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#13: The real test is, ‘Can we change other people's minds about this?’
88 Plays7 years ago
Podcast series host Jill James connects with filmmaker Dave DeSario, an unlikely workplace safety champion and outspoken reform advocate. Dave, a lifelong temp worker, is founder of the Alliance for the American Temporary Workforce. His 2015 film A Day’s Work—a must-see for any occupational safety and health leader—spotlights the plague of serious injuries and workplace fatalities (SIFs) amongst the fast-growing temporary labor force. You’ll learn about the safety nuances and pitfalls of non-traditional employee-employer relationships, the correlation between workers’ compensation systems and increase in temp staffing nationwide, and why this population of workers is more at-risk than your traditional employee population. This episode will connect you with resources to ensure you’re in-step with OSHA’s guidelines for temp worker safety, and open your eyes to an unseen safety epidemic that may hit close to home.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. Episode number 13.
Guest Introduction: Dave DeSario
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Dave DeSario, who is the founding member of the Alliance for the American Temporary Workforce.
00:00:28
Speaker
Dave is also a member of the Services Sector Committee for NIOSH, and he's the executive producer of the documentary, A Day's Work.
Journey into Safety Advocacy
00:00:38
Speaker
Dave joins us today from his home in Brooklyn, New York. Dave, thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for having me, Jill. Really excited to be here and happy to be talking with all the safety pros out there.
00:00:50
Speaker
Excellent. So Dave, you're kind of a unique safety pro. I mean, literally accidentally came into this practice.
Experiences as a Temp Worker
00:01:00
Speaker
Um, I'm wondering if we couldn't get our, our time together started by really explaining how you found yourself to be a fierce advocate for workplace safety with a particular focus on a particular group and that group being temporary workers. Sure. Well, you know, uh, as a temp worker many times over,
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm used to being the perhaps the least qualified person in the room. So I'm coming at this safety and health side of things from a very different background as a lot of the folks that are going to be listening today. So it really starts off as a temp worker in a warehouse as a teenager.
00:01:38
Speaker
Um, and in my early and mid twenties did a lot of, uh, you know, I changed the color of my collar, uh, a bit from, uh, blue to, uh, leaning a little bit more towards white, but I was a temp worker many times over. And I found that what I was told by the temp agencies and what my coworkers were told was not matching up with the reality of what we found in the workplace. So.
Connecting Temp Workers Globally
00:02:01
Speaker
Uh, it's about nine years ago. Now I started a website. It's temporary employees.org to put out a workers perspective on temp work and to connect with temp workers all over the place. Cause we're really, you know, not just all over the U S we're all over the world. Uh, we're in every industry and every occupation. And, uh, you know, through that website started to get a lot of feedback from temp workers, uh, and started to get in touch with a lot of organizations that were organizing temp workers on the ground.
00:02:27
Speaker
And what we saw over and over again were concerns about safety and confusion from workers about what to do when they were in an unsafe situation.
OSHA and Temp Worker Safety
00:02:37
Speaker
Who to talk to? Might they lose their jobs if they spoke up?
00:02:41
Speaker
And this all really came together about five, six years ago. And this got started from Dr. David Michaels, who used to be the Assistant Secretary of Labor. And he really started to wave that big red flag around about temp workers and a string of incidents of temp workers being killed on their first day on the job. So in a lot of ways, we had seen a lot of
00:03:09
Speaker
anecdotal stories popping up, but I don't think we realized quite how extensive the problem was until OSHA took the lead on it.
Challenges for Temp Workers
00:03:18
Speaker
So for temp workers who face a lot of issues on the job, you know, they might be doing the same work as the employees next to them, but they're paid much less. They don't have access to benefits or health insurance in the same way.
00:03:32
Speaker
They don't have a voice in the workplace. Really, the biggest concern is that fundamental right, that right to come home from the job in the same condition that they went to it in. So when you look at the issue for temp workers, I've gotten really involved because this is a population that often won.
00:03:51
Speaker
It doesn't know that they're at greater risk of being injured. So I hope I can help change that perception for the workers, for the host employers that are controlling these work sites and for the temp agencies that are sending temp workers out on the job. So if we can increase awareness of that problem, I think we're going to keep them safer. And number two, this is a population that can't always speak out for themselves. They can be fired at any time for any reason.
00:04:16
Speaker
Um, they're precarious in these jobs and often they don't even know who their real employer is. You know, if something's wrong, should they go to the temp agency or should they tell their site supervisor? There's often a confusion about what to do when they do encounter something they think is unsafe. And that along with the pressure of potentially being fired, if they speak out, um, they really temp workers, we really need people speaking out for us sometimes because it's hard for them to speak for themselves.
00:04:45
Speaker
Sure, exactly. So Dave, you had mentioned that you started, you've done a lot of temporary work yourself and that was part of your inspiration and then you said your collar turned slightly toward white. That perhaps was a piece that was launching you to start this initiative. You have a background in writing as well, correct? Is that a piece of what got you going?
Journalism and Storytelling in Advocacy
00:05:08
Speaker
Well, uh, I'd done some reporting, uh, mostly video reporting for the New York post, uh, and the run up to the 2008 election. So side note from safety towards politics, uh, leading into 2008, it looked like here in New York, we could cover that president presidential election without going anywhere. Cause the three major front runners at the time for the Republicans, it was Rudy Giuliani for the Democrats. It was Hillary Clinton.
00:05:33
Speaker
And there was this looming threat that Mike Bloomberg as an independent was going to come into the race. So we really thought we could cover politics just here in New York on a national level for that 2008 election. Now, none of those candidates worked out, but it did give me a background in writing and in video production that really helped with this film. So, I mean, actually at the time I was moonlighting for the post and I was working as a temp worker.
00:05:59
Speaker
in the basement of an auto parts factory in Queens that was shutting down its production and literally the workers that were there were packing up the machines they worked on for decades and they were either going to Mexico or China depending on which machine it was.
00:06:17
Speaker
I mean you talk about like it's like you can't make up an example that is more illustrative of some of the issues in manufacturing where you take this you take an auto manufacturer and you have temp workers in there who alongside those permanent workers are taking the equipment they worked on and shipping them overseas. So it was you know this was a 2008
00:06:43
Speaker
2007-2008. So really in the worst, coming into the worst of the recession. But I think a lot of that experience influenced where I am today as an advocate for 10 workers. Sure. And so by degree, your background is in, is it in journalism?
00:06:59
Speaker
Um, I think it's episode 10 of your podcast. You're, uh, you're talking with a safety and health expert. Yeah. Wound up in safety and health because they had an undergraduate degree in psychology. Same for you. It did not influence that at all. So, okay. Okay. Interesting. Interesting thought I would ask that because that's, you know, that's part of the accidental pieces. Some people have, uh, you know,
00:07:27
Speaker
education and safety. Others don't have a formal education and some come by way. Like you said, a psych degree knew that you couldn't get a job in that field. So somehow safety found them. Yeah. So thank you for that background and piece. I'm wondering if you could talk, you know, like maybe what happened next in your career that led you to decide you wanted to do a documentary and how you found the story of Day Davis and talk a little bit about that.
Day Davis's Story
00:07:56
Speaker
So Day's Case in particular was one that OSHA was drawing attention to because I think it illustrates a lot of the examples of what's going wrong both in the workforce broadly and in the temp industry and you know in the safety and health world. Day's Case is one that's really featured in the film because of who he is. So it's a young worker, someone who is 21 years old and we see temp workers tend to skew young and so do
00:08:25
Speaker
workplace injuries tend to happen to younger workers and newer workers. Thinking of the broader economy, Dave was someone that had a degree and had skills that were matched up for a completely different industry. He had no business on a factory floor. He was there because there's not enough work for people. And he took a job because he needed the money.
00:08:49
Speaker
And you look at the cost cut and going on at a lot of companies and the training that he received before he went into work. He saw he was given 15 minutes for orientation and training before working on some of the most dangerous equipment that anyone can work on. So we see a lot of these factors coming together. And his case in particular was one where someone outside the safety and health world, I think I was guilty in a lot of ways, too, of
00:09:18
Speaker
You know, when you hear about a serious injury or fatality, maybe the first thought that I had was what did this person do? What did this worker do to make that happen? And I think Dave's case
Workplace Fatalities and Awareness
00:09:29
Speaker
is such an important one because it is so clear that it's not his fault. And it's so clear that responsibility falls on so many different people and so many different companies where there were just, there were many opportunities along the way.
00:09:43
Speaker
for safety professionals, for supervisors, for co-workers, for managers, for executives, for big companies, to somewhere along the line do the right thing, make safety a priority, make safety a priority over production and over profit, but it was missed. So coming out as an outsider, Day's case meant a lot to me, and also as someone that worked as a young person in a warehouse, not too different.
00:10:12
Speaker
as they did, so it wasn't so different for me. But I think as an outsider, what was truly shocking was hearing the number of fatalities that are on the job, which, you know,
00:10:22
Speaker
If you're a former OSHA inspector, these numbers are second nature for you, or if you're in safety and health, they are. And maybe it's something you take for granted or you see the long view. So if you hear 4,500 or 4,600 Americans died on the job in the last year, maybe that doesn't sound so big when you think of the history of OSHA. And I, you know, was it two or three times that in the, in the seventies? Yes, exactly. So, you know, maybe to someone in the industry, that sounds like more of a success story or sounds like a lower number.
00:10:52
Speaker
But I think as an outsider, when I thought of workplace fatalities, I thought of Bangladesh.
00:10:58
Speaker
or somewhere not here. Right. So that was a shocking piece to you in finding out that, oh my gosh, a lot of people die on the job. And then to find out there's a disproportionate number associated with temp workers. And that's a big portion of what a day's work is about. So it focuses on the temp industry, but it's really about occupational safety and health too. And I think correcting
00:11:23
Speaker
my own misperception and I think one that's shared with a lot of people that aren't coming from it from within the industry of just how how dangerous work can be for so many Americans and not just those fatalities but I mean the huge number of injuries and the huge number of deaths that might occur from a lifetime of exposure so right right I think go ahead do no I mean I just wonder as you know I wonder how it how those same numbers are seeing
00:11:52
Speaker
by all you folks who work in safety and health and have that experience. Because there is a success story there over the decades. Jumping in at my starting point, I was shocked. Exactly. We can all go to the OSHA website. We can see what it was when we started collecting the data in 1970. We can see where we've gone.
00:12:15
Speaker
um we've safety pros have all sat through presentations where we have successes right when we talk about those success successes and how we've driven down the fatality rate we've driven down the injury and illness rate across the country yet it still exists and so we while we have had success
00:12:33
Speaker
I wouldn't say that any of us would ever say it's where we are today is acceptable and any life lost is not acceptable, any illness caused not acceptable, particularly because we know that these things are preventable. You
Misconceptions about Accidents
00:12:51
Speaker
had mentioned and you touched on some things about what was shocking to you and kind of where your head first went, which was a bit of what did he do wrong?
00:13:01
Speaker
And the whole what did he do wrong is very unfortunately one of those kind of cliche sort of things that turns out to be true in some cases where that is the first assertion that's made. Not all employers do that. Speaking as someone who's investigated over 30 workplace fatalities and injuries, I can speak to employers who absolutely did not go the victim blaming route and others who did.
00:13:28
Speaker
and I've seen both sides of that and pieces of that are those assumptions that are made.
00:13:36
Speaker
First of all, the reason was singular when it's always multifactorial, which is what you're pointing out in your documentary as well. And that there's this myth around making an assumption that people have knowledge about the hazards to which they're exposed by way of some kind of common sense acid test.
00:14:01
Speaker
And that's simply not the case. It's simply not the case. We can't make assumptions about what employees and temporary employees in particular know about the environment they're going in based on their background. Like you said, Dave Davis had a background, his educational background was in medicine. It wasn't in working in a factory.
00:14:23
Speaker
He was trained and certified as a medical office assistant. So you think about all the piles of paper that might come from an insurance company. You know, he knew how to deal with that. He knew how to deal with doctor's offices. This is a professional position.
00:14:40
Speaker
Um, he had no training or experience that was going to prepare him to be on a factory floor, working with a palletizer, um, expected, uh, to know or recognize perhaps that his employer didn't have a lockout tag out policy. Or even what that was. Exactly. I had no idea of what that was. Yeah, those, those sort of expectations are certainly unreasonable.
00:15:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when you decided that you wanted to do a documentary and you needed to contact and find De Davis's family, tell us about how that went for you. How did you go about doing that and building a rapport enough for a family to entrust you with their story? Well,
00:15:28
Speaker
Honestly to start, we were looking for a case that had not been reported on in the way that days had. And we reached out to I think half a dozen other families and no one really wanted to talk.
00:15:41
Speaker
And that is the most logical response that I think I should have expected in advance. We're talking about relatively recent cases. Hey, I'm a stranger that wants to do a deep dive into how difficult this has been for you and what's going on with your family after the loss of a loved one.
00:15:58
Speaker
and it didn't go very well. Dave's case had gotten a lot of reporting before this film, and they did extraordinary in this film, I think really because of who they are and what they decided to do, more than it was about anything of us identifying it or being able to convince this family to go through with it. So when I initially reached out to Dave's family, I was in touch with his mom, who was the head of the house, old Dave is,
00:16:28
Speaker
uh, one of four kids, um, raised by a single mom and I reached out to her. So Tanya and I were in touch and she was a little reluctant, but agreed to be involved eventually. So when we went down to Jacksonville, Florida, where the family was with the plan to spend, uh, five or six days with them to get to know them and get to know day and get to know what life was like with him and now without him, um,
00:16:54
Speaker
It became clear that it actually wasn't Tanya, Day's mom that was interested in this. It was Day's 17 year old younger sister, 17 at the time, she was 15 when Day passed away, who convinced her family this was something they had to do. They saw that after Day's death,
00:17:12
Speaker
There weren't really any consequences for Bacardi, the host employer. There weren't any consequences for remedy intelligence staffing. They're a division of employee bridge. There weren't any consequences for them, and life went back to normal for everyone else except them. So they saw this as a real injustice, and they saw this happening to other families too.
00:17:33
Speaker
They felt like it was their responsibility. And Nia, who, you know, 15 when they died and 17 when she was in this film, really convinced the rest of her family to be advocates because of what had happened to them. And they didn't want it to happen to anyone else. So, uh, I was really inspired. And I think that's a common feeling people get when they see the movie. It's really an extraordinary young woman.
00:17:57
Speaker
who, again, is accidentally in this safety world.
Family Advocacy After Tragedy
00:18:01
Speaker
This was not part of the plan. And this family's life is so dramatically changed because of their loss. What can they do? Their life is never going to be the same, but they've done so much in giving a face to those statistics, in introducing people
00:18:18
Speaker
to an individual and to a family that lost a loved one in a workplace brutality. I think that goes so much further than just reading some numbers or reading a story in the paper. And I hope that by watching a day's work, you really get the sense that you knew day.
00:18:34
Speaker
and you know his family and you know someone that this happened to. So I think that moves us all further along in keeping workplaces safer and really understanding what's going on out there in the world of work because I guess I don't have that insider's view that you guys do. As trained safety and health professionals, I mean I really hope you have the sense that every day you're going to work
00:18:57
Speaker
you're helping to protect families and protect individuals. If you don't, or if you've lost that, I hope this film can make you feel like that again. And I hope it can open other people's eyes to just how important safety and health professionals are to everyone. So I'd really encourage you to get to know Day, to get to know his sister, Nia, and to know this story.
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, I've watched the documentary myself and you did a great job and what definitely resonated is the family story and his sister's bravery in becoming an advocate and wanting to be able to share her brother
00:19:36
Speaker
in a way that will prevent the same or similar from happening to anyone else. There's a lot of power in it and absolutely humanizes it. You're right and takes us away from statistics. As safety professionals, I would say the vast majority of us get out of bed every day to do our job because of the people that we know that are like day and their families and we want them to go home safely.
00:20:02
Speaker
For sure. And I hope the film can extend that kind of thinking because personally, I think a lot of that focus from safety and health professionals is on creating a safe workplace, creating procedures that protect workers, understanding and identifying hazards.
00:20:21
Speaker
But I hope with the film, we can all take a step back and talk about the way that the workplace is changing. You can't go into a situation and expect that the employees have been there for a long time, will think that they're going to be there for a long time moving forward, have had time invested in their training.
00:20:42
Speaker
Know what's going on around them feel safe speaking about speaking up about unsafe conditions So when I look at these changes going on in the whole workforce So, you know today you have 3 million people going to work through a temp agency and that's just one type of contingent flexible non-traditional employment whether you want to call them contractors or independent contractors or freelancers or consultants or contract workers or temp workers and
00:21:12
Speaker
That big pool of non-traditional workers, it's up to about 35% of everyone working in this country. And in the next 10 years, that's going to get closer to 50% of everyone who's working. So to me, that says two things.
00:21:27
Speaker
You're going to have more inexperienced workers who aren't recognizing the hazards that are around them because they don't have the experience or the training. And you're going to have people that are not as comfortable speaking up when they do see something that is unsafe. So to me, that just says there's going to be an even greater need for safety and health professionals in the future to
00:21:47
Speaker
to be able to recognize where there are workers who are in these positions, to recognize that there are going to be increasingly shortcomings in worker training that someone is going to need to step up and supplement, and to speak out for the workers that don't have a voice or aren't comfortable speaking out themselves because of the threats to their livelihood. So I hope the film was a way, just another way to look at those changes in the workplace and how important this field is moving forward.
00:22:14
Speaker
Right. Dave, let's spend a little bit of time talking about why there's such a disparity with the temporary workforce at 35% of our working population right now. And like you said, growing to 50%. Why is there such a disparity in what you've determined?
Outdated Safety Laws
00:22:31
Speaker
Let's talk about kind of the nuances of the law, about where safety and health laws lie. And when you're a host employer,
00:22:40
Speaker
Versus a temporary work agency or a contracted work agency let's let's talk to our audience About about that kind of like where are the loopholes within the laws and that led us to kind of where we are right now sure there's some specifics, and then there's some sort of more general stuff so thinking generally and
00:23:00
Speaker
You know, the workers' compensation system is set up to, in some ways, incentivize companies that keep workers safer and disincentivize those ones that don't by driving up their costs.
00:23:15
Speaker
So when a temp worker is in a situation or someone that is not an employee of the company that's directing the work process, it's changed that whole system of workers comp and the reasons why it was set up and who it was set up for. So a temp worker is an employee of a temp agency. So the temp agency is the workers comp policy. They are financially responsible if that worker gets hurt.
00:23:43
Speaker
But the temp agency doesn't own the facility, doesn't produce the products, doesn't direct the work process, doesn't control the working conditions. And this is why we find temp workers in some of the most dangerous and dirtiest jobs that there are. Because the fact is, if they get hurt, the company that told them to do it is not financially responsible. So the system has just not been set up that way.
00:24:09
Speaker
When these financial incentives don't match up with the practical realities it's putting more workers at risk when it comes to some of the laws.
00:24:22
Speaker
Go ahead. I'm thinking about the OSHA laws and the applicability of the OSHA Act to ensure all places of employment are free from recognized hazards and we all know that yada, yada, yada. But with application of the OSHA laws, what have you learned? And then I have a follow-up question to that.
00:24:44
Speaker
So I'm not sure if the plan is to edit out some of that confused pause, but it's not bad to keep it because that's kind of the reaction even to people that look into this stuff all the time. Like the safety and health situation, the legalities of it are confusing and weird because the fact is overall,
00:25:06
Speaker
labor laws and safety and health laws were written in an era or written in a way that is supposed to make sense of a normal employer-employee relationship. When that's changed and you have subcontractors and temp workers and all these different non-traditional ways of employment, we kind of have to put on these patches to labor law and these safety laws that don't make perfect sense because the system is different and we really haven't caught up to that yet.
00:25:34
Speaker
So the bigger picture solutions involve changing some of those fundamentals, but there's confusion right off the bat. So originally when it came to OSHA reporting, we'll take that as one example. I'm glad you're going down that road. I was thinking the same.
00:25:52
Speaker
When a temp worker was hurt on the job, it used to be the temp agency that would report that on their OSHA logs because they were the employer. Now, we know that would create some problems right off the bat. So if you have one facility or one location or an industry that's experiencing a really high rate of serious injuries, you can't identify that because it's categorized under a temp agency, which doesn't have that location, which doesn't have
00:26:17
Speaker
which doesn't specify the type of work that's being done or the employer that it was being done for. It gets obscured. So as part of this temp worker initiative that came out a few years ago,
00:26:28
Speaker
It's shifted that record-keeping requirement onto the post-employer, which from some regard is a big improvement because we now see exactly where these serious injuries are happening. So we know what workplaces are a problem. In that sense, it's improved. But in another sense, it's kind of made it worse for temp workers. So if you're walking into a temp agency, and most towns, you've got a lot of options for different temp agencies.
00:26:58
Speaker
You know, one, you know, labor ready versus manpower versus a deco versus Aerotech versus, you know, you got 50,000 temp agency offices in the US. There's a lot of options. As a temp worker, how do you know which one does a better job of keeping its workers safe?
00:27:15
Speaker
which one provides more training. That gets lost in the data. And it gets, you know, not just for the worker who, you know, it doesn't really have access to that info, but, but also for the host employer when they're hiring, they don't have a view of the record of that temp agency. So we're kind of caught in a, I think we've improved the situation overall, but it's still, you can see that the law isn't really set up. Exactly.
00:27:40
Speaker
And you're right, there have been definitely some, maybe what we might want to call band-aid attempts to write that, but it hasn't been righted by way of any kind of legislation yet. It is weird and messy, right? So the temporary agency is paying the workers' compensation rates, the premiums, but the host employer has to log the injuries on the OSHA 300 log.
00:28:06
Speaker
It's not an apple-to-apple kind of thing. And the other band-aid fix that I immediately come to and that I applied as an investigator when I was with OSHA is this policy that OSHA wrote a number of years ago called the multi-employer worksite policy.
00:28:23
Speaker
And so as an investigator, when I would do an inspection, whether it was just a routine inspection or an accident or a fatality inspection, I was to view all of the parties that were involved and specifically looking at who the controlling employer was.
00:28:44
Speaker
who the creating employer was, creating meaning creating hazards, which employer had the ability to correct those hazards, and which employer were exposing the employees to those hazards. And then my job was to cite, propose citations against any employer who met any of those four criteria. And that's how I went about my job when it came to like, you mentioned contractors before, it's kind of the easiest way in an OSHA lens to think of,
00:29:14
Speaker
You know, a general industry factory site hires a contractor, like maybe from the construction trade to come in and do something in their workplace that that employee ends up being hurt or killed. Who gets citations? Well, the controlling employer, possibly the creating, you know, correcting and exposing. And sometimes it's both, sometimes it's three, sometimes it's four. And so OSHA has, you know, the investigators are challenged to use that multi-employer worksite policy. And then how does that work with temporary agencies?
00:29:44
Speaker
And thinking about that change in the policy, honestly, to me, that sounds like a completely different job. When I think of someone that is an investigator or a safety and health professional, I see someone that is looking at the physical hazards on the ground
00:30:00
Speaker
and determining what in that environment made something unsafe. To me it seems like a totally different job description and a totally different type of investigation when you're talking about the employment relationships between different companies. So take someone like Amazon for example.
00:30:21
Speaker
Over the last five years, there have been seven fatalities in Amazon facilities. And I say specifically in Amazon facilities because none of them were Amazon employees.
00:30:32
Speaker
So often the distribution centers that Amazon has, they might own the physical facility, but then they get a subcontractor to manage all of the work done in that facility. And then that subcontractor hires out to multiple temp agencies below it. So where these seven fatalities have happened over the last five years for Amazon, Amazon, the company is never named or cited.
00:30:59
Speaker
So they're in a facility owned by Amazon, they're moving Amazon product in Amazon boxes, because you purchase something on Amazon, but they're not involved in any way. So there wind up being so many of these different layers that I don't know where that responsibility starts and ends. And I think that's one of the big problems for these employers as well and for these companies.
00:31:22
Speaker
we can lay out in the law or in a temp worker initiative who is responsible where. So the temp worker initiative says temp agencies are responsible to provide general industry training and then the host employer where that temp worker is sent provides some kind of site specific training.
00:31:39
Speaker
how much, how far that goes, how clear both of them need to be, we don't know. It's just kind of some general guidance. And I think that sort of applies in all these different layers of subcontracting. It creates confusion, you know, who's responsible. And a lot of times when these serious injuries or fatalities happen, you've got both of those companies pointing at the other one. The temp agency says to the host employer, well, look, we sent someone over. They barely got trained or they didn't get any training.
00:32:07
Speaker
And the host employer says, well, you were supposed to do it and you were supposed to send someone over that had some experience with this. I thought that's why we were hiring someone for this job to step in right away. So, uh, the system, uh, and our workplaces, the way that they've changed over the last several decades, the increase in temp work or subcontracted work. Um, it is completely not for the benefit of worker safety and like,
00:32:36
Speaker
I don't the the ways to get it back in the place are just beyond me. Yeah. You're so right with the changing in the employer-employer relationship. It was very very clearly defined when the OSHA laws were written in 1970 and here we are in 2018 with
00:32:55
Speaker
Like you said, layers and patches to try to figure out how are we supposed to figure out who's the employer and the employee, and so we come up with policies like I was just explaining, multi-employer work site, and the more watered down and the more watered down those relationships become, the harder it is to identify.
00:33:12
Speaker
Who is who and who has what responsibility? Shifting back to the safety profession and the safety professionals who are listening to this, many of whom have temporary employers in their workplaces, how can safety professionals themselves
00:33:31
Speaker
Be helpful in being advocates for temp workers, and I'm really interested to know what you've you know the conversations that you've been having over the years you've been working on this and with the Alliance is Are you finding sometimes that safety professionals don't always know when they have temporary workers in their facilities like you?
00:33:52
Speaker
You know, they get hired and they're put on a job and maybe onboarding that would happen with a full-time employees that would pass through the lens or through the eyes of a safety professional or being missed. Are you seeing some of that or what are some of the observations that you're learning?
00:34:10
Speaker
Um, first of all, I think safety professionals just need to know sort of the golden rule and that is, you know, treat a temp worker the same way you would treat a permanent worker. So there was a case in New Jersey at a distribution center that supplied Arizona ice tea and products like that. And there was a temp worker that suffered an amputee and it had an arm amputated and an injury.
00:34:33
Speaker
So OSHA went in and in their investigation discovered the permanent employees that were starting off were getting about a week's worth of training and the temp workers weren't getting any. They were just put into the same workplace. So I think some of what you alluded to there is happening. Safety and health professionals or someone that's a consultant might get brought in to define that training process and that is done correctly for full-time employees.
00:35:02
Speaker
but temp workers are somehow thought of as different. So I think that golden rule is important. So after the OSHA investigation, this company then agreed to provide those temp workers with somewhere between one and two hours of training when they started. So they're going to be way safer than they were with none, but they're still getting a small fraction of what those permanent employees are. So I think the simplest way to look at it is just that golden rule.
00:35:28
Speaker
But if you want to get a little more specific, there's some great research out of Washington State, their Department of Labor and Industries, particularly by a guy named Mike Foley, Foley F-O-L-E-Y, and he's been studying the temp industry for a number of decades.
Training Risks for Temp Workers
00:35:43
Speaker
So Washington State provides this really unique way to look at specifically temp worker cases and then broadly to look at a lot of industries because
00:35:53
Speaker
They're the only state in the country that has no private workers' compensation carriers. Everything is done through that Department of Labor. Plus, you've removed the profitability and the financial incentive for these companies. You can also argue minus, you've got the government involved doing all the administrating of it. But one of the big pluses is you get a really clear view of the data so you can go in and match up
00:36:20
Speaker
what's happening to temp workers and what's happening to permanent workers in the same exact work sites, doing the same jobs at the same age with the same experience levels. So it provides a really clear view of what's going on and the differences between temp workers and permanent workers. So in investigating a lot of these injuries,
00:36:39
Speaker
They went back and interviewed a few hundred temp workers and permanent workers, matched up based on experience and the type of work they were doing to try to figure out what's happening different with temp workers and permanent workers. And one of the biggest things that we see happen is temp workers, once they arrive at a job, are often reassigned to a new position or new responsibility.
00:37:01
Speaker
They don't have control over that. And as people looking for work, they tend to just say yes and be happy for the opportunity. So people are put in a position that they're not comfortable with and weren't sent over to do is one of the first ones. And we see that the level of training they get is not the same. So they are often getting something at the Tampa agency.
00:37:21
Speaker
Like you see in a day's work, they saw a 15 minute safety video. I've probably seen something very similar in my temp work as well. They're getting less at the temp agency and they're getting less when they arrive at the work site. So the level of training is not adequate.
00:37:37
Speaker
And the knowledge that the employer has about that worker's experience doesn't match up. So if you were hiring someone directly, you're the one that read the resume. You're the one that interviewed and spoke to that person about their past experience. So the temp agency does that and then passes them off to someone that doesn't know the skill set of this worker.
00:37:58
Speaker
So I think like when you're driving on the highway and you're driving next to a moving truck, well,
Advice for Safety Professionals
00:38:04
Speaker
that might be an experienced driver and you might be just as safe being next to that truck versus another one.
00:38:10
Speaker
or that moving truck could have you or me moving apartments for the first time what we're doing behind the wheel at that work site that the person directing the work process is often in that situation not knowing the skills and experience of the people that they're working with and kind of taking for granted that they'll figure it out or they must be good enough if they were sent over.
00:38:30
Speaker
I think that's a lot of what's going on out there. I think one of the things that safety professionals can do is to really arm themselves with more information about the temporary agencies with whom their company is contracting and to try to get a seat at the table because safety professionals don't always have a seat at that employment table.
00:38:52
Speaker
when they're deciding which agency to go with and what they might be providing and whose responsibility is what. I had an opportunity a couple of years ago, there's a local to where I am group of safety professionals that gets together monthly and I episodically attend their meetings and one of them I attended maybe two years ago was where they had invited in
00:39:16
Speaker
three local temporary agencies, two of whom were national names. One was kind of a homespun, you know, local temp agency. And the safety professionals in the room were having conversation. So the temporary agencies were all giving presentations about what they do. And then the safety professionals in the room were asking them questions about safety and about safety training. And what became
00:39:42
Speaker
obvious very, very quickly to everyone in the room was how different the level of training is with each agency. The assumptions each agency had about whose responsibility it was to provide training and the degree to which the temp agencies were providing training. And it was this, I think to the safety professionals credit, it was a big aha moment to them to say, Oh my gosh,
00:40:13
Speaker
You know, really, that's all they're getting. And then some employers in the room, the safety professionals representing some employers were like,
00:40:21
Speaker
I've been talking to some of these companies for years. I don't assume anything. All the temporary workers that come through my facility are having the same training as my employees. And so it was a mixed bag, but the trend was more of a shock as to what the employees were not coming equipped with. And then the temporary agencies saying, you know,
00:40:43
Speaker
We put people in so many different places of employment How could we possibly understand all of the hazards that are associated with work? Wherever we're sending people which you know is it is it is a truth? and and at the same time how can safety professionals be really digging into and finding and building a
00:41:04
Speaker
whatever relationship they can with those temporary agencies to find out what is and is not happening so that they can be advocates at their place of employment for those temporary workers to say listen, employer, we need to do the same thing. We need to treat all these people exactly the same way.
00:41:22
Speaker
I couldn't have said it any better myself and it reminds me very much of a similar experience I had where it was at a statewide conference or meeting for a chapter of the AIHA. So it was local professionals in a network together and talking about temp work. So often and exactly as you're describing, you don't know which agencies are doing a better job than others when it comes to training their employees and screening them.
00:41:51
Speaker
Through these professional networks, there really is that ability for safety professionals to share the knowledge that they've accumulated about where they're getting more training from these workers and what agencies are more reliable, which agencies have safety and health professionals on staff.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yes, I wanted to ask you about that. Please keep going. So this emerged as a solution that I had never seen before until I got a little more involved in the safety and health community going around and screening a day's work. So this really emerged as a solution. You guys in the safety and health world really are a community. And when you're getting together for a lot of these local gatherings or you know
00:42:31
Speaker
other professionals locally, you all have that knowledge and that experience to be able to identify some of the better and some of the worst agencies. And we need to shift more of that work towards those better agencies. Now, I think in the big picture, the thing that's gonna help most is shifting the amount of work in the whole US economy away from temp working towards more stable direct employment.
00:42:58
Speaker
But that's a harder solution and not necessarily one that's gonna happen anytime in the near future. But for practical steps that people can take on the ground, it's talking to others in the industry about what they see and who's doing a better job. Because if facilities need to use temporary workers, let's make sure that they're coming from the agencies that are doing a better job to prepare them before they go there. The ones that have safety and health professionals on staff that know how to identify hazards or
00:43:28
Speaker
Um, people that workers know that they can go and report something to, you know, it's easier to report something to a safety and health professional than it is to someone in HR. We don't always trust someone that's in, in HR has our best interests or do our, uh, you know, a supervisor. So, um, being a place where workers can go is also very important.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yes, it is. Yes, it is. So those are good tips for safety professionals and anyone listening. You know, it'd be a fun conversation for safety professionals to have with one another. And we all come with different
00:44:03
Speaker
levels of let's maybe let's call authority wherever it is that we work as a safety professional. One truth is is so clear with safety pros is that we are always selling something selling not by way of you know a monetary gain but we have to sell an idea and we're pitching ideas and we're often doing it without budget and not always with a seat at a decision-making table and so I think the conversation with safety professionals is so important about how would
00:44:33
Speaker
you advocate with your management team about why it's important to train temporary workers. And you've given some really good ideas, specifically with very specific data, like Washington State is gathering, and just like who's responsible in the end so that the safety professional can make those arguments, not only from a business standpoint, but also from like you've set up before, it's the right thing to do, and to be having those conversations with the temp agencies.
00:45:02
Speaker
Um, Dave, you had mentioned very briefly about some temp agencies, employee safety professionals. I really wanted to know what you found in that because I curiously, I don't know the answer to that. Well, I would say anecdotally, it seems like in the last five years, approximately since the temp worker initiative, there have been more in-house safety and health professionals at temp agencies. Okay.
00:45:28
Speaker
In the big picture, I think it's kind of a band-aid on a broken arm, where the issues are quite large and have been inherent in this system for many decades, but it's also a step in the right direction. So the TEMP Worker Initiative comes with some recommended guidelines from OSHA and NIOSH.
00:45:50
Speaker
And those recommended guidelines say, well, you should have a safety and health person that is on staff that can go to other work sites and assess whether or not they're safe that can provide good training for these workers. I mean, it makes perfect sense. I mean, that's how it should be. So I think.
00:46:08
Speaker
We're seeing more of that. I don't know how those numbers compare to what's typical for other organizations, but I think there definitely has been a movement in the right direction with some agencies. But you go to plenty of them that don't have anyone with safety and health experience on staff.
00:46:27
Speaker
Right. Dave, can you speak just a little more about the temp worker initiative? How did it get started? When did it get started? How can people learn more about it if they're not familiar with it? Sure. OSHA's website, they specifically have a page dedicated to temp workers. So it's OSHA.gov slash temp underscore workers. And it has a number of bulletins that they've issued
00:46:54
Speaker
over the last Let's call it five years. Okay. So in part they were motivated by a number of high-profile fatalities that happened the case of Dave Davis that's profiled in the film is one of them where They used those cases to really get attention for what was going on in the temp industry more broadly. So the
00:47:17
Speaker
Guidelines that they recommended are not the law, you know, the laws really haven't changed to protect temp workers, but they've made some changes in how they investigate incidents and how they might find companies should there be a serious injury or fatality.
00:47:34
Speaker
Um, so they've clearly defined in their mind what is joint responsibility between employers. Right. They've laid out some best practices for temp agencies and host employers. So the OSHA temporary worker initiative has created a good blueprint, but fundamentally the issue still is that these are recommended guidelines. They're not the law. So we still see many instances often with reputable big brand name temp agencies who are not following these guidelines like, um,
00:48:04
Speaker
They should attempt agencies should know if there are past safety and health violations where they're sending workers. They should know if those have been corrected. They should be inspecting those work sites and they're not always doing that. And even when they ignore those guidelines and temp workers are seriously injured or killed.
00:48:24
Speaker
The investigations that follow up don't hold them to a standard as if they should have followed those guidelines because again, they're guidelines and not the wall. So OSHA has done under its regulatory authority, they've taken some steps that make it clear how temp workers should be protected.
00:48:42
Speaker
But it's not the law, and we still have a long way to go in protecting temp workers. Right. So the temp worker initiative and the guidance that you've given on that is another tool that safety professionals can add when they're doing advocacy for training temporary workers. So thank you for that. I think that's great. As you're describing that there isn't a law and it's a best practice sort of thing, my regulatory mind goes immediately to the general duty clause.
00:49:12
Speaker
and you know how OSHA can apply that and you know if if I'm an investigator looking at those things I would be looking at how would I apply the general duty clause to to if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck it's a duck to make it extremely simplistic and it'd be it'd be curious research as to whether or not the general duty clause has been applied in any of these worker death cases with temporary workers
00:49:39
Speaker
I'm wondering, Dave, what has it, so the film was released initially in 2015, a day's work. Talk about who's screened it, who's had access to it, and kind of what the shift is now for people to be able to access it.
Impact of the Documentary
00:49:56
Speaker
So film came out in 2015 and over the last three years I've done screenings at events for about 200 organizations. So it's really been safety and health organizations like the AIHA, the ASSP, the National Safety Council, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. It's screened with
00:50:20
Speaker
OSHA regional offices and researchers at NIOSH. It's screened with labor unions, it's screened with safety and health organizations that are local, and it's become a big part of university education as well. There's a system of schools, it's called the NIOSH ERC system.
00:50:43
Speaker
takes big public health universities and funnels a lot of those students into occupational or environmental safety and health issues and research. So it's become sort of an educational or training tool for people that work in safety and health or that really work in that labor world where they're seeing these changes in the workplace.
00:51:04
Speaker
So after now nearly 200 screening events, plus some film festivals, the film is now available to the public for the first time, which is a big step in that when you look at the level that it speaks to a lot of these issues, and the presentation of the film really told as a family story in a lot of ways,
00:51:25
Speaker
The goal has always been to reach the public and to change perceptions of temp work and occupational safety and health. So look, if you work in safety and health or if you're a labor organizer, these issues are really going to speak to what you do every day and you're really going to like this film. And that's great. You know, like I'm glad to open some eyes a little further for people that have already recognized some of these issues or to give people a real inspired sense of
00:51:55
Speaker
why they're doing the work they're doing and how important it is. But that's just plain for the home team. The real test is can we change other people's minds about this? And I think when I was coming to this as an outsider and being shocked by the number of fatalities and injuries that take place every year, I wanted other people to know that, to feel the same way about it that I did. When we were doing the filming in 2014,
00:52:25
Speaker
at the time, which it didn't make the film because the numbers kind of changed, but in 2014, 12 years after the start of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of fatalities in any given year in the US on the job was greater than in those wars combined for the 12 or 13 years leading up to that. Right? Isn't that crazy? I've heard that statistic too.
00:52:48
Speaker
the level of concern or awareness or outrage or value placed on those lives is so dramatically different because of where and how those circumstances happened. And I'm not trying to compare one to the other. I'm just saying, I think more people, if they're aware how big these numbers were and how much of a problem this still is today, I think we could change the culture of how people value safety and health training,
00:53:17
Speaker
how far the law goes in specifying what needs to be provided. Um, do we start to rely on other institutions to provide more training? You know, is this more part, you know, does safety and occupational safety and health training need to be a part of a high school education or a trade education? Um, so I hope this film, um, now that it's available to the public, um, which you can find at tempfilm.com.
00:53:40
Speaker
It's also on Amazon and Vimeo. I hope it can just start to change public perception because it's great to play it for the home team. In the safety and health world, in the labor world, it's really a hit, but we're trying to change minds and change the culture.
00:53:55
Speaker
That's exactly it. And, you know, as safety professionals, we often, you know, we often get another cliche that's passed our way is, oh, that's the safety person's thing to worry about. Oh, we have the safety person. That's their job. As if once, you know, as if the safety professional has this magic wand.
00:54:16
Speaker
that if they're doing their job or they're present that everybody is going to be okay when in fact the responsibility is with each individual to perform the way that we want them to perform when no one's looking. And the only way they can do that is if they have the background, the knowledge, and the training.
00:54:37
Speaker
that gives them the ability to advocate for their coworkers and themselves to go home the same way they arrived at the beginning of every day. And the fact that the general working public don't often understand how many people lose their lives or their livelihood
00:55:03
Speaker
and can't do their job because of workplace hazards is something that just isn't shared widely and people don't know about it. And those of us in the safety profession understand it so well and on such a visceral level.
00:55:20
Speaker
And if you've been in the business for any amount of time, you know that and feel it. And I've been in safety for 20, over 23 years. And as I travel my home state, because of the work that I did early in my career,
00:55:38
Speaker
I'm always passing by what I call hallowed ground. And if you talk with other safety professionals, they'll tell you similar stories. Like I can't drive past certain areas in certain communities without immediately being transported to where someone lost their life.
00:55:54
Speaker
And it's something that people don't always know, and the working public themselves don't always know. So the more that we can bring those stories to life, like day story, and other stories that other safety professionals carry with them, the more we'll be able to move the dial. Yeah, and I hate to add to that hollow ground point, but if you're
00:56:18
Speaker
Uh, feeling a little stressed or emotional about it. Like don't go for the Bacardi, go for the Captain Morgan. Because when I see that Bacardi bottle everywhere, obviously, I mean, I can't help but think of this family that I know. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I have those, I have those, I have those same moments. And, and then there are so many employers who do an outstanding job.
00:56:42
Speaker
And they have safety professionals who are doing outstanding jobs. I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to collect a story that started in my career when I was really young in safety. And I was investigating the death of this man named Nick. And he was run over by a bulldozer at work.
00:57:06
Speaker
And he wasn't a temporary worker. He lost his life on the job. And there were a lot of people who were dying on the job by mobile earth moving equipment in the area where I was working. And I was seeing these fatalities occur and I thought, gosh, you know, something has got to change.
00:57:26
Speaker
And I didn't have any citations because there weren't any laws I could apply to his exact work scenario at that time. And so I decided to partner with a coworker of mine who had worked in the construction trades as a heavy equipment operator himself. And we proposed a new law that was eventually adopted by the legislature to prevent that kind of death.
00:57:50
Speaker
And so that happened in the early 90s and then fast forward many many years. I was thinking about I wanted to tell the story about what happened and I was really curious to know like what did the employer do and what happened to his family.
00:58:06
Speaker
And I decided to just approach them, just like you did with Day's family, and ask if the employer themselves would be willing to talk about what happened at their workplace in the aftermath. And I also contacted Nick's widow for the first time. When you work with OSHA, you don't get to talk with family members. You're prohibited from doing that. They want you to stay neutral.
00:58:31
Speaker
And so reached out to his widow and found where she was living with their daughter who was five, turned six the day after her dad died, and the employer who remembered me as that OSHA lady, and a really small business.
00:58:50
Speaker
Well, no, it's not always a good thing. Sometimes that OSHA lady really has a very negative moniker. But that employer had done these crazy, wonderful things with safety and became these fierce advocates for employee safety, not only for their own employees, but for trade groups. And they had just done remarkable things and they had no idea that the law that I had proposed
00:59:19
Speaker
co-written and was passed that they were complying with had anything to do with Nick their employee until I came back all these years later and so it was really fun to bring fun in that fun is a is a loose term there it was really interesting to bring all those parties together to say you know this man's life tragic as it was was not
00:59:45
Speaker
for, you know, people change the way they did their work and it changed the landscape of the whole state for people doing the type of work that Nick was doing. And so those employers exist, they're out there and it's very wonderful to tell their story. That's really an amazing story.
01:00:06
Speaker
and really impressive. I hope as many listeners are still on as started and spent so much time listening to me that they caught that because that's really incredible and I'm really happy to have met you and to have heard that.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah, I get to tell Nick's story as a keynote address all over the country, and I've been doing it for a couple of years. And every time I tell his story, I send a quick text to his wife and let her know that I'm telling their family story again. And I'm wondering, is that similar for you with Day's family? Like, what's your relationship with them like now?
01:00:52
Speaker
I mean, frankly, it's been a mix. In part, I've taken some great joy in being able to share with them all the places that I've been able to go with this film and with their message. I think the people they've been able to reach for the story is really impressive when you talk about, you know, this is
01:01:15
Speaker
One family in Jacksonville, Florida, that is now holding the attention and speaking for about an hour to OSHA inspectors across the country, to the NIOSH researchers, to safety and health professionals on the ground, to young leaders in the workplace. It took all over. I see that and I think it's so amazing. And I'm excited to share these places that it's reached. I don't know. And I don't think they have that same joy with it yet.
01:01:42
Speaker
Uh, and I'm trying to get it there because to them, I think in Jacksonville and their community at Bacardi and at remedy intelligence staffing where this happened, everything is still the same. And making this film, my goals were bigger than getting it just in the safety and health world. And their goals were a lot bigger too. So, uh, even after three years, you know, I can give a long list of the places it's been. I think it's impressive, but.
01:02:09
Speaker
What have we really changed at this point? So you're still just getting started in a matter of...
Ongoing Advocacy for Change
01:02:16
Speaker
In particular, we've done a lot of university screenings with, I think, the next generation of safety and health professionals.
01:02:23
Speaker
who to them, these fissured, fractured, subcontracted workforces are going to be the norm. I think we've done a lot to shape how they see things and how they're going to design systems in the future to help keep these workers safe. So I think they have made a big difference, but can they walk out of their door and see that?
01:02:41
Speaker
in Jacksonville? Like, you know, no, not yet. We've done nothing over the last many decades, but continue to see the temp industry grow, continue to have these really high rates of injury and fatality for temp workers. And we're really in the early phases of this struggle. You know, personally, I think we still need to create some awareness before we have the energy for action.
01:03:10
Speaker
So I hope the film and their work can be a part of that but we, you know, we've got a long way to go. We do, we do. There's a lot of work left to do and the safety profession can definitely collectively lay our hands on that. And going back to what you said, I think you wanted to admit that, you know, talking about this was
01:03:33
Speaker
at times fun i think that's all right to admit i have ever great time with this and i hope that that some of the folks listening to this
01:03:41
Speaker
I don't know if there are a lot of professions in the world where you can walk away really feeling like you help protect someone's life, someone's livelihood, someone's family, but you all have. And it's really been a great joy to be invited into this safety and health community and to be a part of the discussion. Thank you so much, Dave. And as we wrap our time together today, I'm curious, do you have plans for any more documentaries?
01:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, there's one in the works. I'm not the lead on that project. I'm helping some other folks that have already started a film, but there is one called The Company We Keep.
01:04:21
Speaker
Uh, it'll be out in April of 2019 about an occupational cancer cluster at a GE facility. So, um, it's some of it's about these illnesses contracted over a lifetime of work. And some of it is about the workers and the widows who are fighting to, um, change the laws so that it's easier for workers to win recognition for what they've been through in a workplace. So, um, no spoilers there. And, uh, yeah, there'll be, there'll be a follow up next year.
01:04:52
Speaker
Wonderful, wonderful. Dave, thank you so much for your time with us today and thank you for the advocacy that you have been doing and are going to continue doing and the help that you're offering all of us in the safety profession really appreciate it. Well, really my pleasure and my honor to be a part of it and to be on your show. So thank you so much for having me, Jill.
01:05:13
Speaker
And thank you all so much for joining in and listening today and thank you for the work that you all do to make sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. You can listen to all of our episodes at vividlearningsystems.com or subscribe in the podcast player of your choosing. If you have a suggestion for a guest, including yourself, please contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.