Gang Safety

This is Part 3 of a series called Clash of the Protocols. Read Part 2 here.

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If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to report it, does it count as an incident?

Incident reporting has many sources of friction. From a technical perspective, It takes money and a lot of time. Reporting requirements can be arduous. The data is often unusable. There are privacy issues. There are problems with standardizing reports.

And there are social sources of friction. Employers don’t want to be sued or suffer from bad press. Workers fear retaliation from employers and coworkers. 

Eric Tucker studied the history of occupational health in 19th-century Ontario, Canada. He found that workers anonymously filed complaints to safety inspectors. They used aliases such as “One Who Knows”, “A Victim”, and even “An Upholder of Decency”.

Incident reporting protocols have to overcome both technical and social sources of friction. There have been great improvements in both. Digital technologies help reduce costs, enforce data standards, and hide private information. Legislation has cemented some of the gains in worker power that labor unions fought for in the 20th century. For example, the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Act.

The benefits of incident reporting protocols are twofold:

1. Direct benefits, such as enabling other workers to avoid or eliminate a hazard, and

2. Emergent benefits, such as creating broad awareness of widespread hazards so they can be eliminated from a system of workplaces.

But without high participation across the system of workplaces, the big benefits never emerge. The majority of workplaces need to contribute and contribute somewhat evenly. Another factor is the “closeness” of coworkers. My thesis: the effectiveness of safety communication depends on the number and closeness of coworkers. Isolated workers are far more likely to get injured. This is because reporting unsafe conditions is a social process. 

Safety reporting is a public good. The more people that report incidents and hazards, the safer the system becomes. 

Safety in Numbers

The Institute for Employment Rights (IER) found something that supports my thesis. In Australia, temporary workers, self-employed workers, and workers in small teams were disproportionately likely to suffer injuries. But, we could attribute this to a few things:

• Safety inspectors focus on large workplaces,

• Smaller workplaces have fewer protocols in place,

• Smaller workplaces do less safety training,

• Larger workplaces are better at “safety-washing” their statistics,

• Larger workplaces have a greater proportion of white-collar workers,

• Larger workplaces have full-time employees focused solely on safety,

• Etc., etc., etc.

There are a lot of potential explanations. My thesis has some competition. But the concept that safety reporting protocols need a solid social foundation is true. Another (more Lindy) way to formulate my thesis is: there is safety in numbers.

Herd Animals

In the wild, and in the workplace. There is safety in numbers. Herds of ungulates, like zebras or bison, are safer from predators. Unions of laborers are safer from becoming the collateral damage of relentless corporate profit-seekers. A workforce’s ability to coordinate itself can help to improve the well-being of its members. But that’s not quite my point. Unionization is one thing, protocolization is another.

My thesis is that peer-to-peer networks of coworkers are safer than isolated workers. This applies only in a shared workspace. Coworkers are witnesses, confidantes, collaborative problem solvers, and mentors. Social groups create and pass on safety protocols better than handover documents - written to onboard new employees - do. 

When it comes to small organizations, employee turnover is devastating in this respect. Safety protocol knowledge is highly concentrated in small organizations. There are only so many people and so much to collectively remember. With a larger network, safety protocol knowledge is more distributed. The coworker network shares knowledge of how to avoid workplace-specific risks. There is an economy of scale.

A quick note on unions. They are highly organized groups with a formal chain of command. They need a large enough critical mass to function. Safety Gangs work better with more members, but they still work with just a few members. A union of 10 employees will not function. A Safety Gang of 10 could get by.

A workplace being “social” is necessary but not sufficient to make that workplace safe. Worker safety also requires agency. Coerced labor is dangerous, no matter how many people are in the workplace. Workers need to be able to i) communicate the presence of a hazard and ii) avoid the hazard. In the extreme, consider people who must do their job out of necessity for survival. Because they don’t have a choice about when, where, or how to act, they don’t have the ability to avoid hazards.

The necessary background conditions for safety (a.k.a the absence of hazard) are:

1. A dense and social worker network.

2. Worker agency – the ability to SPEAK and CHOOSE.

3. Knowledge of health and safety, and their enemies.

If these conditions are met, it’s easier for safety protocols to emerge. 

The three graphs above illustrate the different kinds of peer-to-peer safety protocol networks. Let’s call those Safety Gangs – organic, self-organizing groups of workers. Contrast this with a more hierarchical, engineered network. Two examples. First, an organization reacting to a ‘megahazard’ such as a flood. Second, an organization with an internal health and safety unit. We can call these Safety Armies.

First, in an organization with an internal health and safety unit, there is a formal division of roles. That unit often sets guidelines, facilitates workplace inspections, and processes incident reports. Or - if they’re deeply understaffed/underfunded - they don’t.

Second, disaster management relies on a set of organizational protocols like the Incident Command System (ICS). The ICS provides a blueprint for chain-of-command, division of labor, and coordination of resources. 

There is a wide range of differences between emergent and engineered safety networks (Safety Gangs vs. Safety Armies). Next week’s Thursday edition will explore this, and other things:

• Emergent vs. Engineered safety networks (Safety Gangs vs. Safety Armies),

• The difference between Health and Safety,

• My research plan for the Summer of Protocols, and

• The pinch-points of global capitalism.

This will probably be the second to last installment of The Clash of the Protocols series. I’ll be narrowing my scope as I ramp up my summer research.

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