Seth Godin, safety and bagels

Last night I was just catching up on a few blogs that I try to regularly read and I was shocked when I read a post from Seth Godin about his near- death experience in a bagel mixer.

It is amazing to me how many people have serious accidents at their jobs and yet how society's attitude towards workplace safety is apathetic at best.

Although hundreds of thousands of people are injured in the workplace every year in North America there does not seem to be any urgency to stop the bloodshed– in fact it seems as though we accept these kind of injuries as our initiation fee into the world of the working.

Whenever I am doing a junior high school presentation I usually ask the students how many of them know someone who has been seriously injured at their job – usually almost every student raises their hand.

Lately, I have been asking myself – why doesn’t safety matter to more people? I have come up with a few ideas:

1. We live with the Sesame Street concept that “everyone makes mistakes” - so we believe that workplace accidents are just regular part of working life.
2. Although we can accept minor accidents, we seem to feel immune to more severe accidents. (We don’t see that our acceptance of the small incidences are in fact what lead to the more serious accidents at work.)
3. We don’t want to think about negative things and we are not forced to.

I am sure there could be other reasons why safety doesn’t matter to more people...? (What are they? Let me know, please!) I am hoping though as the profile of workplace safety is raised that more people will begin to see that we don’t have to accept near brushes with death at work– especially not to make an “everything bagel”.