Pub. 1 2018-2019 |Issue 4

24 M any people take it for granted that they have a safe work environment. It’s a serious problem when that assumption turns out to be wrong. The U.S. government, employers, and employees can all have a role in developing accident-prevention strategies. Historically, many people have considered employees to be responsible for their own safety, and they have thought that if someone got hurt it was probably because they were being careless in some way. People thought that unsafe actions caused 85 percent of work accidents. That approach, however, has serious shortcomings. Most significantly, it hasn’t caused much improvement in workplace safety during the last 15 years. Why? It is reactive instead of proactive, which means changes are made only after someone has actually been hurt or killed. There isn’t much emphasis on prevention. Blaming employees is also superficial; sometimes there are multiple factors involved in the creation of an unsafe work environment, and it is unfair and misleading to focus only on the role played by employees, especially if the employees don’t really control the environment where they work. Too frequently, SAFE Work Environments