4 ms·

Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell betw

Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.

ChefboyOG 4y ago
That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
- rfrey 4y ago
  It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site. Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    > Oil and gas is safety obsessed. And yet…
    - squigg 4y ago
      And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.
      - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time. But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
        brnaftr361 4y ago
        People only report it when it's going to be, or already is a big deal, but any injury is supposed to be reported. But yeah, on top of that there is a lot of shit that's real slow to build, RSI for example, or diabetes. Of course with all the rules, anybody that does get injured is going to be painted liable for it, and if you don't get your story straight it's an employment risk to the injured.
- ikr678 4y ago
  It's both the liability issue, but also how safety incentives are set at the highest level. It is not uncommon for senior exec to get bonuses tied to lost time incidents, hazard reporting and other safety metrics, which get cascaded down through the org (In Australia at least). One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.
acs 4y ago
I worked for XOM for years which also really pushed the "safety culture" in the office. We even had the same "fired for not using the handrail in front of the boss" stories. Wild how memes like that must have spread through the industry. 10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without instinctively grabbing for a handrail.
- oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
  I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill. I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space. I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like: 1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures. 2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it. 3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization. 4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand. 5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that. What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass everywhere because people don't understand fluid dynamics.

ChefboyOG 4y ago

That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?

seanp2k2 4y ago
Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
rfrey 4y ago
It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site. Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
- azinman2 4y ago
  > Oil and gas is safety obsessed. And yet…
  - squigg 4y ago
    And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time. But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
      - brnaftr361 4y ago
        People only report it when it's going to be, or already is a big deal, but any injury is supposed to be reported. But yeah, on top of that there is a lot of shit that's real slow to build, RSI for example, or diabetes. Of course with all the rules, anybody that does get injured is going to be painted liable for it, and if you don't get your story straight it's an employment risk to the injured.
ikr678 4y ago
It's both the liability issue, but also how safety incentives are set at the highest level. It is not uncommon for senior exec to get bonuses tied to lost time incidents, hazard reporting and other safety metrics, which get cascaded down through the org (In Australia at least). One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.

acs 4y ago

I worked for XOM for years which also really pushed the "safety culture" in the office. We even had the same "fired for not using the handrail in front of the boss" stories. Wild how memes like that must have spread through the industry. 10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without instinctively grabbing for a handrail.

oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill. I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space. I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like: 1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures. 2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it. 3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization. 4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand. 5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that. What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.
- newsclues 4y ago
  Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass everywhere because people don't understand fluid dynamics.