The importance of safety can’t be underestimated. Providing personal protective equipment (PPE) is essential in industries that require employees to work in harsh and hazardous conditions, from manufacturing to transportation, construction and more.

Imagine that on the first day at your new job, the foreman tosses you a harness and a 6-foot lanyard and says, “Be careful out there!” That may seem like an extreme example of a woefully inadequate fall protection training program, but I will bet dollars to donuts it happens more often than we think.

Unfortunately, many organizations have a false perception that merely employing someone in a safety capacity is a risk control, as in, “Your Honor, we did our due diligence in safety… see, we hired a Safety Person (points to the ‘Safety Person’).”

In late 2019, a plant electrician with 15 years of mining experience was electrocuted when he contacted an energized connection of a 4,160 VAC electrical circuit. Two more mining fatalities by electrocution have occurred since. The electrocution deaths prompted the MSHA to issue a safety alert.

Individual oversights and errors can and will eventually lead to unwanted consequences. However, we need multiple checks and balances that limit fallout and the continuance of loss, or possibly, an egregious event.

A worker who knows all the ins-and-outs of their position and has spent years on the site will be more efficient than someone who has just started. But, learning on the fly in situations like this could be riskier than you may think. Research from Toronto’s Institute for Work & Health shows that workers who had been at a job for a month or less had three times the risk of suffering a lost-time injury compared to those who had been at a job for over a year.