Now is the time for fabricators to evaluate shop floor safety

Summer isn’t here yet, but it’s close enough to start (or finish) planning for it.

Whether your plans tend to be extravagant or modest, you’re probably going to schedule at least a little time away from work. Depending on your budget and appetite for adventure, a couple of weeks of backpacking in the Himalayas might sound pretty good, but then again, it’s hard to beat a few long weekends at home and a couple of short trips in the local area. Either way, most of us are likely to spend some time thinking about it long before it starts and well after it’s over. Nothing like daydreaming in anticipation of it and reveling in memories afterwards.

If you run a business, you’re probably also going to give no small amount of thought to covering the shifts of people who are out of the office, looking to see who’s been cross-trained and how thoroughly, writing a schedule, and maybe rewriting it once or twice as things come up (“Hey, I just found out my cousin’s getting married on July 5—that’s a Friday—and I want to leave on July 3 so I don’t have to travel on a holiday,” and this leaves you wondering if this guy even has a cousin or if he just thought of a reason for a five-day break from work).

Anyway, we all know that more people do more driving, more boating, more swimming, more cooking out, and generally more of everything during the summer months. Doing more activities leads to having more accidents. A report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration titled “Trend and Pattern Analysis of Highway Crash Fatality By Month and Day” shows that the number of traffic fatalities tends to be at the highest from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s not just driving and leisure activities, of course. People do more yard work, build more decks, do more landscaping, and through the course of such projects, use more power tools than at other times of the year. This is as good a time as any to slip a reminder or two about summer hazards into your company’s safety briefings.

Do accident rates rise at work during the summer? You bet.

According to a Bureau of Labor statistics report titled “The Seasonal Timing of Work-Related Injuries,” workplace injuries are at their highest during July. Of course the report is written in dry prose, is replete with references, and begins with lengthy explanation of the statistical methods used to arrive at the conclusions, but it’s mercifully short at just 11 pages and the conclusions are easy to find. The bottom line is that the safest month at work is December; according to the index used in this report, the tally is 0.86. June and July are the worst at 1.09 and 1.12, respectively.

This doesn’t mean that we should be more safe in the summer; we should strive for zero injuries throughout the entire year. It does mean that we should be more cognizant when risks increase, and we know they increase during the summer months.