Episode 192: Better Information

In this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety Podcast, Dr. Mark French explores how occupational fatalities and serious injuries are often underreported—or poorly reported—by the media. He emphasizes that every worker who leaves for the day but does not return home deserves more than a passing mention in the news. Instead, incidents are too frequently summarized through obituaries or crowdfunding pages, leaving little information for professionals to analyze, learn from, and use to prevent future tragedies

Dr. French highlights several recent cases: a young father fatally injured in a meat processing facility, an electrician killed on a construction site, a farmer entangled in machinery, and a series of industrial tragedies involving robotics and heavy equipment. Too often, media accounts fail to ask the critical questions—what equipment was involved, were safety systems in place, was training adequate, were emergency responses effective? Without such information, accountability and opportunities for prevention are lost

He also notes a rare case of more comprehensive reporting, where a food facility fatality was covered with statements from both labor organizations and the company. While still limited, this coverage at least acknowledged the gravity of the event.

French closes by urging leaders and media alike to demand more transparency—not to assign blame, but to learn and build safer workplaces. Meaningful coverage fosters accountability, empathy, and prevention. As safety professionals and leaders, we must advocate for deeper reporting so tragedies can drive real change

Transcript

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This week on the podcast, I'm back on my soapbox about the media and how we talk about occupational fatalities. A number of news stories caught my attention this week. That's what I want to talk about. That's where we're heading. This week on the podcast, you Mark, welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety, nothing is more important than protecting your people safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French, Mark, welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, Mark and as always, thank you for having me in your podcast rotation. Happy to be here. Thank you this week, one of my normal topics, unfortunately, is news coverage of occupational injuries and fatalities, how hard it can be to find them, and then how little we learn from them. It it continues to happen where occasionally i Yes, absolutely, I have found some great journalism on occupational injuries and illnesses, and there are some out there that really go the extra mile. And then there are times where I feel like we're left lacking in understanding, in seriousness, because it's treated sometimes like it's just another news story. And for me, someone who goes to work and doesn't come back home should be a little bit bigger news. There should be more information. There should be a little bit of effort put in behind learning more or trying to put in that out there to be a little bit more. Back in the day, I almost studied journalism. I loved it. I stepped that's why I do my podcast. Is I love that. I love asking those questions. And I wonder sometimes if the news put a little bit more pressure, even a little bit just asking the to know that if an occupational, significant occupational issue happened, serious incident or fatality, would it affect a company more if they knew that there would be, there would be the phone call that they would have to do a response? Because even some of these, like a lot of the times, you get the one where we reached out to the company and we got that they were making no comment from their person, but safety is integral to their their process, and they're grieving with the family, and you get those types of messages, but in some of these that I'm looking at, it looks like they just did a web search and closed it. And I'm I'm not being too critical here, but I really think that at least there was an opportunity there to ask a question, to push on the bubble of comfort a little bit more, to flex that bubble where a company has to at least know that people are watching and listening and not just treating it like another day like Well, it's the United States. We just have deaths at work, and that's gonna be okay, and it's just a normal thing. So here's one. Here's the first one that I came across. It was about a very young father husband who lost a lot of blood at a meat processing facility, went into cardiac arrest and passed away. And a lot of the information that this news article grabs from is the GoFundMe that was created to try to help the family with the expenses and the obituary that was posted online. And that was it you. That's all we know. We know a little bit more about his family and who he was, and it's an absolute tragedy. We don't know anything more about this incident. Then something happened that were that he lost a lot of blood, what in meat processing, that can be a lot of things. It can be lacerations, it can be crushing, it can be loss of limb. And of course, I have a I have in my head hundreds of questions about this. Was there, what was the piece of equipment? What happened? Was it a guarding issue? Was it a lockout issue? Was it a lack of training in first aid people to come to the rescue when something happens? Was anyone trained, I think about all those things. Did they have an adequate first aid kit available? Were they adequately trained to handle whatever that was? What else so much more could have been asked, even to an email to the company or a phone call, which is kind of unfortunate that we don't have that. Let's go to another one. Here's another one. And this is posted for I mean, this is all fairly real. Happened within a reasonable amount of time. These are not big gaps in time of news stories. Here's another one, an electrician dies at an accident at a construction site. And this was reported. They actually say this happened last week. They didn't even report about it until a week later, and basically the sheriff turned it over to the Occupational Safety they they did a search and found out through his obituary that where he went to high school. Mm, hmm, that is woefully inadequate. Was it, I mean, they say he's an electrician. Was it an electrocution? Was it a fall? Was it something completely unrelated? Who was the construction firm? They don't even name names of what the processing plant was in the previous or the construction company. Now, I'm not one that likes to point fingers, but again, there's a certain amount of accountability that should be here, and I know that. I know for a fact that if something were to happen, something big part of what the safety professional HR professionals job is. And the thing we talk about to our team is it's not when something happens, it affects so much. And the first thing we should be ready for is that the news may come knocking at our door to ask us what we've done, and that's a piece of the accountability of what we do and what we have, and we we use that and to better explain that this is such a multi faceted role of understanding of what can happen and how chaotic it can be in a bad case scenario. And yet, here the bad case scenario happened. It doesn't we don't know if it was negligent. We don't know if it was anything more than what very basic information about it. And then we move on to a to a farming incident, unfortunately. And the thing about farming incidents, as as I have said many times before, is that for every one we learn about, there are many, many more that we'll never hear about because it's a family farm, because usually only OSHA will get involved, or the news will get involved or even has to be reported, unless it's a company that fits the OSHA rules of being multi employer, 10 people or more, not family owned or like family run type thing. And so for this one that we learn about, there's probably a lot, lot more that are happening, and it's devastating when these things happen. And this one here, an individual became entangled in a silage chopper while filling their corn silo. And my goodness, there's so many questions of of E stops, and was there someone else available to help, and how fast can EMS arrive and in were they trained? Are they prepared for emergencies like that? And it's a tough topic, and yet here we are very little information and very not enough to really know if there's going to be help. Help or outreach, or what, what will happen because of that. And then one more that I'm going to cover, and then we're going to move into one that actually has some information about it on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast you are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French gsda Consulting, learn you lead others. The Myers, Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information. Visit us on the web at T, S, D, A consulting.com and welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. This week, we're talking more about significant injuries, primarily fatalities in the news and how they're covered by the news, and how I'm usually left lacking for information. And we'll continue on. And in this story, it gets a little bit better, and there was some work put into it, but still not of course, I would want more and more and more, because I absorb that information. I take it in. I'm a learner. I want to learn, even though this is tragic and horrible, I want to take something from it. And these types of podcasts are always the rough ones when all I'm talking about the negative, all the terrible things that are happening, knowing that we're trying to prevent them knowing that we're out there working to be better leaders, better influencers, to make this better workplace in a better world. Sometimes we need the information, we need to be able to understand, to be able to learn, to be able to and, in some cases, just create accountability. So let's move into the next one. This one is from Milwaukee. It was a food facility, and they actually named the name of the food facility here, and someone was crushed by a robotic machine. It happened in an early morning, and Occupational Safety and Health was was there. They identified the person. They actually got the statement from the AFL CIO president of the state, and also from a spokesperson of the manufacturing side. And I'll read the statement from the company. They quoted from pieces of it, they issued the statement that said the tragic accident that took an employee's life earlier today is a terrible incident that is being fully investigated. We are cooperating with government officials and gathering facts. The company will be supporting the family and next of kin. We are also offering counseling and support services to the team during this difficult time. The one thing I have to admire here, and the one thing I have to not in a way, just recognize, is that a lot of the times, companies will blanketly say safety is number one, and I'm very glad. And safety may be a very that, like they may have a whole lot of good things trying for them. They left that out of the statement. And I actually think that's, in my opinion, that's probably a good thing, because it feels very contradictory when you see something like this, and then they you hear the statement of safety is so important. What they focused on is we're going to investigate, we're going to support the family. We're going to support our team. Okay, short, succinct, looking into it. You know, I do. I applaud that, that they didn't start the defensiveness. They didn't start being defensive and trying to rebuild themselves. They simply said a thing happened. We are going to do whatever we need to to comply, and we're going to support those who need it right now. Okay, I I hate that it happened for them. I hope that they take it very seriously, and I hope it moves forward, and I hope they were able to solve it and get so much better because of it. And in this case, like there's pictures of the facility map, the news did a decent job of making this real for this company and giving us enough information. Information to know that. I mean, when I look at any robotic issue, I think that the energy they went into an area where de energization didn't happen. Because in a lot of punching, stamping, robotic welding facilities, that happens where there's a very specific zone where you can un jam or troubleshoot, but you have to de energize, because if something happened in it, it moves or does something, then it can it will not know any different. It's a machine, and in most cases, with food facilities, a robotic machine usually means palletizing or shipping material of some form. Not for sure there that's just an assumption based on what I know and what I have been in before. So let's move on to the final one that I want to talk about. And it was for me, it was the news, and all of that was, there was quite a few interesting ones that I picked up on on top of the ones that are car rollover, person struck items that we have to be aware of. And this one comes from a person who unfortunately was crushed by a jet engine. And there's lots of pictures. Evidently, they put their helicopter in the air over this facility and started shooting video this news agency did, and what they found, and what was reported is that an older gentleman was helping a co worker move a jet engine on a dolly near a loading dock. He tried moving or doing something else, the dolly rolled, pushed him off the dock, and then it rolled off the dock and landed on him. I don't like the fact that the police called it a freak workplace accident. I don't believe, in this case that it was a freak accident, based on a few things we know about safe dock work. One, why was it open? Why were they that close to it? While it was open and moving something? Could the wheels be locked? What was the other person? How were they helping? And I'm sure this was horrible, horrible for the other person. And I look at this and say, Okay, there's some opportunity here. There's opportunity to look at the way materials handled, how close it's handled to an open dock door. And I've seen this in a lot of larger manufacturing of you know, we're just waiting for that next truck to come in. We're not going to shut the door just yet. It's a lot of little things that can add up to create that perfect storm for an accident that no one wants to happen. No one wants these things to happen, but there has to be training risk reduction items in place to assure these layers of protection so that we can be sure that these things don't happen when the worst case starts to happen, because something of that size, when it starts to roll, oh, I'm absolutely sure there's no stopping it. It's two tons of equipment on a dolly that's rolling. How do you stop that? And that's very difficult. I really appreciate you joining me on this journey, not a very happy journey this week, but one that's necessary, one that we have to look at and understand that as leaders and people who are interested, we rely on our news media to give us the information so that, not that we can finger point, so that we can join in some solidarity of wanting no workplace accidents to ever happen and result in this and we can learn and hopefully get better again. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate you taking this journey with me this week, and until next time we chat, stay safe. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda consulting.com, consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice you. 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