It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care.
In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations).
Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be.
My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.
This is a good point. Of course, I only ever had exposure to the white collar folks.
Those white collar folks could never make the work safe. But they could sure as hell f_ck it up. At least from what I saw, the safety theater was tremendously effective at telling the white collar folks not to demand stupid sh_t: once the guy on the ground says the magic words ("that's not safe"), conversation over. YOU, project manager/junior exec, didn't plan well enough. The guy on the ground is just doing his job.
In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations).
Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be.
My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.