How Do You Deal with Unsafe New Corporate Management?

You work in the maintenance department of a manufacturing plant. Your company was bought in a corporate acquisition. The last time this happened, the new corporate owners emphasized safety and brought many positive values into the deal. Sadly, that was not the case this time.

Your plant manager, Phil, was highly regarded by everyone. He was demanding, but fair. He held everyone to high standards and let individuals know he appreciated what they did. Less than a month after the acquisition, he was replaced by a much younger person named Rob.

While Phil asked questions and sought input, Rob berated people for providing any input. Rob was aggressive and unthankful — and totally focused on cutting costs so as to maximize profit. Rob had almost no industrial experience, and his main target was all the “wasteful safety spending.”

Rob held a weekly staff meeting, during which he would identify some waste of money or another. His very first target was the boxes of foam earplugs that were distributed throughout the plant. The next week, he ended the free safety glasses program.

One day, Rob called all of the electrical maintenance people into a conference room and announced: “No more fancy gloves.” He read from a printout the cost of the gloves. Then he pulled a cardboard box of nitrile gloves out of a plastic shopping bag and said: “I got this whole box for about the same price. Use these from now one; they are rubber too.”

Complaints to the corporate office were futile. In fact, the corporate office canceled a planned NPFA 70E training session. Right after that, they laid off the plant's safety director and rolled those duties into the HR manager.

Your shop doesn't have a union, so an organized strike is out of question. What can you do when faced with this situation?

Your first duty is to your family, not to your job. All good employers agree with this, which is one reason all good employers emphasize safety — not to mention the fact that fatally electrocuted employees aren't exactly productive employees....

No good employer will penalize you for doing work only when it is safe to proceed; good employers will penalize you for doing work when it is not safe to proceed. Worst-case scenario… you lose this job, and then hire on with a good employer.

Do the work only when it is safe, per industry standards, to do that work. If you don't have the correct gloves, for example, don't do that work. Yes, this employer might fire you. But if they do, OSHA will descend upon that plant with a fury that will make the new plant manager's legs turn to jelly.

You also have a duty to your coworkers, and they to you. Discreetly meet offsite, perhaps at the home of one of you, to calmly discuss the problem and agree that nobody will work in an unsafe manner regardless of the pressure from management.

Since this company's behavior is illegal in multiple ways (violating OSHA rules, creating a hostile work environment, etc.), the company's legal counsel is obligated to advise senior management to comply with the various laws currently being broken. Thus, it's a good idea to float some facts over their way and let them start advising.

You can also recruit the CFO, if you provide basic data on the cost of industrial accidents. You can obtain this information from OSHA's website and other sources online. Since the acquiring company has such a focus on profit, this is practically a silver bullet.

Whatever happens, make sure you and your coworkers keep each other safe. If the new management just cannot get onboard with that, they'll get tired of shelling out big bucks for noncompliance fines, and eventually sell your company to one with a safety-oriented culture —that company may even hire back your old plant manager.