Opinion: Wear Your Seat Belt — or Else

By Mac McQueen

Manager of Health, Safety, Environment

and Department of Transportation Compliance

Wyoming Casing Service

This Opinion piece appears in the Jan. 9 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

I am the health, safety and environment manager for a business with about 60 employees who operate under some of the most hazardous workplace conditions possible in the “lower 48” states. But despite the hazards that follow our employees on a daily basis, we operate safely and have an excellent TRIR (total recordable injury rate) and EMR (experience modification rating).

I mention those ratings because they are a measurement of our company’s successful commitment to the safety and well-being of those who depend on us for their paychecks. Without a doubt, however, the single most dangerous thing our employees do in the course of our workday is commuting to and from the job.

As of this writing in mid-December, four of our employees have been involved in three serious vehicle collisions in 2011 — none of which occurred while on duty.

Two of the accidents were single-vehicle crashes in which our employees were unharmed, but their private vehicles had to be written off. The other accident, however, was a good deal more serious, with two employees sustaining injuries serious enough to disable both for several months.

One of the injured was a single mother carpooling to work with the other employee when they were involved in an offset head-on collision. The driver of the other vehicle fell asleep at the wheel while moving in excess of 55 mph, jumped the center line and plowed into our employees’ SUV.

Each of those incidents could have been far worse — and in each case, the employees credited our company’s training and insistence on seat-belt use as a strong contributing factor in their survival.

At every safety meeting and whenever our crews are leaving the yard or returning after a completed project, they are reminded to buckle up. They also are reminded that seat belts save lives and that failure to use them in a company vehicle is cause for immediate termination.

That’s right — anyone caught not wearing a seat belt in a company automobile or truck is fired.

That may seem a harsh response to resisting seat-belt use, but this is what I tell employees during training: “I cannot control how you safeguard yourselves and your ability to continue to support your families outside the workplace, but I can — and will — ensure that each of you has the maximum odds of returning safely at the end of each day to those you love. If you are unwilling to take that step for yourselves and those most important in your lives, then I cannot in good conscience place you in a position where your actions affect your co-workers.”

That’s really what it comes down to: Seat-belt use is a measure of an employee’s willingness to operate within the safety guidelines set by their company and their industry.

As we see it, seat-belt use is a measure of character: If an employee is operating in defiance of company policy — and possibly the law — in such a simple thing, what else does that employee do that is unsafe in the rest of his or her work? Cutting corners in procedures? Speeding? Falsifying hours-of-service records?

And what is your exposure as an employer where any such lapse is concerned?

Of course, every time the issue of seat belts is raised, I hear the tired story of someone’s wife’s best friend’s hairdresser’s second cousin who would have been killed had they worn their seat belt in this or that wreck. And every time that happens, I find myself repeating the same math: Yes, in some vanishing, very rare instances, injury is exacerbated by seat-belt use. However, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, seat-belt use results in a 50% reduction in injuries and fatalities. Ignoring those odds puts you at great peril.

Putting aside the human cost, this poses a massive loss for an employer. The loss of a key employee for any length of time places a terrible burden on a company. Extending that loss is an unnecessary and onerous expense in both the bottom line and safety. It involves shifting personnel and inevitably placing someone less experienced into a new role without proper preparation.

In an accident, lives can be irrevocably altered. An injured employee may require retraining or job transfer or even find himself or herself unemployed in the event that no slot can be found to match the limitations imposed by the accident. These painful considerations all play into a manager’s thinking when dealing with the aftermath of a wreck — including those not actually work-related.

In our situation, two employees were spared significant injury. But, months later, we are still trying to help piece back together the lives of the two injured in that head-on collision.

The single mom had catastrophic injuries that included a shattered ankle and broken arm and left her unable even to use crutches for two months. At this writing, the other employee has been back at work for three weeks, but the single mom is still recovering.

But without seat belts, we would be talking about memorial services, not figuring out how to help these workers reconstruct their lives. When I went to scene shortly after the accident, it was like an illustration for Dante’s Inferno — if Dante could have imagined two completely mangled, almost unrecognizable SUVs. But the important point here is that all three occupants of both vehicles were belted, and all three survived, even the driver so rudely awakened when he crashed into our employees’ vehicle.

Seat belts save lives.

Seat belts prevent or minimize injury.

Seat belts are just good business.

Wyoming Casing Service, New Albany, Pa., installs oil and gas well casings — the alternating layers of steel and cement that line and reinforce drill holes.