9/1/2026

Hello there! I should have started my posts with this subject as the 1st, but safety should be the top priority in ANY workplace or environment you occupy. Safety should be your 1st priority at work, home maintenance tasks and even during downtime, bar none. There is no amount of product in your facility produced, sold or shipped that is worth a drop of your or your co-worker’s blood! The financial aspects of workplace injuries won’t be discussed here, just the personal effects.

My wife (and business partner) grew up without her father due to an industrial accident that caused a family to lose a husband, a father, the family bread winner which changed the course of 3 lives forever. In 2011, I had the misfortune of losing a great mentor and a real close friend due to an industrial accident that had the same result in his family but also transformed how an entire papermill looked at safety and forced each employee at every level to examine processes and priorities in our safety culture. For most of us, this accident provided reasons for changing our approaches to working safely, ask more detailed questions about our tasks, trust but verify all Lock-out tag-outs, and treat each situation as unique and examine the surrounding environment thoroughly.

The final stats from 2024, provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, indicated there were 5,070 fatalities and almost 2.5 million recordable injuries across all sectors, but please take all precautions to avoid becoming a number in these annual statistics. Anyone with any experience on the mill or plant floor knows, if there were 2.5 million reported recordables, you can bank on at least another 2.5 million unreported minor recordables or near-misses. This is an unfortunate side-effect of our safety culture as Americans as being too cool to participate in safety at work (we had some creative nicknames for some people that participated in safety programs back in the day...)  To change this misconception and as a first step, report a safety concern to your supervisor. Don’t allow a supervisor to mistake this as a complaint, report this concern and provide at least 1 feasible solution. That will diffuse the instinct to treat this as a complaint and will be seen as legitimate. As a second step if the safety issue goes unresolved, report it one level higher and provide your solution to that supervisor. Third step, if all else fails and if your facility has a dedicated safety leader, go to them with the same problem and solution. In my personal experience as a manager, if one of my crew comes to me with a problem and a solution, that tells me that this really matters to them, they have thought about it, so I have support them. If there is a legitimate workplace safety concern and it is being ignored, it might be time to find another place to work. Your life is priceless and someone at home is waiting for you there. You are irreplaceable and your health and life is too important to be lost due to neglect to poor safety culture in the workplace!

As a final thought, as someone on the back side of their career, I realize that younger workers won’t report scratches, minor cuts, sprains or strains. As someone on the back side I can tell you, some of those minor injuries are cumulative and persist for years if gone unreported and untreated.  Just remember, you are the person responsible for your safety, and you can help your coworkers change the way they think about safety! Your boss won’t bleed or lose a paycheck, you and your family will feel those effects. Please do your job as safely as possible and remember to always take care of yourself!

Thanks, and we are always happy to help!

Mike