety and looking out for visitors and their people,” he said.

Despite the persistence of injuries, illnesses, and deaths in America’s manufacturing plants, the industry overall has become safer, according to OSHA.

“In roughly half a century, OSHA and our state partners, coupled with the efforts of employers, safety and health professionals, unions and advocates, have had a dramatic effect on workplace safety,” according to OSHA’s website. Worker deaths were down to 13 a day in 2020, compared with 38 fatalities per day in 1970. Injuries and illnesses were down, too, to 2.7 per 100 workers in 2020 from 10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972.

This likely isn’t surprising to William Howard, president of Stability Technology Inc., a full-service machinery consultancy in Charleston, S.C. Howard, who estimates that he’s visited hundreds of factories during his career, regularly talks to onsite workers to learn about changing safety concerns.

“I think there is an emphasis in most factories towards improving safety,” said Howard, who has a doctoral degree in engineering. “I think there’s an emphasis in new machinery toward providing as safe a machine as possible. I think that the number of factories that I go into that seem like they’re doing everything right seems to be increasing as opposed to 25 years ago.”

Like Warren, Howard gets an initial impression when he walks into a facility for the first time. Among all of the factories, there are just some that are humming with activity, with all of its lines working, he said. He can see that safety regulations are in place, maybe even spot a sign proclaiming, “340 days since our last accident,” or a similar statement.

“And you walk into these factories that are efficient, and well guarded and maintaining the sort of safety standards that I would like to see, and these usually seem to have the workers that are the most focused and appear to have the highest morale (and are) happiest with their jobs,” he said. “That’s anecdotal as opposed to a study. But that’s what I found.”

Worker retention is not part of his line of work, but Howard agreed that a safe workplace may even encourage older workers to stay on the job longer if they’re more engaged and happier in their careers.

Conversely, factories that seem less safe—or aren’t doing everything they could to protect workers—appear to have employees who are more disengaged, Howard observed.

“All of the pieces work together,” he said.

Warren recalled a company in Maine with a group of older workers who did precision assembly work under illuminated magnifying glasses. The work wasn’t particularly heavy, but its repetitive nature took a toll on the employees’ hands and bodies nonetheless.

“The reason I was in there was they were looking for a way to get that particular part of the manufacturing process automated and have safety around it,” he said. “So that worker would sit there literally in the same seat, but instead of doing all that minute articulation with their fingers, day after day, year after year, the collaborative robot next to them is doing that hard work.”

The workers became the inspectors.

“And the company’s emphasis was, ‘These are very experienced people, we don’t want to lose them, we want to retain them. But how do we take the skill set they have and still use that yet not contribute to beating up their bodies anymore?’” he asked.

Automation, whether robotic or an automated feature on a machine or line, also can promote safety and attract workers, sometimes by literally lightening their load.

Warren noted factory and fulfillment center workers used to have to drag around baskets or totes, work that’s been taken over by automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots.

Anthony Kersten, director of engineering at Guelph, Ontario-based ZCS AKIA Engineers Inc., noted the pandemic greatly reduced demand for many manufacturers that subsequently laid off production staff. During the downtime, these companies increased their levels of manufacturing automation, and the worker shortage is driving them to automate even more.

“Generally, we see an increase in safety as a side effect of a drive to update and automate processes,” he said. “Reducing workers’ exposure to hazardous processes is a (positive) side effect of automation, as is updating older processes with newer equipment.”

Workers may be safer and the employers’ risk lower, but those who work in a more automated factory still may be relegated to the kind of work that progressive manufacturers see as more suitable for robots.

“Part of the risk assessment is an evaluation of the frequency of access and the possibility of avoidance of hazards,” Kersten explained. “Removing people from processes by automation helps reduce risk assessments. However, it may increase exposure to ergonomic hazards as it leaves workers to do repetitive tasks that might not be easy to automate.”

There are many ways automation can alter processes and help protect workers. For example, Bosch Rexroth Corp., Hoffman Estates, Illinois, makes devices that provide the “smarts” to a controller and safety I/Os that can keep people out of robotic cells or at least slow down work in the cell to reduce the danger it may pose to an intruder.

In the past, the decision to wait for production in a robotic cell top to stop before opening a gate and entering would have been left up to a human operator, said Dan Barrera, product manager at Bosch Rexroth.

“But because you’re letting the human being make those decisions, the human being can also open the gate before or without stopping production,” he said. “Now those locks for the gates can be electronic and fully automated for safety. Which means that the minute that I go into that lock and I open it, I’m actually triggering an input into the system. And this input automatically will stop production, because it actually knows that the gate opened.”

The action will also create a log and trigger an alarm.

“And in some cases, to clear the alarm, you have to reset or reboot the whole line, which takes a lot,” Barrera explained.

Production doesn’t necessarily need to stop. Slowing it down, just as cobots are designed to slow down when they’re near humans, may be all that’s necessary.

For example, safety mats equipped with weight-detecting sensors are placed near machines. If a sensor is activated, it creates an input into the safety controller and tells it a person is too close to the machine or to the “danger zone” around it. Production can keep going because the person isn’t in immediate danger, but slowing down the machine, cell, or line gives the person time to react and avoid getting hurt, Barrera said.

Automation can also enhance ergonomics. Spik said Ferndale’s engineering department is working on automating doors that are part of a machine guarding system. The workers have to open and close the doors many times during a work shift to load a new part in the machine.

“So what we’re doing is automating that door, where it opens and closes automatically bringing that machine to be fully automated,” he said.

Ironically, older workers may push back on an employer’s safety efforts.

“It was the guys that worked on the same machine for 10 years, or 20 years, they would be like, ‘What are you doing to my machine?’” Spik recalled. “They’d say things like, ‘You might as well close the business... now we can’t be competitive because it’s going to take five seconds longer to do something.’”

The retrofits required educating the older worker about safety, Spik noted. “In the end, they liked these things we put on there—because a lot of the time if they use cutting fluid it’s no longer splashing on them,” he added. “They’re not getting hit by red hot chips anymore; they’re not burning themselves.”

If newer machines are safer, as Howard pointed out, what about all of the older machines still in use in factories? Can legacy machines be brought up to current standards to promote worker safety and keep a manufacturer’s reputation for an emphasis on a safe workplace intact?

“It can be harder to guard an old machine,” Howard said. “Oftentimes, you can’t just call up a company because the company that made a 30-year or 40-year-old machine might not be in business,” he said. “So getting a new guard requires fabricating it or creating something special, which could be harder.”

At times, the best solution is to use administrative controls, like keeping people out of areas, Howard said.

Warren pointed out a potential safety snafu with older machines, and the need for additional safety assessments as they’re modified to stay in good working condition.

“Something that was made in the '50s can still be up and running now,” he said. “And they may have been refurbished. That doesn’t mean that they added compliance safeguards and a stop-time analysis was done, that a full risk assessment was done after the last refurb was done.”

That’s not one of his “gotchas,” but it is a safety tip that enhances an employer’s reputation in the eyes of current and future employees.

In 2020, there were 135,900 nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses involving days away from work in private industry manufacturing, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This works out to a rate of 113.3 nonfatal injuries and illnesses per 10,000 full-time workers.

The manufacturing industry accounted for half of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) top 10 most frequently cited safety violations during the 2021 fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2020 through Sept. 30, 2021). Such occurrences include violations related to respiratory protection, hazard communication, control of hazardous energy by lockout or tagout, powered industrial trucks, and machinery or machine guarding.

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