A recent RAND Corporation study of Pennsylvania firms that had state Certified Safety Committees showed mixed results in reducing company injury rates. The study found that employers that joined the CSC program did not experience a reduction in lost work time injury/illness rates when compared to similar firms who were non-CSC participants.
A recent RAND Corporation analysis of Pennsylvania firms that had state Certified Safety Committees (CSC) revealed mixed findings relative to the reduction of company injury rates. The study, involving 364,840 businesses and 1,930,649 firm years from 1998 to 2005, found that employers that joined the CSC program did not experience a reduction in lost work time injury/illness rates when compared to similar firms who were non-CSC participants.
However, among CSC companies that were found to have better compliance with program guidelines, there were greater decreases in injury rates. Education of safety committee members was strongly related to a lowering of injury rates. However, program audits revealed that approximately 5% of the CSC participants had no program at all while over 80% had at least one shortcoming. When faced with the requirement that company changes relative to safety were needed to stay in the CSC program, firms may have felt it was not worth the effort – there was a strong association between dropping out of the CSC program and undergoing a program audit.
In 1994, the State of Pennsylvania legislatively authorized a 5% discount on workers’ compensation insurance premiums for employers that had a joint labor-management safety committee (what became know as a CSC). The labor-management safety committee was expected to meet regularly and perform three activities:
Nearly $30 million in discounts have been awarded to over 4,300 businesses as of 2006 – an average of $7,000 per employer.
The level of program non-compliance by companies interfered with attempts to assess CSC impact and, noted the authors, “raises questions of both effectiveness and fairness”.
The Bottom Line – How This Applies To Ergonomists
This study verifies what most ergonomists have seen in the field – a safety committee needs certain ingredients in order to be affective. This study pointed to management commitment and committee member training. However, the basics were well expressed over two decades ago within OSHA’s Ergonomics Program Management Guidelines for Meatpacking Plants: Commitment by Top Management, a Written Program, Employee Involvement, and Regular Program Review and Evaluation.
Other Key Points
Companies that participated in the CSC initiative were:
Businesses with lost time injury/illness rates lower than 50% of the industry average were unlikely to have a CSC.
The authors note that participation in the CSC program grew from 0.5% in 1996 to 2% in 2006. Despite these low numbers, about 40% of the manufacturing employers with greater than 100 workers had a CSC program in 2006.
Other studies involving the effectiveness of safety committees were reported by the authors of this paper as marred by design weakness leading to various conclusions:
Research Method
Several data bases were accessed for specific information relative to each company:
The key outcome measures were injury rate (the number of case with lost work days per 100 workers) and injury rate ratio (ratio of the company’s injury rate relative to the average injury rate of its four-digit Standard Industrial Classification).
Nine different analysis approaches were used to assess program participation and program impact.
Access
This study can be acquired from the copyright holder at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajim.20861/abstract
Article Title: The Pennsylvania Certified Safety Committee Program: An Evaluation of Particiaption and Effects on Work Injury Rates
Publication: American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 53:780-791, 2010
Authors: H Lie, R M Burns, A G Schaefer, T Ruder, C Nelson, A M Haviland, W B Gray, and J Mendeloff
This article originally appeared in The Ergonomics Report™ on 2010-08-30.