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#84: Science, Politics, and Safety. How Are They Related?
80 Plays3 years ago
John Morawetz’s childhood was a little different than most. As a middle-class kid of two professors, John knew more about graphs than most kids knew about sports. He turned his early passion for justice and science into a career in health and safety as the Director of the International Chemical Workers Union Council Center for Worker Health and Safety since founded in 1988.
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:07
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded November 5th, 2021. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by John Morowitz. John has been the Director of the International Chemical Workers Union Council Center for Worker Health and Safety Education, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, since it was founded in 1988.
00:00:34
Speaker
through an NIH EHS or the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences worker training grant.
00:00:41
Speaker
The Center currently operates on four federal grants and trains members and salaried staff of 12 unions and trade union organizations.
Training and Achievements
00:00:50
Speaker
Since 2006, John has worked on federal activities for chemical facility anti-terrorism legislation. The Center trains from these unions in industrial, hospital, and school chemical emergency response, infectious diseases, and disaster preparedness
00:01:09
Speaker
and has an extensive program to develop rank and file workers as trainers. The center uses various adult education techniques in all of their programs. The unions in the consortium include
00:01:22
Speaker
the International Association of Machinists, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Nurses United, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, and the United Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The center also
00:01:52
Speaker
works with United Auto Workers and three other partners under a Department of Transportation grant. This past October, the American Public Health Association Occupational Health and Safety Section held their annual award ceremony to honor the work of individuals or organizations who advocate for health and safety of workers in the United States and internationally.
00:02:17
Speaker
It was at this award ceremony where I got to hear John's nomination and acceptance of the Eula Bingham Award for Excellence in Occupational Health and Safety Education and Training for 2021, along with one other awardee. And if you've never heard of Eula Bingham, have a listen to episode 60 of this podcast.
00:02:39
Speaker
where you'll hear my favorite industrial hygienist and health and safety historian, Mark Catlin, talk of Eula's contribution to occupational health and safety.
Career Journey and Influences
00:02:49
Speaker
John's body of work is immense, beginning, well, quite a long time ago, and I'm so grateful to have him here. John, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being here. Glad to be here, Jill. Part of your acceptance remarks the other week during the awards ceremony
00:03:09
Speaker
you referred to your path to this profession as a twisted line. And if for everyone who's listened to the podcast in the past, you know that we talk about, I guess what you call a twisted line, everybody calls it kind of like the accidental way they found this health and safety profession. Seems like maybe that's a good way for us to start. Where did all this start for you somewhere in New York, John?
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, I grew up in New York City, but yeah, I should just say about the award that it's named for you, La Bingham, who started, the main person who started worker training grants, it's called now the Susan Harwood Awards, and she was an amazing person. She was the right person at the right time, with the right president, and she really showed us what could be accomplished.
00:04:01
Speaker
And times change a lot. Obviously we're not back in, I guess she was in 1977 she started, but she really had a great legacy and she set the goal, the target of what we can all try to get to. In terms of my line,
00:04:18
Speaker
You know, I come from a middle-class family with my parents. It's a very unique family. My parents are both professors. My father's a professor of chemistry. My mother's a professor of mathematics. But I didn't know much about unions at all for some time, probably not until I got to college when people were talking about it.
00:04:40
Speaker
uh... but you know i didn't know it was a union town new york is really a strong union town and like a lot of new yorkers i didn't think i was going to leave new york i mean new york was the center of the universe uh... but i've been very comfortable it's been wonderful living here in cincinnati and uh... understanding and working with the union with people from all over the country it's just really great uh... so starting out uh...
00:05:07
Speaker
You know, let me just say that there's a bridge of Eula and her generation of women being a professional. She was a professor of toxicology before she was the head of OSHA, and she went back to that. But you're reminding me of my mother, a mathematician, who was born around the same time in a similar age, and that was really interesting.
00:05:29
Speaker
And I would say I credit both my mother and my father for a basic comfortableness with numbers, which leads me, I would say that my soundbite is that really there's the political union health and safety end is the science end, and I got a master's in industrial hygiene and safety and
00:05:48
Speaker
this field has merged both my science and the politics, and it's been wonderful.
Political Activism and Education
00:05:54
Speaker
So in the beginning, I would say that, and I probably should stop and let you ask questions. That's okay, keep going. I told the story that in this speech about my father, we always sat at the same place, I have three sisters, my parents, dining room table, and I was sat on his left.
00:06:15
Speaker
dining room conversation was not sports, and I had to teach my father baseball. He didn't know anything about it. He was a Czech immigrant. But one subject or another would come up. I don't even know what in particular. And he always had a pen. He'd plot his pen, would unfold the paper napkin, and he'd draw the x-y axis and a curve
00:06:38
Speaker
and describe something we were talking about. And I learned and was comfortable with graphs at an early age. And I got to say, most people, you don't even get to the curve. You draw the x-y axis and you've lost them. Exactly. This is not normal dinner conversation and lots of households, right? Right. But it was my normal. Yeah.
00:07:04
Speaker
It's very hard for me to understand how difficult it is for people to understand graphs. And with the pandemic, where there's so many different things you've got to look at, whether it's cases or hospitalizations or deaths, whether it's geography, whether it's times, states, counties, it's very complicated. And trying to get down to the main thing, what's going on is real important and being comfortable of dealing with a massive amount of data that taught me very well.
00:07:35
Speaker
So, John, you grew up in this home with two academics, three sisters, raised by immigrants. This informed so much of your life. When it was time for you to think about leaving the nest, where did you go? What happened next? What happened? Well, my mother taught at NYU, and my older sister and I both went to NYU.
00:08:05
Speaker
Leaving the nest, a lot of people, you graduate high school, you leave. And I left the house, but I went to school nearby. And I would say, I didn't so much leave the nest as the world, the country caught up with me. It caught up with me, I'd say, you know, the Vietnam War. But I should backtrack a little bit in high school,
00:08:31
Speaker
Before I left the nest, I got involved in basically reform democratic politics. And so I knew he was like a year in front of me. The current congressman from Manhattan, one of them is Jerry Nadler. And we helped try to defeat a conservative Democrat, anti-war, pro-war, pro-Vietnam war, democratic congressman Leonard Farbstein.
00:08:55
Speaker
We didn't unseat them, but that was my beginning of political awareness. Then this college, Vietnam War is going on, racism, Black Panthers, Fred Hampton gets killed. I wouldn't call it leaving the nest, but that's my evolution of understanding what's going on in the world. Yeah, and justice was being baked into your bones. Yes,
Family Heritage and Awareness
00:09:19
Speaker
and that goes back earlier for justice, I would say.
00:09:23
Speaker
growing up with three sisters, no brothers, and all became professionals, and my mother, and my father's no slouch, but you know, that's what I grew up with, but basically the idea that men and women should not be treated equally was, I never heard it. I mean, I didn't hear anybody being made a fun of, and so it was,
00:09:44
Speaker
it was basically men and women are going to be treated equally. And so that was part of the justice. The other one goes back to justice. It goes back to probably their heritage where my mother was Southern Irish, Protestant and atheist agnostic. And so, you know, the Southern Irish Protestant really landed gentry.
00:10:07
Speaker
the people who ruled southern Ireland or Ireland. But my mother and her father were sympathetic to the Irish Rebellion in 1923, 1916, Eastern Rebellion, and so I understood that at an earlier age. My father saw it, my father's a Czech Jew, so his father was a very strong Czech nationalist, and my father was born when it was the Austro-Hagarian Empire.
00:10:30
Speaker
So that idea of a country and my grandfather was new Thomas Masaryk, Jan Masaryk, I mean the presence of the country. And then the immediate family left, his two brothers and sisters left before the war started, before the Nazis occupied, but my grandparents and my father didn't get out until the Nazis occupied.
00:10:53
Speaker
Now they all got out. I had one uncle who spent the whole war in Belfast where he met his wife and my aunt. You know, that's where he spent the war. But everybody else was in Canada. They moved to Canada. But my father had four cousins who went to the camps. He had three aunts, two. One I think got in camps. One died in Poland and lots, not in a camp. Another one just disappeared. And an uncle who died in the camps.
00:11:22
Speaker
And of those two cousins survived, and I knew them. So the whole idea of what can happen, Holocaust, you know, pogroms, I mean, that was very real and we understood that. And so in terms of understanding the genocides that we've seen, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, I mean, these are things that man's inhumanity demand, it was very vividly, I knew that at an early age.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah, and coupled with worker rights movements that were happening as your coming of age, essentially, all of that had to collide in your head and inform the lens with which you view the world. That really happened in college. OK. That happened with
Factory Experience and Advocacy
00:12:09
Speaker
the answer. It didn't happen earlier. It didn't happen around the dinner table. Yeah.
00:12:13
Speaker
And there's a diversity of views in the family without getting into details. I won't get into that. But worker issues, I'd say it was more when I was a senior in college. My senior year was 69-70, Kent State had happened. There had been a strike of the cafeteria workers at NYU that I had helped support. So the idea of what worker struggles were about, I sort of understood that, hung out as I credit
00:12:43
Speaker
later in life working in the factory, the lefties who I hung out with, we did a lot, you know, anti-war work, but also anti-racism work, defense of the Black Panthers. I mean, that was part of it also. And then a year after I got out of college, then the Attica Rebellion happened.
00:13:01
Speaker
were 39 hostages and prisoners, mainly prisoners, but I think there were about 14 hostages who were killed in the takeover by the state troopers. That formed a lot of my understanding of the world also. But there was a lot going on in the world, and there were worker struggles.
00:13:19
Speaker
where it got to me was eventually those lefty pink red friends basically encouraged me to work in a factory. I was driving, I did a number of different things. I worked at an anti-poverty program, unemployed for a while, I drove a cab for a year, and eventually they said, come on, you gotta work in a factory, work with workers, and try to organize, et cetera. And- And John, real quick question, what did you study at NYU?
00:13:45
Speaker
Originally, it was a biology major, pre-med. And then I want to drop out probably about 1968. And let's just say my parents were not too happy. And I still remember a sit-down conversation with my father. And I never thought he was a negotiator, but he negotiated. And the deal was I wouldn't drop out and I'd change my major to political science.
00:14:12
Speaker
And I graduated. And did he draw the XY axis again for you during that conversation? I don't think that came up in that discussion. That's awesome. Okay, so you've landed yourself in a factory. What kind of factory? It's a wire and cable factory. It was in Maspeth, Queens called Sierra Wire and Cable. It moved to the south and I think it later got organized and later I think went overseas. But I think there's still the business. Okay.
00:14:40
Speaker
And so what did you drop into a factory? I'm guessing this is your first time your eyes have seen something like this. What did you do there? Well, it wasn't the first time. I mean, along the way, I had worked in a factory in Paterson, New Jersey. It wasn't quite the same kind of factory. I mean, I did different work, et cetera. But that was the closest to a factory. It's true. I didn't have much experience. Let's put it that way.
00:15:09
Speaker
And I did a number of jobs, a job that really, well, there was one where I operated a machine that would check whether it was insulation that was not existent or a blow, or it basically would cause a short circuit. And that was interesting. I once shocked myself from not doing the right thing, but that was it. I lived. I think my feet left the ground, but I lived. It was interesting.
00:15:38
Speaker
But the last three years, three of the five years, I got a job in the back of the plant and I did that in the rubber department because I was, you know, talking to the workers, organizing about different issues, union issues, as well as what's going on in the world, and they were watching me.
00:15:58
Speaker
And the only way I could have some mobility around the plant, and it was triple shifted, was to be able to get a job in the back of the plant. That way, I could talk to people on the way as I walked out, and I could talk to people on the way in for my shift, as well as a locker room or whatever. So I went to the rubber department. And the rubber department, around that time, another part of the department, there was some lead poisoning.
00:16:27
Speaker
And the company, unbeknownst to me, nothing I knew about it, they sent the workers to be tested for blood lead levels to Mount Sinai Hospital, which had a world-renowned program operated by Irving Selikoff, who did a lot of work on the association of asbestos and lung diseases. He really was a great guy, did a lot of breakthrough work.
00:16:49
Speaker
And there was a friend of mine, Steve Levin, who was just starting a residency in occupational health. And I knew him before I got the job, anti-war work. And we were talking back and forth, and he was getting information from me, and I was getting information from him. And he encouraged me to go with it.
00:17:10
Speaker
I think there was a show of my history here. I was reading the New York Times, even working in the factory. And the front page of the Science Times, which I love the Science Times on Tuesdays, had the front page article was about the art hazards for artists.
00:17:30
Speaker
And I called up the guy that quoted in the article and I said, you mentioned lead. What's this about lead?
Advanced Education and Career Path
00:17:37
Speaker
And he said, why are you interested? And I said, I work in a factory and we exposed to lead. And he said, don't talk to me. Talk to these people at Nykosh, the New York committee for occupational safety and health.
00:17:50
Speaker
and now part of the National Caush network. And so I went over to them. I think the co-leaders were, there were two co-leaders, Debbie Nagin and David Michaels. And David Michaels went on to be head of OSHA under the Obama administration. And I remember one thing I did is I pulled out a fact sheet on the discrimination for black workers. And in the middle of it, it talked about,
00:18:16
Speaker
rubber workers and i'm going what what's going on here i'm working on the rubber department by that yeah and it basically said this from the tire workers that workers with the way discrimination works black workers ended up in the dirtiest funkiest jobs and they were making tires and the rubber workers union had negotiated with the major rubber man tire manufacturers
00:18:39
Speaker
To have I think it was a nickel deal and it was a five cents per day or hour that went in I think was five cents per hour went into a fund that funded the University of North Carolina to studies of Rebel workers and what cancers they got and lo and behold Rebel workers that study had stomach cancer and so
00:19:01
Speaker
One that interested me to the word epidemiology, which took me months before I pronounced epidemiology. And I was working in the rubber room. Now, rubber in a tire, rubber in wire and cable is sort of different, but some of it's the same. And they mentioned in particular the Banbury mixer. And the Banbury mixer is used in, I believe, in both industries. And I worked around the Banbury mixer.
00:19:27
Speaker
and not directly on it. But the Banbury mixer, basically it's like a giant meat grinder that's about one story up in the air, now on a frame. And the guy who operates it would dump these 50 pound bags and five pound bags and this oil and one thing or another. And this is before right to know. He didn't know, I didn't know what it was.
00:19:47
Speaker
And then you basically, the grinder mixes them together, heated pressure, and it drops down into these big rollers, and it is a long process, but it gets made into a strip of rubber. So this really fascinated me, and then the epilogue on that is that there was a guy, an oil man, who went around to oil all the machines in the factory, named John also. He ended up dying of stomach cancer.
00:20:13
Speaker
Now, it's only one case. I know the science. One case doesn't prove anything. But when it's the same cancer that's showed in other studies in that industry, to me, it hit home emotionally and, again, gave me motivation and firsthand experiences in the wiring cable factory that I still think was basically my education for health and safety. Were you, at that time, were you also worried about your own health, John?
00:20:43
Speaker
as you're reading and discovering these things? That's a good question. Well, let's just say I was worried about my health when I put that wire on the machine that I hadn't turned off and it was energized and my feet left the ground. I never made that mistake again.
00:21:04
Speaker
I don't know. You were really focused on the people around you, it sounds like. The people around you, the people who were doing this for years and decades. Yeah, I probably began to have some awareness. I don't think I wore a respirator. I probably try to stay away from it when they were dumping the chemicals. But regretfully, I got to say no, but I think that's what
00:21:32
Speaker
Of the many things that taught me, it taught me how people, workers, anybody basically makes peace with the hazards that you're faced with. That you basically, you're making a living and talking up is difficult. And that was also another education of talking with the union and trying to get the union to have regular meetings and elections. That was a whole other thing. And actually when I just moved to a condo downsized and I was going through some of my papers,
00:22:02
Speaker
And I found a bunch of stuff. I mean, I found copies. I have rank and file newsletters that I used to hand out in front of the plant about health and safety, about contracts, about all kinds of different issues. But also I found my copies of my Freedom of Information requests for an OSHA inspection that I believe I requested. And I think a draft, what's called a NIOSH request, a request to NIOSH to come in and investigate health hazards.
00:22:29
Speaker
And you're figuring out and navigating all of that as a pretty young person. John, you mentioned learning of the word epidemiology when you were discovering all of this in the world that is rubber and wire and cable. Is that kind of where epidemiology and an interest in that was born for you?
00:22:53
Speaker
You know, I would say the moment I heard about the lead problem, and I should back up a little bit, part of the reason the company sent the workers to get tested, because there was one of the workers there who died, and I don't know what he died of, but he worked around these big vats they had, I believe of PVC, the powder, vinyl, but there was other lead and there was a lot of other stuff.
00:23:21
Speaker
And he had a very pock-mock face, and he'd always eat his lunch around the machines. So his clowniness was not good. And I think once I heard that, or about the blood lead levels, and there was a professional article written by Mount Sinai Hospital about it,
00:23:38
Speaker
it became the perfect match that led to what I said in my speech about, I turned to my father at some point, I still remember, he used to repeat the story and I'd repeat the story, both of us for different reasons, which is that I said to him, dad, I found a field that'll make you, mother, and my political lefty friends happy. And it was a perfect merger of my science background and my love of science,
00:24:06
Speaker
my parents, especially my father, had a love of all different fields of science. And politically, what does it mean for the people handling this stuff? In another level, I don't know if I quite said this to my father, but he was a chemist, and he knew about some of the hazards, some of them he didn't know about, he made fun of, but he was a spectacle of the field. But on the other hand,
00:24:29
Speaker
what about the people who are actually doing the most hazardous and most direct contact with the substances that then you're doing a study in a lab about? You had mentioned
00:24:47
Speaker
I think it wasn't Mount Sinai who were employees would go for blood lead testing and stuff. Is that kind of where in your story you had met some of the physicians there and talked with them or did I just fast forward too fast into your history?
00:25:03
Speaker
No, well, that's only where I met the one guy. I mean, I met the other people. Okay, I got it. But that was mainly Steve Levin. He died a couple of years ago. He was a well-beloved person. But in particular, you know, my wife and I were wanting to leave New York City and left the wiring cable factory. But before I left, I had asked him,
00:25:23
Speaker
You know, this is an interesting field. And I remember at that time, beyond what I said to my father, I didn't tell him this, but I want to work for a union. I want to do health and safety full-time for a union. And I still remember, Steve Levin said, go get a master's in industrial hygiene.
00:25:40
Speaker
So that's where, I didn't know a lot of professionals in the field, so I went to, we went to Boston, I got into the Harvard School of Public Health, and met a bunch of professors there, some really great people, and that's where I got the master's in industrial hygiene and safety, and then
00:26:02
Speaker
At the end of the fall of my second year, one of the professors, Dave Wegman, encouraged me to go to the APHA, American Public Health Association. And I went to that meeting as a student and that led me to APHA, the Occupational Health and Safety section. And so that was the beginning of that family.
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, which as a reminder for our listeners is the entity where you got the award the other week named for Eula Bingham. So yeah, you've been familiar with them for a really long time. So you finish your grab program at Harvard. What happens next? Like what do you jump into career-wise then?
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, you know, you get a job. And Boston, I love living in Boston, but I figured there were so many people who liked Boston also who graduated with me, and some of them were able to land jobs, stay in the area. I had two job offers, and one was actually from a union in Washington, D.C., but it was a one-year job. It wasn't gonna pay that much. I don't know, but the other one was that
00:27:17
Speaker
uh... i got into i applied for was accepted uh... cdc operates this thing called the i s epidemic intelligence service it's a two-year old boy network uh... it's gotten much better and i think a lot of women at that time so i call it the old boy old girl network and all i think just about every head of cdc
00:27:38
Speaker
has done their stint in EIS. And basically it's that trained me also by the epidemiology. And typically it's a church picnic or the norovirus on the cruise ship or something. But if you look at Ebola or you look at Zika or you look at the regretfully COVID, the EIS officers are on the front lines trying to figure out what's going on, how's it spreading, et cetera. And so that job was a two year job in Cincinnati to work for NIOSH.
00:28:07
Speaker
And it appeared to me to be a great opportunity. And usually, they only take doctors and PhD epidemiologists. And luckily, I got into it along with another guy who I worked with at NIOSH, who we are master levels industrial hygienist. And my personal recommendation to CDC is that they should open up the EIS class or run something similar
00:28:33
Speaker
to a lot of people, because it's very valuable skills to understand public health in many different areas. So I got into that, and that job was Cincinnati, working at Nash's. They have headquarters in Atlanta, but they have two main locations, one in Cincinnati and one in Morgantown, West Virginia. And this was in Cincinnati, so I came here for two years. I figured that'd be it. As I said, in New Yorker, I didn't envision living anywhere else.
00:29:02
Speaker
And one thing led to another. I mean, it was a great job, learned a lot there. A guy I worked with at NIOSH ended up, he had organized the American Federation of Government Employees, now a partner in our program, into NIOSH. He went to work for the Moulders Union, which is the only union based in Cincinnati. And then after a year or so, he got another job at the Moulders Union, research education.
00:29:28
Speaker
Health and safety opened up and I gotta say it's an old boy thing. I got an interview because he recommended me in front of the executive board and I got hired. And then they merged and it was a great job. When I say I got a degree in industrial hygiene and safety, that safety part really came in handy because one of the major things I did
00:29:50
Speaker
beyond a new directions OSHA training grant and some other stuff was investigating all the fatalities. And one of them was a confined space fatality. One was like a tag out fatality. They were just classic problems. And so they merged with another union, Glass Pottery Plastic. They performed the Glass Moulders Pottery Worker Union, GMP.
00:30:15
Speaker
And they were going to leave, go to media Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. Well, I love the Northeast, but I decided I was going to stay in Cincinnati. I stayed. And at the same time, I had this job offer was there for the chemical workers. And that's what I chose. And it's been a great 30. That's how I landed at the chemical workers. Wow. For 33 years now. Yep.
00:30:44
Speaker
John, backing up to you mentioned investigating all of the job fatalities. Those are very unique experiences for anyone who's done that kind of work. How did that shape the next trajectory of your career, if you will, or did it?
00:31:08
Speaker
I don't think it's shaped the next trajectory. Let's just say that just as safety and health are two sides of health and safety, that people specialize in one or the other. And in general, I specialize in training and it's mainly chemical hazards.
00:31:24
Speaker
COVID and Ebola, it's been infectious disease. But we haven't trained, we do do some safety work with the training center, but the money is mainly supposed to do your chemical emergency response. So that's, it hasn't been that much safety. But then again, I don't do the training. I just wrote the grants to get the money. And after about five years, I was out of the picture for the training and the staff are the ones who do the training and they do a great job.
00:31:50
Speaker
But I think that it gave me a balanced approach to the hazards of the workplace. And I'll give you one strong example, which is that the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico had thousands of workers on the beach cleaning up the oil.
00:32:09
Speaker
This woman, Debbie Berkowitz, used to be head of UFCW, Health and Safety Department, and she worked for OSHA at the time. She emphasized the heat hazards, and I think she was right, that a lot of us, we concentrated on what was in the oil and the level of exposure and all that, and I think it was a legitimate concern, a legitimate hazard, especially the closer and the closer you got to on the barges out there closer to the spill.
00:32:35
Speaker
But for the majority of workers on the beach in the hot sun, it was heat stroke. And it could kill people. And OSHA rightfully emphasized breaks, shade, and water. And I don't think anybody died from heat stroke. So I have that balanced approach. And that's what I give credit to. Yeah, right.
00:33:01
Speaker
I was going to ask about, I know that OSHA's been attempting to pass a heat standard for quite some time and it sounds like we're just on the precipice of it right now. I'm wondering if maybe some of that had to do with pieces of that work at that time.
00:33:16
Speaker
it's a good question uh... getting standards is a complicated process eulog did amazing work at a time when OSHA hadn't been around even for ten years at this point i think it's extremely difficult the legal process to get new standards quite frankly companies that were all organized they knew all the tricks the the lawsuits the hearings witnesses all the rest of it so it's much more difficult and
00:33:44
Speaker
As a hazard has been around and the question of a standard for a long time. I haven't followed it. I haven't been that involved in it, but it's My my guess is there are a number of things that led to this and you know I haven't followed it right now the last year under the Biden administration But it's a long overdue and right definitely is important to get yeah, definitely you you mentioned you'll as influence And you know
Founding and Evolution of Training Center
00:34:13
Speaker
how she influenced your work with once you got to the Chemical Workers Union. Do you want to talk about that influence on your work and or a little bit more about what the training center does and what they're doing today?
00:34:30
Speaker
Well, you know, I was limited by five minutes, so I had plenty of things I could have said about EULA, but limited by time. So, EULA, in the beginning, before I got hired for this career in terms of the chemical workers, and I was in Cincinnati, I might have heard, I certainly heard of her, I don't know when I first met her.
00:34:50
Speaker
But before I was hired by the chemical workers, I knew anything about the grant they were writing. She basically, quite frankly, knocked heads and got the steel workers and the chemical workers to put in a joint grant. And I'm not sure all the political ins and outs, but it took some doing. And I credit her for starting the Center the way it started. So the steel workers were part of our grant until 2005.
00:35:15
Speaker
And then they left. And there's a lot of complicated ins and outs. The bottom line is that by that time, the steelworkers were about to merge with another union called PACE. And PACE was a merger of the Paper Workers and Oil Chemical Atomic Works Union. OCAW, I got to say, parenthetically, had a head of legislative and health and safety work called Tony Mizaki, who was just legendary. And one of the APJ awards is named after him. He was at the forefront of the struggle for worker health and safety.
00:35:45
Speaker
And in the beginning, when NIHS first funded grants, at least half of them were unions. Right now, it's many fewer. And that was a lot because unions had a very powerful role, the laborers, opportuneers, carpenters, in terms of getting this money.
00:36:04
Speaker
I'm going to back up there many stories here, but basically it was hazardous waste work because hazardous waste workers were looking at the EPA coming out when they were cleaning up a hazardous waste site valley, the drums, whatever. An EPA would have Tyvek suits or a better suit, level B suit, whatever, level A.
00:36:23
Speaker
SCBA, they'd be out there for half an hour, then they'd leave, take samples, whatever. And these guys were working in their boots and jeans and no respirator, nothing. And they were going, what's going on? I'm working at this 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And these guys, what's going on here? So they wanted to get
00:36:40
Speaker
Grants to train their members and also give them credentials so they could get jobs. They were trained to deal with hazardous waste They're also Bhopal happened and firefighters were concerned about some of the stuff firefighters had to go into plants that exploded or something going in and so that became
00:36:57
Speaker
hazardous waste operations and emergency response has WAPR and OSHA standard. And actually OSHA was mandated by Superfund stabilization to write that standard, which is very rare for OSHA legislatively, OSHA to be told you got to write a standard. And they had to do it and they did it. Well, a little piece of the legislation after that said there's going to be $10 million to NRHS to start worker training grants.
00:37:23
Speaker
And about half of those grantees were unions, and it's grown in the universities, environmental justice groups, and it's really a great family, which all of us, I think, do some great, we call it gold standard in training.
00:37:38
Speaker
A few unions are there now, but that beginning, getting back to EULA, having two unions to write to have a common grant is similar to one other union grant called CPWR, originally called Center of Protective Workers Rights. I'm going to butcher what their name is now, but they do great work for the construction trades on health and safety, and they do research also, and they're a multi-union grant.
00:38:06
Speaker
But otherwise, it was individual union grants. So the die was set from the beginning that we were going to be two unions, then we machinists, two of the unions that aren't a list, aluminum, brick, American flint glass workers joined in 1990, rubber workers later, and those three unions, rubber, aluminum, brick, flint glass, merged with steelworkers and then steelworkers left. And make a long story short, going back to steelworkers and OCW, my digression before, is that OCW had one of the original grants.
00:38:36
Speaker
and does great training. And so Steelworks is going to merge with them so they had their own grant. And so basically there's a parting of the ways. And divorce is never easy, but you know, we parted ways and they do great training. And we do a lot of common work together and have for years and years. So that started the training center into what it is now.
00:39:00
Speaker
And so on a day-to-day basis, what is your staff working on? Or, well, I mean, this might be an obvious question, but what have they been working on lately? COVID, COVID, COVID. So, yeah, obviously I was gonna answer the question by saying, well, do you want the answer before COVID or after COVID? Okay, let's do both. So before COVID, I would say,
00:39:30
Speaker
a little bit of everything, or a lot of everything. There's a range of programs, and to name some of the big ones, our basic program that started the program, that we still rely on a lot, is a four-day hazardous waste job.
00:39:45
Speaker
that we teach a lot of the substance, we teach the OSHA laws, we teach various resources, and then people dress out in encapsulated suits, SCBA, they understand SCBA checkout, the dangers, how you monitor your air and all that, how you signal you want to get out of a suit, and they have a simulation of a spill or a leak set of drums or pipes because our training center for 33 years has been in a building in downtown Cincinnati and the hands-on part gets done in the basement
00:40:15
Speaker
And so it can be 100 degrees out. It can be 20 degrees out at IC. We can do training safely. So we did that. We got into OSHA training, OSHA 10 and 30-hour programs, general industry construction. One of our partners, American Financial Teachers, has trained teachers to be authorized in New York City, in Connecticut, Chicago, to be authorized to turn around and give those 10-hour classes to their students.
00:40:40
Speaker
And we are able to credit that, to report that to N.I.H.S. We got into CPR first aid after Hurricane Katrina. We got into hurricanes, into mold remediation. We got into other disasters. I mean, a lot of the hurricanes, so in particular, Nykosh leaned on me.
00:41:03
Speaker
I still can't believe that we did it, but Peter Dooley, one of the staff of the National Caution Network, called me up. I was hiking on Mount St. Helens, and he said, I happened to be back at a hotel that I shouldn't have been at, but anyway, I was there, and he said, we got to go to Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and we want to go a week from Monday, and I said, Peter.
00:41:26
Speaker
Where are we going to do the training? How are you going to get around town? Where are people going to be staying? The flood is still around. How is this going to really happen? And one by one, he solved each one of those problems. And that Monday that he wanted us to go, we were there. We ran a program bilingually, English and Spanish, with a great organization in Houston, Feiyu Justia.
00:41:48
Speaker
You know, so we get into that. And you were training the response workers there. Training workers, it dovetailed a lot of community. I mean, having coalitional black trade unionists with Hurricane in the beginning, Hurricane Katrina and Sandy and all that. But then by Houston, we were getting to bilingual classes, both in hurricane stuff and infectious disease stuff.
00:42:13
Speaker
It's just been a diverse, growing kind of program. And after Ebola, we got into, well, actually before Ebola, I think with swine flu, H1N1, we got into some infectious disease, a small grant, and NHS puts out these great brochures on major hazards, but one on hurricane, on flood, on earthquakes, on an avian flu. And so we got infectious disease, and then Ebola happened, and then we got a little bit of Ebola training, infectious disease,
00:42:40
Speaker
Training and train the trainer so we have an extensive train the trainer program Which is really one of the two pillars along with the Delta education that make the program work well One I got to say a Delta education means workers talk to each other they learn from each other and
00:42:58
Speaker
We learn from them also. And lastly, yeah, we add something to them, but really they learn from each other. And the other one is worker trainers. Almost all the educational staff comes out of the rank and file of our consortium partners. And the second apprentice program, where they go through our hands-on program.
00:43:18
Speaker
They go through a five-day train-the-trainer program, and then they assist us with that four-day program. And after they assist for a little while, and there's a job opening, then we're talking to the partners, talking to the staff, you know, we're lucky we hire some of them. So, John, as our listeners, the people that will be listening to this are listening to this, you just listed just a litany of disasters.
00:43:47
Speaker
that you've been on the front lines of providing resources help in training and it's amazing and also you're kind of in maybe an adrenaline junkie after all of this waiting for the next disaster. How interesting has that been? I mean do you
00:44:13
Speaker
I guess my question is, you're always responding to something on the front lines. It's your work. It's your life's work these last 33 years. How do you find your resilience in that?
00:44:33
Speaker
You know, this could be a whole nother podcast. Yeah. So one is the two main parts of it. One, the disaster stuff really started with nine 11 and, uh, there was particular money back then. It was called WMD weapons of mass destruction. Well, we know Colin Powell die as funeral was today. We know about, they didn't find them, but, um,
00:45:00
Speaker
We as a community, the NHS trainees and the staff at NHS, we understood after a while that we had to deal with all hazards and in fact under President Bush, there was a presidential directive talked about an all hazards approach.
00:45:16
Speaker
And that meant both terrorism and natural disasters. And so then in 2005, Katrina hit, and we were already talking with CBTU, some of their trainers, before Katrina hit. We had a meeting with them scheduled like the week after.
00:45:32
Speaker
to talk about mold and after Katrina and what happened at the convention center, New Orleans, all the rest of it, it evolved into a discussion about and then training about hurricane response and working with some of the other partners. There's a community college consortium we worked with. We learned some of the basics and I just support so that 9-11 was a lot of what got into it. The other big factor I got to say is having a consortium.
00:45:57
Speaker
Having this big consortium means that it's a lot of work. So the new director, Sherry Allen, has got our hands full, to say the least, as I did. But it means that whatever hazard is around,
00:46:16
Speaker
We're going to have a significant population and one, or usually much more, of our partners legitimately want to do training in that area for their members. And NHS is able to change what was WMD to an all-hazards stand-alone disaster grant.
00:46:37
Speaker
The other one I gotta say is that from a political point of view, you gotta say it's like, let's not think of this just as a blue collar or a white collar or this industry or whatever. There are hazards to your work. I mean, you can go out, sexual harassment, you know, the boss harassing you, male, female, not even sexual. I mean, there are all kinds of hazards on the job.
00:47:02
Speaker
Politically that's where again credit progressive lefty politics understanding that those are important You got to address them and you know one I often mention to get back to 9-11 is that I don't know the number I think it was least 15 New York Public Employees Federation members were killed in 9-11 who were in one of the towers and you know The terrorism gets played up much too much, but the reality is you know active shooter all that stuff stuff happens in the workplace
00:47:32
Speaker
That's right. That's right. So then 2020 happens and the way that the way that your trainers, the way that you guys operate and have operated all these years suddenly is turned on its head. Um, you want to, do you want to talk about what that experience has been like is like how you had to pivot.
00:47:56
Speaker
Well, as I often say, we had a choice. The choice is either do no training or get into web-based training, which I had resisted, and I just had pushed it for a long time, and some people were doing it. But we in general, and we still believe that classroom training face-to-face, people talking to each other, is the best kind of training.
00:48:19
Speaker
But March 2020, there was no choice. We're not going to do that. We're beginning to, and I still say we, I'll say we till the day I die probably, we're beginning to do, and we have scheduled a hands-on program and the staff will figure out how to do that and how we get back. But we're never going to get back completely.
00:48:37
Speaker
We knew we had to do web training and basically we looked at a couple of platforms and some of our partners had some platforms they want us to look at that they used and we settled on Zoom and the pitch for Zoom is that
00:48:53
Speaker
Zoom has this the breakout group Option and an active chat room that are really great features that many other platforms don't have and what that meant is that we could do a presentation and We had worked with other unions 20 years ago or 15 years ago on The session was called different grants. It was called union grants. It's called death by PowerPoint not
00:49:21
Speaker
and it was like how do we not drone on and on and not make a 12-point font and nobody can read it including the speaker so there's a you have no choice it's going to be a PowerPoint you're going to be visual you're going to do that but then you can do a number of things one during the presentation you can do a poll you can structure and they got to be yes no questions and you can have everybody fill out and they begin to get active and then you can report back
00:49:48
Speaker
what the responses are within when it when you have a point say okay 80% of the people have answered here the results and we can record those we get those in a spreadsheet um so that's one interactive thing the chat room was another interactive thing where some chat room is just a little bit is not that active we strongly encourage it
00:50:09
Speaker
The presenter often asks people to do one thing or another and they respond. And some of the instructors, really phenomenal, the way they can glance as they're talking at the chat room and know what a question is and know what the answer should be and say the answer. Other time we have a staff monitors, has a dedicated job monitoring the chat room and stops a presentation. And we also have a trainer.
00:50:34
Speaker
That was the first place we had a worker trainer beginning to be active in taking a role in presenting. We had to find a new way for them.
00:50:43
Speaker
and we never had that before. The other one in the breakout groups, and this evolved over time, is we have somebody who is the breakout group moderator and it's staff if we don't have trainers who can do it, but also a note taker. And then we have a separate training session where those trainers will get together and go over logistics, how they do it, how you record stuff.
00:51:06
Speaker
And, you know, you don't want chat room or breakout groups go down any strange rabbit holes, deep control of the conversation, make sure that everybody gets to have a say, you go rotate around people. And those all made it a lot more interactive than it could have been. So that's, that's what we did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A really big pivot very, very quickly.
00:51:30
Speaker
like everyone else in the country trying to figure out how to do their work and connect with one another. John, we kind of we marched through pieces of your education, pieces of your jobs, things that you've been working on.
Career Reflections and Personal Interests
00:51:45
Speaker
You've done a lot of things in addition to that from serving on boards to
00:51:52
Speaker
different presentations and things that you've written, some teaching you've done. Do you want to talk about any of those that, you know, kind of spring to mind that you're proud of or you'd like to talk about?
00:52:11
Speaker
Well, you know, thinking of the career beyond CIRA, which really was my education, or a cable factory, I have served on the board of directors for ACJH, American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienist. I was the treasurer for two years. I'll just go through it and you can tell me if you want me to elaborate on them.
00:52:35
Speaker
in terms of the time or maybe another talk. I was for 10 years on a risk assessment committee, which is fascinating and hard work, which was we met I think three times a year to go over a draft risk assessment document to set three different health effect levels of various chemicals for the public.
00:52:59
Speaker
So it was levels that would begin causing some symptoms, but not that serious, would cause irreversible damage, tissue damage, or limit the ability to escape. And three might cause death. And then you set those levels for at least I think five, four levels, I think 30 minutes, one hour, four hours and eight hours. And sometimes it was a 10 minute level, depending upon the chemical and how quickly it might have a reaction.
00:53:26
Speaker
So is this work what translated into my NIOSH pocket guide to chemical hazards and some of the data that's in there?
00:53:34
Speaker
No, it was the other way around. No, okay, okay. Nars Paka got used in the Eagle. Nars Paka got his occupational. And that's a very important point, though. They're glad you raised it. Oh, yeah, okay. It's because I haven't done it in a while. In fact, thank you for raising it, because I'm going to do it when we end this call, which is to search the initials AEGL, acute exposure guideline level, and then occupational.
00:53:58
Speaker
and to see what pops up on the web. Because what's happened from time to time is people take the AG level and say, well, in an occupational setting, here's a level that sort of applies. And my bone of contention is no. Because these are once in a, the studies we use were variably animal, some human studies,
00:54:21
Speaker
that were once in a lifetime exposure. They weren't this repeated chronic exposure. Number two is they're for the public. So work-wise, people with susceptible diseases, whatever, have difficulty, they're going to gravitate out of the workplace. So you have what's called a healthy worker effect. So it's really, there are different tugs back and forth, and the bottom line is you can't use the eagles for occupational levels.
00:54:46
Speaker
makes complete sense and hopefully that piques the interest of any of the industrial hygienists who are listening to this that they're going to want to be googling what you're going to google after we after we hang up today yeah okay so you were talking about committees and boards um so you know i talked to various universities i'm trying to go through my resume see what i'll say you know i could talk about um
00:55:14
Speaker
I guess another one could be that, and this gets back to the worker trainers, is that we have a number, and we could go through a number, I think there are eight, how many publications? I've had more than, I've probably had 15, 12, 15 publications. So about six of them have to do with the work that I do. So one is about eagles, actually. I was unhappy with one thing they did there. But unhappy is putting it mildly. But a lot of, some of the articles about are worker trainers.
00:55:45
Speaker
And I still remember, we went out, one of our grants is Department of Energy. So these are the workers who basically build nuclear weapons or the guide system for nuclear weapons. And they're represented mainly by the machinists, one of our partners, as well as the chemical workers. And there are a host of other unions also, but that's for us, that's who we train and who are our trainers.
00:56:05
Speaker
And unlike all the other programs, we have a bunch of worker trainers at these facilities who work in these facilities and then come out for 3-4 days a week, do training, and go back to work.
00:56:23
Speaker
And that means a couple things. One is it means that the weeks where they're not training, they're still accessible to both labor and management to ask questions. And at one of these meetings, our classical evaluation was working, not working, wasn't showing that much. And I turned to the, at these trainer, DOE, trainer exchange, and I said,
00:56:44
Speaker
What are we going to do? How can we show this works? And I still remember one of the workers trained was standing up and saying, well, I know what you can do or what it is, but you can't measure it, John. And I said, I simply said, watch me. And he told me what he said, which is they were the go-to people for both labor and management to ask questions.
00:57:09
Speaker
And I devised a questionnaire to ask people, the worker trainers, about that. And that's, they are. And it's not just DOE. I think it's true for all our trainers. I remember talking to a trainer in Cincinnati, a woman worked at a chemical plant in Ohio, and I was telling her about DOE. I made a point of always talking to the worker trainers when they came in to help out. If I didn't talk to them,
00:57:34
Speaker
I'd end up being recommended I hire them and I wouldn't know them. So she was saying, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I can't even get out of the parking lot some mornings. It's like people are coming to me and say, hey, what about this? What about that? I mean, they are the go-to experts. No, they don't have a degree. No, they're not going to answer the highly technical scientific question. In terms of what workers need to know to make their jobs safer, they're the best thing around.
00:58:02
Speaker
So there are two articles about that. There are another two articles about basically that we did these wall-to-wall OSHA 10-hour classes, general industry 10-hour classes, at a couple of chemical facilities where the local management agreed, in fact they paid us often, to come in and do the training.
00:58:21
Speaker
We would send staff a lot of time, a lot of many weeks, as well as we began, we didn't know the beginning, but maybe we did, but we began perfecting how to do it, recruiting both labor and management as trainers to help do the trainers, but also said there'd be, in particular, labor trainers left at the plant after we had done all the training.
00:58:43
Speaker
And so we have two articles about that and one of them talks about the structure that we put in place to basically handle health and safety issues that come up in the training program. So that's one. And then we have some on evaluation of the training program.
00:59:02
Speaker
But what we do is we ask people when they start the four-day program, either the Sunday in their hotel, they fly in, they used to fly in, drive in to Cincinnati, and they get this questionnaire at the hotel when they check in. Or if they drive in the commute, they get a first thing Monday morning.
00:59:19
Speaker
They fill it out for what their activities have been for the last six months. Have you used these resources? Have you tried to improve the supply or quality of gloves, the right gloves in the workplace, or respirators, or labeling of chemicals? And then we also ask them, were you successful, or is it in progress? Then six months later, we have a contractor who calls them up and says,
00:59:46
Speaker
Same question, identical question. The same people. And we have, therefore, a comparison pre and post. Not everybody does great stuff afterwards. But the change is pretty dramatic of what people say beforehand and what they say after. And there are plenty of active people, or some, who come in in the beginning.
01:00:07
Speaker
But my idea, and what we said in the article, is that when you do smoke-up activities, you rely on people talking to each other, basically, and we encourage it, that the people who are active spread their stories to the other people, as well as, I should say, the last day of the training program, we get people, during the week, three days, there are tables where we deliberately, and I was deliberate about it,
01:00:32
Speaker
I'd always review it every Friday. We'd divide people up. They would sit at tables with people from other locals and other unions. And the last day we say, no, everybody from Local 31 and Local 451, you get together. And you're going to talk about what are the hazards at your workplace.
01:00:50
Speaker
What are the priorities of the hazard of your workplace and what are you going to do when you get back? What are the obstacles you're going to have and what's your strategy? And that was a transition for going back and changing the workplace and that's what these studies showed.
01:01:05
Speaker
Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, the importance of the face-to-face interaction you were talking about earlier. You know, John, when just listening to your body of work and, you know, I know that it's essentially scratching the surface in a kind of a short amount of time here, but when you think about
01:01:25
Speaker
You know, the pace with which you've been going for all of these years and the information that's come into your head and how you've applied it as you're moving through your career.
01:01:39
Speaker
What were you doing for yourself to continue learning or was it by experience? You know a lot of times guests might share like how they're keeping up with things or what they're doing to advance their career educationally or knowledge wise or whatever that is for them. What would you say that would be for you?
01:02:02
Speaker
Well, first and foremost, the adult education method means workers learn from each other and the staff learns from them. And I think that it put a place along with worker trainers, a self-corrective measure for the training program. So I'm answering the question, not for me, for the center. That helped self-correct. Number two is we had the NHS community that we would have two workshops a year and we'd batter around key questions.
01:02:31
Speaker
And that helped to figure out where to grow, what to learn. They were very supportive, took a bit to get there, but also fellow grantees from all the different universities in environmental justice or the unions, that we learned from each other and we tackled new problems. And it still is, it's a great community. The other one which you didn't ask but sort of leads to is like, how did I avoid burnout?
01:03:00
Speaker
And so let me, let me just say that. Yeah. When I, the question on resilience, I wasn't sure if you wanted to go back to that or not. Yes, please. Well, you know, I always told people never a dull moment on this job for better and for worse, but
01:03:15
Speaker
The partners, it wasn't like a 12 organization consortia from day one. It was actually four. It was us, the steelworkers, but also the University of Cincinnati from the beginning, and also a local labor clinic, GCOHC.
01:03:30
Speaker
We added partners and then we added their staff. We added their industries and their hazards. And that evolved along the way. And then life changes, 9-11, Ebola, you know, any number of things. We begin devising new classes. The bottom line I tell people, there's never been two years that have been the same. So burnout was not a problem.
01:03:56
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't repetitive, that's for sure. Yeah, the problem because it wasn't burnout is, and there were good benefits, chemical has been a great institution to work for is that many of us retired at the same time, which was when I retired. So the poor center has had to figure out where I think if you go to the second most senior educational staff, they don't even have two years there. Oh, wow.
01:04:23
Speaker
So it's a huge challenge for the new director, Sherry Allen. But a challenge for educational staff, a challenge for support staff, a challenge for the partners. But the benefit is that the people we hired, with almost maybe one exception, were people who we worked with for years. And even Sherry, she's the new director, but she worked there for five years, and she was a worker trainer for years before that.
01:04:51
Speaker
So, John, for our listening audience, you know, you've been talking about your life's work with the unions. If someone who's listening thinks, gosh, maybe I want to find a role in worker health and safety within the unions, how would you suggest someone start or how do they walk through that door? What would you tell people today?
01:05:18
Speaker
Without knowing who I'm talking to, the audience, it's hard to say. But let me just go. Yeah, so our audience today is always made up of health and safety professionals, both IH and safety. And I don't want to leave out any HR people who might be listening, but it's a strong foothold in the health and safety world. Yeah.
01:05:44
Speaker
They already in the health and safety world by and large have an interest in it so it's a different kind of question because what I gotta mention it anyway is for young people in school of some kind not even necessarily occupational health and safety there is an internship program called OHIP
01:05:59
Speaker
And it's run by APHA, our section, Occupational Health Intern Project. And one of our partners, AOEC, Association of Occupational Environmental Clinics, runs that program. And so if they know someone in school who wants to get a health safety, apply for the OHIP Project. It's a paid internship, and we've donated money to it. A number of projects we've worked with.
01:06:25
Speaker
Sounds like your question is much more directly though for working for unions than I would say wherever job, this is most of your audience. A health and safety job in the unions.
01:06:35
Speaker
Right. So most of the people, the audience are health and safety professionals or they're dealing with it in some way. So if they want to work for a union, the first thing they can all do is start working with a union before you work for a union. And because I think I know I was reticent to hire somebody who had never worked for the union before.
01:06:56
Speaker
Got it. So, I mean, I think of what I did. I had worked in the wire and cable factory, and there was a union job. But then, you know, how did I get the chemical workers? I had worked with the molders. At NIOSH, I was active a little bit. I worked a little bit with the union there. But the thing is to figure out what unions may already exist in your workplace and deal with them equally rather than dealing just with the other professional who you're dealing with or dealing with management.
01:07:26
Speaker
And a lot of places, regretfully, are not unionized. And that's a more difficult problem. And then you have to go outside your workplace. Or you can say be sympathetic when the workforce wants to organize. Got it. Yeah. John, as we're starting to wrap things up for our time today, a couple more questions for you, I guess.
01:07:52
Speaker
I don't know if this is a really hard question or not. When you look at your work and your contribution to occupational health and safety over all of these years, what are some of the things you're most proud of? Well, I'm not saying it just because this is how you met me, but I'm extremely proud of getting, and there was another awardee, Deborah McPhadden,
01:08:20
Speaker
to get the first year that our section has been given the Eula Bingham Award. So it's quite an honor, and I think I'm very proud of that. But, you know, as I said in the speech, though, I got the award, but it really is. I mean, every work, it's a collective effort. And yes, other staff didn't write the grants. They helped a little bit here, a little bit there, or more here, or more there.
01:08:46
Speaker
But at the same time, being an educational staff before COVID, where you'd be on the road for two weeks, come back for a week, then be on the road again during training, I couldn't have done that. I would know all the bits, I could learn it probably, but I couldn't do it.
01:09:04
Speaker
It's far better that the trainers are actually out of the rank and file or run someone like me, the middle class kid of two professors. It's far better. It's the rank and file workers are the full time staff. So it's just a difference. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.
01:09:22
Speaker
Um, before I ask a last question, is there, is there anything else that you'd like to share or share with our listening audience who, um, you know, are maybe just starting in their careers or maybe they're, you know, halfway through it. Yeah. You know, you, you take the opportunity, this comes knocking or you, or you make the opportunity. Um, I guess.
01:09:47
Speaker
The three things I tell young people, which is not that your audience is to say, be willing to work hard, get along with people. And lastly, when you make mistakes, be willing to own up to them. Each of those three things are a problem in the reverse.
01:10:07
Speaker
That's my advice in terms of general, outside health and safety. I mean, otherwise, you know, we've gone on, I've had quite a career, but I realize that looking at my list of publications, you know, there's one on fatalities, two others on fatalities, which at another time we can talk about, but it's been a great career.
01:10:25
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. So John, last question is this. What do you do for fun? What do you do to recharge? Anybody who knows me will know what the answer is.
01:10:41
Speaker
I go into the outdoors and hiking and taking pictures where I hike. And I'm quite a serious amateur photographer. And you give me your, I'll email you some pictures and give me an address and I'll mail you some cards. I've turned about 30 of them into these blank wilderness cards. And anybody who knows me knows I'm gonna be at the Grand Canyon or Mount San Helens within the next year.
01:11:08
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. And, you know, maybe we can put one of your photographs in the show notes to the podcast episode. So we can, we can, we can do that. We can do that. Fantastic. John, thank you so much for sharing everything that you have today. And thank you for the work that you've been doing for the greater good all these years.
01:11:31
Speaker
Well, thank you for doing this podcast, really. It's reaching out in another way that I'm not used to, but it's reaching more people.
01:11:39
Speaker
It sure is. It sure is. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good. Making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcasts app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps connect the show with
01:12:03
Speaker
more and more health and safety professionals like John and I. Special thanks to Naeem Jarisi, our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.