I've had to wrap up the semester and grade/post finals, now I can get back to answering questions. I appreciate the mostly positive feedback from the community here. My small university is a relatively young school. Like most young organizations, the Administration is learning how to grow out of the amateurish reactionary policy making mode into a more rigorous but bureaucratized policy making mode.
Good job. I'm curious what kind of industry/lab was this (if you can say).
Thank you, kind of you to say so. I was part of the Management Team who worked on this. I have to admit, we had the absolute luxury of having 100% commitment from our General Site Manager, who was made directly & personally responsible for any injury incident. If an act or condition was hazardous and unsafe, he stopped all work and gave everyone the authority to fix it. I fought it tooth & nail at first because like Courtney alluded to, I thought it was burdensome bureaucratic silliness. It was a lot of work to build & deploy the work instructions, job safety analyses, extensive training, and all the documents that go into this effort. Productivity decreased. Initially. But at the end productivity returned to higher levels, all employees were constantly aware of hazards, and the adaptations made to the work effort to accommodate the safety policy became automatic. Everyone felt as I did: it was now a joy to come to work because I felt very comfortable and did not fear that I may get injured during the course of the day.
The division in which I worked was a research division of a large chemical/materials corporation. It's purpose was to develop new commercial manufacturing processes to enable creation of a new market into which they could sell their commodity engineering plastic. Interesting work, small organization, originally started a decade+ prior with a whole bunch of highly paid scientists and reports that they had burned through $15 Million per year. By the time I arrived, most of the patents had been issued and they were downscaling...I had missed the gravy train. During my tenure there the division was only about 20 employees.
I'd like you to ask your department head if he thinks the problem is that this list isn't long enough.
Alas, this political situation at this university and department is such that there is an aggressive campaign to deny any problems exist and to squelch any off-the-script comments that don't fit the "all is perfect, everybody is happy" narrative. Totally illogical, and I can only guess that there are dollar issues and political issues that make this so. The Department Chair and the College Dean are not transparent. We are certainly not a happy ship here.
This specific incident was this past Fall 2017 semester. I had a similar long-hair at a drill press incident in the Spring 2017 semester. THAT one sent chills down my spine because that girl was only a few seconds away from a bad day before I was able to intercept it. Again, this occurred just a few feet from the same Lab Manager.
whistleblower protection...at your school, you should have reported such a thing
We theoretically have whistleblower protection, but...I'd be ostracized and discriminated against for sure in subtle, untraceable ways. Same for the more formal OSHA regs: I teach an Industrial Safety course and know. Even though retaliation is strictly illegal, we all know it would happen if the organization is dysfunctional. I have tried to use the university's Safety, Health, & Environmental Manager as an ally and he refuses to engage in this issue. He deflects and tells me work it out.
a paper trail evidence that you have reported such a thing, because if anything happens later on, you at least had evidence that you reported your concern.
After multiple conversations his advice (really...not making this up) was to keep logs of incidents, phone calls, & emails to be able to protect myself when the major catastrophic event does finally occur. Well, I've got enough stuff to throw several adminstrative levels under the bus when it occurs, but I know I won't survive it either. But it kills me to know this is my only option at this time. So I'm trying to my best to keep pushing for rigorous safety.
I've even recruited two companies from our Advisory Board to visit our facility and do a no-legal-obligation Site Safety Assessment. The Department Chair vetoed that action and stated we will not use any outside or 3rd-party advisors.
We have an "operations policy" that does not provide any details about establishing a rigorous safety behavior model. Department Chair publicly claims it is a very rigorous safety policy and everything's just fine. This existing "policy" is generally useless.