4 The safety bureaucracy
I was working at a downstream oil site once, when I came across a document
elated to risk management. This, I thought, was nothing strange: after all, these
oil people can blow up their plant or burn things that weren’t supposed to burn.
They can kill themselves and a whole bunch of people in the neighborhoods sur-
ounding the site. Not to mention create spills and contaminations. So sure, they
have risk management going on all the time, and there are probably good, for-
malized, standardized ways in which that is done. The document I came across
was only a couple of pages long, which was unusual. Normally, they were much
longer than that. Intrigued, I turned over the first page to discover what the
isk assessment was about. Of all the risks facing the site, this must have been
the darkest and scariest of all. The risk assessment, in all seriousness, evaluated
the merits and demerits of supplying individually wrapped teabags in the office
eak room versus putting a box of unwrapped teabags on the counter. In an
industry that is used to thinking in terms of ba
iers and layers of defense, I
wasn’t surprising to find out – on the last page – that individually wrapped tea-
ags were deemed more hygienic and thus appropriate for the office staff. An
individually wrapped teabag, after all, has an extra layer of defense against the
gru
y hands that are fishing for one in the
eakroom. What this risk assess-
ment did not mention was that Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) solved the hazard a
long time ago. To be of any use at all, tea bags get dunked in (almost) boiling
water, which deals nicely with any of the imagined biohazards. And fascinat-
ingly, though unsurprisingly, the resources industry regulator could not give a
toss about risk assessing tea bags. The whole initiative was driven by the orga-
nization’s bureaucracy itself. What the risk assessment also didn’t mention was
that the demountable trailer that contained the
eak room and its quaintly
isk-assessed teabags could be wiped off the face of the earth in the kind of
Texas City explosion that, during the very same year, wrecked a similar site half
a world away, killing 15 people and injuring more than 180 others.
Making things difficult is easy
Risk assessing teabags is of course one of those “health and safety lunacies”
(Townsend, 2013, p. 59). And it’s not alone. A company that uses ‘grey’ (or rain)
water to flush its toilets, for instance, had its safety professionals commission,
organize and install signs that read “Non-potable water – don’t drink” above its
toilet bowls. Another had its traveling managers fill out detailed eight-page risk
The safety bureaucracy54
assessments for travel to all parts of the world before they were allowed to book
any trip – whether it was to Timbuktu or the next subu
over. Nobody ever
eally read the risk assessments (unless something bad happened on the way),
and signing them was a matter of the boss pencil-whipping the last page without
looking at any of the rest. But, as insiders said, the bureaucratic beast needed to
e fed – with paper. Another company had its engineers await approval for small
taxi fares from the weekly executive team meeting.
These are examples of what has been called a culture of stifled innovation, of
discouraged productivity, of risk aversion, of intrusive rules and petty bureau-
cracy (Hale, Borys, & Adams, XXXXXXXXXXMany have begun, in the words of Amal-
erti (2013, p. 114), “to realize the irony of the tremendous efforts that are
eing devoted to safety.” One of the ironies lies in the false sense of security.
As Amalberti has shown, there comes a point at which more rules no longer
create more safety. And more rules can mean more liability, not less. Writing
more internal rules can actually increase a company’s liability (and the liability
of its directors) when something goes wrong. After all, the more rules a com-
pany has said it should comply with, the bigger the chances are that it hasn’t
complied with at least some of them (Adams, 2009; Hale et al., 2013; Long,
Smith, & Ashhurst, XXXXXXXXXXThe growth in and of safety bureaucracy, and of
the many service offshoots o
iting around it, shows no sign of slowing. The
Office of the Chief Economist reported that Australia had 30,400 occupa-
tional and environmental health professionals in 2014, a 106% increase over
five years, and a four-fold increase since the 1990s. Worldwide, the number of
occupational-health-and-safety-certified companies in 116 countries where they
were measured more than doubled from 26,222 in 2006 to 56,251 in 2009
(Hasle & Zwetsloot, XXXXXXXXXXAs a manager in a professional association of mar-
iners summed up:
It’s amazing [how] many are working in safety. How many lectures we’ve been
to and listened to about how the world isn’t able to survive if we don’t have all
these safety companies. It surely has become an industry.
“Bullshit jobs”
Something bigger seems to be going on in the background. Anthropologists have
eflected on this in a
oader context of workplace and economic changes in the
West:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have
advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the
United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to
elieve he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And
The safety bureaucracy 55
yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to
figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have
had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in
Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives per-
forming tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The
moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a
scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it XXXXXXXXXXThese are
what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs.’
(Graeber, 2013, p. 10)
We can let that sink in. Just think of the person who did the teabag risk assess-
ment. And when you’re done with that one, here is another example. A con-
struction company recently had its health and safety department develop a
“working-at-a-desk checklist” to ensure compliance with ergonomic and health
and safety requirements it had mostly drawn up itself. Workers had to check
YES or NO to the following questions (the original working-at-a-desk checklist
uns for four pages):
Chai
1 Is the chair easily adjusted from a sitting position?
2 Is the backrest angle adjusted so that you are sitting upright while keying,
and is it exerting a comfortable support on the back?
3 Does the lumbar support of the backrest sit in the small of your back (to
find the small of your back, place your hands on your waist and slide your
hands around to your spine. The maximum curve of the backrest should
contract this area)?
4 Are your thighs well-supported by the chair except for a 3–4 finger space
(approx.) behind the knee (you may need to adjust the backrest of your
chair to achieve this)?
5 Is there adequate padding on the chair (you should be able to feel the sup-
porting surface underneath the foam padding when sitting on the chair)?
6 If you have a chair mat, is it in good condition?
Desk
1 Is your chair high enough so that your elbows are just above the height of
the desk (note: to determine elbow height relax your shoulders and bend
your elbows to about 90 degrees)?
2 Are your elbows by your sides and shoulders relaxed?
3 Are your knees at about hip level, i.e., thighs parallel to the floor (may be
slightly higher or lower depending on comfort)?
4 Is there adequate leg room beneath your desk? Do you require a foot rest?
The safety bureaucracy56
Screen
1 When sitting and looking straight ahead, are you looking at the top one
third of your screen?
2 Is your screen at a comfortable reading distance (i.e., approximately an
arm’s length away from your seated position)?
3 Can you easily adjust and position your screen?
4 Are all the characters on the display legible and the image stable (i.e., not
flickering)?
5 Do light reflections on your screen cause you discomfort (you may need to
adjust the angle of your screen)?
6 Do you wear bifocal glasses during computer work?
7 Do you have dual monitors at your workstation?
Keyboard
1 Is your keyboard positioned close to the front edge of your desk (approx-
imately 60–70mm from the edge)?
2 Is the keyboard sitting directly in front of your body when in use?
3 Does it sit slightly raised up?
4 If the keyboard is tilted, are your wrists straight, not angled, when typing?
5 Are the keys clean and easy to read?
Mouse/laptop
1 Are your mouse and mouse pad directly beside the end of the keyboard,
on your prefe
ed side?
2 Do you use a laptop computer for extended periods of time at a desk?
3 Is the screen raised so that the top of the screen is at eye level?
4 Do you use an external keyboard and mouse?
Desk layout
1 Are all the items that you are likely to use often within easy reach?
2 Is there sufficient space for documents and drawings?
3 If most of your work requires typing from source documents, do you
equire a document holder?
4 If you use a document holder, is it properly located close to your monitor
and adjustable?
5 Is your workstation set out to prevent undue twisting of your neck and
ack?
After completing these questions, the form had to be handed in to a Safety Pro-
fessional (capitalized on the original checklist), who then determined whether
The safety bureaucracy 57
action was required or not. It had to be signed by both the Safety Professional
and the Safety Manager (also capitalized) and then stored in the employee’s
personnel file (presumably for possible liability management down the line). In
one company, this checklist was introduced, and then the company introduced
‘hot desking,’ meaning people no longer had their own desks (Saines et al.,
2014). This meant that they were filling out this questionnaire (which took some