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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | JUNE 12, 2003 FACTORY DAYS By Lisa Bergson A Little Nudge Puts Safety First My plant, a hazard to life and limb? That was OSHA's verdict -- and after examing the inspector's listed violations, I had to agree
It never occurred to me, for example, that we needed exit signs above the doors of our cavernous one-story building. I'd been coming to the plant since I was 12 and knew where the doors were. I was simply oblivious. Running a pointy, ornately decorated fingernail down the page, Ketchell tallied up thousands in fines. At the time, it was a penalty we could ill afford. HULKING MONSTERS. We had two weeks to present OSHA with documentation proving we'd corrected the violations. If not, Ketchell warned, there could be additional penalties. "It can be pretty high," she added. I began to sob uncontrollably. "You can ask for a reduction in penalties if you correct something," she confided, visibly shaken. "Show them you've made the improvements. Show them the impact of the fines. Let them know if it means you're going to have to take drastic steps, like closings and firings." Ketchell leaned forward and whispered two words, "Payment plan." All the same, with our limited resources and small team, I didn't see how we could address so many faults. That night I cried and cried. While many of the violations centered on signs and lines, others pertaining to our machine shop were a lot tougher to remedy. "If you can't figure out what to do, call the manufacturers," Ketchell suggested. But, the machines' makers had long since gone out of business, leaving no instructions for adapting their ancient wares to modern safety standards. The machines were simply obsolete, "the oldest things I've ever seen in my lifetime," according to Ketchell, who was really not all that old. The gargantuan, 16-inch Majestic lathe, the Niagara press break, and other great, gray, steel contraptions dated back to the Fifties, when my father built the plant. They were smelly, dirty, and noisy -- and I loved them. To me, they were remnants of a bygone era, when craftsmanship mattered and workers could take pride in a product made from start to finish. They still worked, but they weren't any good. CLEANING HOUSE. As it turned out, I underestimated the ingenuity and commitment of my people. Within a week, exit signs appeared, machine shop areas were demarcated with yellow-and-black safety tape on the cement floor, custom-made safety guards were installed on the machines, and our machinists reluctantly donned steel-toed boots and safety goggles. Within a month, we were trained on bloodborne pathogens, machine lockout/tagout practices, and hazardous communications, with logs, and had appropriate procedures and plans in place. Satisfied with our progress, OSHA actually cut our fines by well over 50%. But I had to learn the hard way. To avoid that kind of fire drill, it behooves every small-business owner to be aware of the laws effecting his or her operation, from OSHA regs to ERISA. Bear in mind that when Ketchell appeared at our door, MEECO had been randomly selected. She had no idea she was entering a facility rife with violations. Now we are all better educated. I run a cleaner, more orderly, and decidedly safer factory. Yet, that day stays with me. I have no doubt it influenced my decision a few years later to close the machine shop. Sure outsourcing in the age of computer-aided machining made economic sense. But I also harbored an irrational sense that those big old machines had betrayed me. (Of our two machinists, one found work with our new vendor and the other remains here, retrained as a draftsman.) A REFORMED WOMAN. Beyond that, I realize my tears weren't simply over the penalties. Up until then, I'd associated OSHA with bad companies, sweat shops, and the like -- places where workers found the fire exits locked in an emergency, where they were forced to work under dangerous conditions for long hours, with no breaks. Yet, rereading our "citation and notification of penalty," I see instance after instance where my employees were, among other things, "exposed to crushing/amputation hazard" by the lack of a foot guard on the Niagara press break, an unguarded foot treadle on the Pexto shear, and the lack of a guard on the exposed portion of the Grob vertical band saw. More, we had situations where the employees responsible for emergency firefighting didn't even know how to operate the portable extinguishers! True, our workers-compensation claims were infrequent enough to warrant a substantial drop in our insurance assessment. Under my tenure, we've never had a serious accident, thank God. The fact remains, someone could have been injured and badly. I failed -- albeit unwittingly -- to put safety first. It's an old wound, but it still hurts.  Lisa Bergson is President and CEO of both MEECO and Tiger Optics. Before joining MEECO in 1983, Lisa Bergson worked as a business journalist at BusinessWeek and freelanced for many business publications. You can visit her companies' Web sites at www.meeco.com and www.tigeroptics.com, or contact her at lbergson@meeco.com Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | JUNE |
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