Safety Wars
Safety Wars Live 7-12-2024 Alec Baldwin Case Dismissed, Jim's 32 Years
Hi, this is Jim from Safety Wars. Before we start the program, I want to make sure everyone understands that we often talk about OSHA and EPA citations along with some other regulatory actions from other agencies, legal cases and criminal activity. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Provost fines are exactly that, and they are often litigated, reduced or vacated. We use available public records and news accounts and press releases. We cannot warranty or guarantee the details of any of the stories we share, since we are not directly involved with these stories. Enjoy the show. This, this, this, this show is brought to you by Safety FM. And from the border of liberty and prosperity in the highlands and north, this is Safety Wars for Friday, July 12th, 2024. Yesterday I celebrated the anniversary of 32 years, and I posted earlier today a totally self-serving video. Yeah, I'm a self from a machineless, totally self like we all are, come on, gotta toot our own board, everyone's in a while, just don't overdo it. 32 years in the safety industry, health and safety environment on the street yesterday. A lot of people got me there, I stand on the shoulders of giants. I stand on the shoulders. So you're going to be seeing some more videos and things of that nature for what we do here and everything else. So my wife is like, "You didn't have to do a video with someone else talking to me." So well, you know what, if you have that and we'll be sending that out, you know, what appropriate and now we got something to edit, but you're going to get the 10 things today. I actually was more of the 10 things that Jim Polzel has learned in the 32 years of my career. In a lot of ways, I'll be honest, no, I could have made it, no, 20, unless you're 20 things. But one of the things I did not include that, I now think I probably should have been, was this, if anybody calls themselves a safety expert, run, do not walk away. Run, run for the hills, never, you know, never self-ident, no, especially the self-identified safety experts. You got to be very, very careful of them, right? Just the way it is. Now you can know a lot about one subject, you can do this, but someone's always the expert and that's in the video I had tonight, right? In that video, right, the person, and this is one of the tenants of HOP, right, human or organizational performance, one of the tenants here is that the employee is the expert. Not that manager, not the one not doing the job, not the outside person, and I make this one caveat, you have to have what are called learning teams with all this stuff. It's like, Jim, well, what do you mean learning, you kind of have learning teams, you kind of sit down and, you know, Brett Sutton, a friend of the program, and several other friends of the program, always talk about learning teams, or you have to sit down and learn. So two nights this week, I was doing hazardous waste operations and emergency response training for managers, right? So when you have these courses and you're doing these trainings, it has to be relevant to your audience too many times to hear these folks, you know, where, you know, they get signed up, okay, we're going to go and we're going to have this 40 hour train or an eight hour refresher training, usually an hour refresher, we're going to have this and we're going to have that. Then it's along the lines of, this is how you put out a hard hat. This is this and this is, you know, gloves and there's some new glove technology out there. And no, yeah, that's important that they know that there's something really new that comes out and, oh, yeah, this is neat and this is a new way of doing things, new technology. That's what that refresher training is for in part. But when it's also how do you manage, if you're a manager, how do you manage the stuff that goes on at a hazardous waste site? And that's where we, me, specialize in. How do we manage this? What are we looking for? Do we have examples? Do we have exercises where people talk and we get people talking and we essentially do all of this learning and talking and discussing and, you know, and everybody gets something out of it. It's relevant to what they're doing. So that's how I roll. Now I go in there, yes, there's training materials, some handouts, I have some stuff in case somebody wants to talk, I believe me, everyone talks to my thing that maybe one or two people know, but basically everyone talks. We go into acts investigations, human organizational performance, learning teams, all the stuff gets included in there. And the thing is this, everybody's afraid to do that. So we're going to go and have some new commercials here. We're going to go right from, that's what we're going to talk a little bit about and we're going to have these little snippets in the future on different subjects and basic OSHA stuff. So this is the, we're talking about the general duty clause in this segment here. So let me know what you think about it. Want to avoid hefty OSHA fines and keep your team safe? Let's dive into the general duty clause. The general duty clause, section five, A1 of the OSHA Act of 1970 is a catch all rule to cover unregulated hazards. Employers must keep workplaces free from recognized dangers that could cause death or serious harm. For OSHA to cite you under the general duty clause, they must prove the following four things. One, the employer failed to render its workplace free of a hazard. Two, an employee was exposed to that hazard. Three, that hazard was causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm. And four, feasible means exist to free the workplace of the hazard. Employees aren't off the hook either. In five, B mandates they follow all safety standards. Both employers and employees must work together to maintain a safe work environment. Examples, think lifting above shoulder height repeatedly or working without proper support. Stay proactive. Monitor work areas, apply the four-part test, and you'll prevent those nasty citations and keep everyone safe. Need help? And more information. Contact Jim Pozel and the Safety Wars team to help you prevent workplace incidents, conduct safety audits, and training. Contact the Safety Wars team at jim@safetywars.com or 8452-695772. Visit us on the web at www.safetywars.com. Let's build a safer workplace together. Okay, so let me know how you think we're going to have a little snippet of information throughout this. So, something, we'll go into the ten things in a minute here. But something just came across literally like one minute before airtime here. So on Monday we talked about the Alec Baldwin thing, and a lot of the stuff that happens is a lot of stuff that happens, you know, people forget about the basic details in the news media, regular people aren't going to comment on it. But as a reminder, if you have a job to do, you've got to do it, and we're going to talk about that through one of the things I learned here, right? But if you have a job to do the job, and someone goes out there and tells you, don't do your job. You better have it in writing, but realize that that's not enough. Hannah Contreras-Reed found that out, that's not enough. You have to have, no, someone's doing stuff that's going to get someone killed that could get someone catastrophic released, or get someone seriously hurt. You got to do your job regardless of what the writing is, right? That's what the moral of the story is, and number one, number two, those safety standards that we have out there, general duty clause, you just talked about it now, and are a little snippet here, all that matters, just because it's not in the freakin' ocean manual. The ocean book doesn't mean that you're not responsible for it, right? Because the intent of all of these rules is preventative in nature. It's not ex post facto. Oh, you didn't do this, shame on you, da, da, da, da, da, no, that's not it. It is proactive, and it's preventative in nature. So you got to worry about preventing injuries, sort of this. Now this came through, right here, this is from the Associated Press, a New Mexico judge on Friday, brought a sudden and stunning end to the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin dismissing it in the middle of the actor's trial, and saying it cannot be filed again. So basically, it can't file it again, he's off. Judge Mary Marlow's summer dismiss the case based on the misconduct of police and prosecutors over with holding of evidence from the defense in the 2021 shooting of cinematographer Helena Hutchins on the set of the film Russ Baldwin cried, hugged the two attorneys, just gesture to the front of the court, then turned, I don't know what that gesture was, I got only guess, right, I'll show there's video out there. Then turned to hook his crying wife, Hilaria, the mother of seven of his eight children holding the embrace for 12 seconds. He climbed into an SUV outside the Santa Fe courthouse without speaking to the media. The late discovery of this evidence, this is the judge, the late discovery of this evidence during trial has impeded the effect of use of evidence in such way that it has impacted the fundamental fairness of the proceedings, Marlow's summer added. This conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith to show signs of scorching. If you recall on Monday, I had mentioned, I might have been the week before when this was all starting, if a gun was not involved here, my personal opinion, not the opinion of Jay Allen or CTFM or anybody else, my opinion, if a gun wasn't involved, I don't think that this would have went anywhere, to be honest, because how many times do people die at work a year, 5,000 give or take, you know, aside from New York and a couple of other states, nobody really gets prosecuted here for this stuff. So no, no, Hanukkah and Terris Reed and her boss, no, they were David Hall, I believe it was, don't hold me on that, he, no, this is a rarity. The evidence that sanctiques revealed during the trial's second day of testimony Thursday was the existence of ammunition that was brought to into the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office in March, by a man who said it could be related to the Hutchins' killing. Prosecutors said they deemed the ammo unrelated and unimportant, while Baldwin's attorneys allegedly buried it. The defense filed one of many motions they had made to dismiss the case over evidence issues. All the others weren't rejected, but this one took. Judge's decision ends the criminal culpability of the 66-year-old Baldwin after nearly a three-year saga that began when a revolver, he was pointing at Hutchins. A new rehearsal went off, killing her and wounded Joel Suza. Our goal from the beginning was to seek justice for Helena Hutchins, and we fought to get this case tried on its merits. This should Attorney Mary Carmack always said in a statement, we were disappointed that the case did not get to the jury. Anyway, going on, now, so there's going to be other stuff dismissed as well. The motions filed to dismiss other things, and I'm not an attorney, I don't play one on the radio. So this is a stunning turn of offense here. Some would say that he got lucky. He didn't get lucky. One thing, regardless of the evidence in this case and everything else, the video that was out there after this happened in that October 2021 video of him in the parking lot, screaming and yelling and wailing and crying and on the phone and everything else, there's no doubt in my mind he feels guilty in this. There's no doubt in my mind he's psychologically impacted by this. There's no doubt in my mind that Helena Hutchins and his family is in mourning over this. Yeah, they got a settlement of some sort, not winning the lottery. When you lose a family member in the workplace or any other situation, when you lose a family especially under circumstances like this, there is no closure. I hope the families are all doing okay here because that one person in one report mentioned this. I hope the family is okay. How are they doing? The Helena Hutchins and his family. How are they doing? Well, it's a private issue and everything else I'm sure I hope and pray that they're doing well as can be. But there are no winners here. Someone might say, "Well, he beat the rap, he did this, he did this." There are no winners, no winners here. Now that's just my own thinking on here, I mean you can agree or disagree or anything else, but I don't know, very sad case now. So I ran through the intro again now that we are streaming on YouTube and our other video platform. So I just went over from the people who just are coming on to the video. On the whole wild ball, one thing, I will have that separate. So what are we going to do tonight? The special night for me, this week was special week. We are at 32 years in this industry as of yesterday. So started out doing geotechnical work and health and safety related to that right to no inventories, the famous right to no inventories in the state of New Jersey. And that's how I got my start doing this stuff. And dealing with SDS or MSDS right now, SDS and things of that nature. And we learned. Now everyone is going to start somewhere, there is going to be a starting point. And then what happened was about a year later, friend of mine, John Arnowski, and another friend of mine is Kim, we will leave her first name as Kim, they are a very close friend of mine. They were dating and I was at a work and he said, Jim, why don't you try out and do safety full time on a hazmat site. You know how to run all the equipment, industrial hygiene, you know, and everything else so you don't know you're going to learn. Stay with it if you don't like it then leave. And here we are 32 years later. But anyway, 10 things I learned, I actually learned 11 things, right? I should have had another item in here, a couple of things on here, but now what exactly are we doing here? You know, what did I learn? What can you say after this? So our 10 things, number one, clearly define your job duties and authority. How many times have I said this on the show? Clearly define your job duties and authority in your employment contract, specifying if you have the power to hire, fire, discipline, or implement changes, right? So why do you want that? Why? It could protect you legally, give you some glad you still got to do your job. But, you know, try to keep in your lane. The big thing is, right, you get onto these jobs as a consultant or even as a direct hire safety person and they're like, well, why don't you do something about it? How come you don't do that? Well, why don't you get, why aren't you implementing change? Well, if you have it in writing, hey, not my job, I don't have the authority to do this stuff. Kind of hard for management. I mean, they're going to do what they're going to do anyway, sometimes. But kind of hard for anyone to say anything, and it's like, I thought that you were giving excuses. It's that, hey, I'm not giving the authority to do this. Now, on the converse side of this, if they tell you, you have the authority to do this and it's like, well, now you do that, now you have the authority to do it. It's in writing. This way, someone says, "Are you stepping on my toes or she's doing this, bro?" I was in the authority to correct this issue, period. Same thing, when I am out on a project and one of my people is out on a project and what happens? There is an incident, it could be a nervous, it could be an actual incident, or something bad happens. I make the notifications that I need to make, and I tell the project manager or the site super whoever's there, okay, do I am going to institute an investigation here? Do I have your permission to do the investigation, yes or no? This always is yes. Sometimes it's no. No, you know, I will handle that and I will get whatever you want to do, but no, you have to make them. Now, if there's an issue, hey, I was not giving the authority to do this, or I was giving the authority to do this, I'm doing an investigation with this, we're a learning team. And the thing is, you don't want to be adversarial, you never want to get an adversarial. Now here's another one. If someone instructs you, you've got a document or report. Someone instructs you not to perform your duties, document the interactions, consider reporting it, especially in an immediately dangerous life and health situation. And if the instruction comes from a superior, right, you better make damn sure that you do that. And remember, written orders cannot be countermandated unless it's some kind of dire emergency with the verbal order. Can't do it. Why? Because if there's a problem, they're going to come back, someone's going to come back and say, well, the plan says in writing X, Y, and Z, and you say, well, so and so, tell me don't worry about that to do the actual, well, yeah, but the plan says X, Y, and Z, Y, it wasn't it done. And guess what, the guy, the person's going to be out for themselves, wait a minute. No. They'll throw you under the bus, believe me, they'll throw you under the bus. You've got to be smart about it. Now you're going to say, well, dream you sound adversarial. Guess what? If they know that you've got your groove load together, people are going to respect you more, right? At least there's a higher chance of them respecting you. You know, you can't guarantee anybody respect here. Maintained a sense of humor, number three, maintain a sense of humor. Maintained a sense of humor. Don't take yourself seriously. Laugh at yourself. Have fun. One appropriate. Now, ease tensions and improve workplace relationships. Now, the thing is this, when there is an issue and there are issues, there are troubles we're dealing with people, especially now where we have people out there letting their private lives hang out there, you know, on all different types of subjects, huge amounts of subjects. You have to ask the question and I started asking this question 15 years ago, is it my business? If it's none of my business, move on, none of my business. If it isn't my business or I think the end is my business, well, why isn't my business? And if it's truly my business, I have a rationale why it's my business, make sure you have a constructive approach before you're going to intervene. That's what you want to do. Value human life. Now, you're going to say, well, Jim, what are you talking about? People don't value human life? Yeah, I'm going to tell you, people do not value human life. Welcome to the construction and environmental world. A lot of general industry too, I can name several general industry clients. They have no value in human life. Zero, not a zilch and they act accordingly. So regardless of what you say, you can have the most inspiring speech in the world. You can have great things. I mean, you could be the Winston Churchill of safety species you could have. The great orators, you could be a great orator. Guess what? They don't give a shit about human life. I'm not going to happen to you. What do you think? So what we often do is talk about the cost of the company. How much is it going to cost you? Some of you have an eye injury, how much is that going to cost you? So this situation happens, how much is it going to cost you? I get these people all the time with carbon monoxide, for example, a carbon monoxide is not an issue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I explain what the medical procedures are for treating a carbon monoxide, if the person survives. I mean, if they're injured and they're dead, ideal aged or permanent, now you're dealing with a whole bunch of costs. But what does it take to treat a carbon monoxide related injury? That's a pretty extensive thing. So what happens? What do you think happens? Oh, how much is it going to cost me that? Yeah. And you're going to have to sell a lot more widgets to make up that cost, even with the workers' confidence, like, oh, and there's no workers' comp, that's another one. Well, do you realize that workers' comp is good, where you get care that you need usually? You get to see doctors and everything else again, but it's a no fault policy. So normally what happens to a supervisor tells you to do X, Y, and Z, unless it's something over the top, you get hurt, they don't follow usher regulations, what happens? Supervisor goes on their way, company goes on their many-year-old way, they have higher workers' comp rates or something like that for a couple of years, whether you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they go on, and there's no risk to them. Because with risk, you have to have the likelihood of something happening, and what's the consequence? There are no consequences, do you think they're going to give a shit? No, they're not. OSHA compliance, organizations, this goes on number five-year, number six, OSHA compliance. Organizations that violate OSHA regulations often for each other employment laws as well be vigilant and throw in your assessments while you're assessing a company. Okay, they won't handle, they won't give us one thing. Now on the other end, okay, on the other end, what else are they not doing, are they not paying wages? I mean, you do know that we had a major change in the wage laws in July 1. What are you doing? Ignorance and oscillation, non-compliance with OSHA EPA regulations may stem from ignorance rather than malice, those situations respect and kindness and avoid hostility. So if someone's not doing something, find out why. Don't assume that they're stupid, don't hurt all others, well, Kasa, you've got to work with people. Hey, why is this happening? Get along with them. They may not know what the right thing to do, say they may have been trained the wrong thing what to do. You may not know the right thing to do, maybe doing something perfectly normal, get with them. They're the experts on that job. Usually. But you got to go in there and you go in and you try to find out, hey, what's going on? Explain to me what's going on. Hey, I'm interested in learning on how you do this. And guess what? Maybe once you show that you're working with somebody, then guess what happens? Oh, hey, now you're working together, you're painting each other, you're building a little bit of a relationship there and everything else. And, you know, maybe they're not smart on this and they're smart on something else. Maybe now you learn something and now you can go and you can work with them and, okay, maybe you're smarter and you're not, you don't know what's going on. The whole thing. That's what you got to do. You got to work with people, folks, work with them. Number 8, private confrontation, avoid undermining and confronting colleagues in public, address issues privately and document the interactions, right, if appropriate to ensure accountability. We had a jerk on a site about three weeks ago, yesterday, three weeks ago, go completely berserk, site manager. So I'm forced because of what we do here, human and organizational performance and a lot of the other stuff. I wrote a very detailed email to our customer saying, hey, no, saying, hey, you know, the way that this person's acting, right, is not making this a less safe thing. Regardless of what the problem is, yelling and screaming means that you're not going to get the input and the information you need to run a company safely. Way it is. No one's going to record anything if you're a jerk, if you're screaming and yelling. Even if you feel like screaming and yelling is like, you know, like, okay, you know, hopefully you don't, you know, have, they faces like I do sometimes, like, or like that guy that does the safety stuff online with making faces relax, and it's right. Again, you got it, you have to do that. Now, say positive, maintain a positive attitude and don't let negativity affect you. Inspiration not only promote safety, but also enhances your career. Nobody wants to be around a person who is negative, doesn't happen positivity, you want to learn about being a leader, act positive, be an optimist, you can do person. Don't say no all the time, say, you know, no, we could do that if we had the right procedures. Matt Damon taught about this where he was on a set with, I believe, Alec Ball, that was Alec Ball, when it was Tom Cruise, one of the mission impossible movies, where they wanted to do a stunt that he was working on for 15 years and thinking about it, Tom Cruise. And whoever the safety person was said, no, you can't do that. So they fired the safety person. Well, let's supply something. My question is this, if you're going to be out there thinking about if you know somebody's been planning something for 15 years, why don't you hear the person out? Maybe they got, maybe they have a way of doing it safely, rather than dismissing it out of hand like a allegedly lists person was doing, say, you know what, yeah, we could do that if we do all this other stuff, yeah, we could do that, but let's set the right equipment, the right training, the right procedures in place, let's get that into, you know, usually the SKR mode, let's see, we can get that into the skills mode where we saw it, all right, and everything else. That's a much better way of going about it than, no, you cannot do it, no, you can't do it. Well, that's what I'm paying the bill. I'm going to do it anyway. Say yes, or you can say, yeah, you know, if we do X, Y and Z, we can ensure this, this is this. I don't know, they may say, you know what, this is someone I could work with. And then you get out that, that beloved has a matrix table, and now you're able to figure things out, which is a much positive, more positive, I don't even know all the time, you don't even know all the time, not me. Now prevent workplace violence after the situation we had, the week after Christmas in this town, I'm sorry to end this all day on a negative note, no, no, no, we talking about psychological safety, no, and everything else. We have now had resources available, 988, and a lot of the suicide hotlines and everything else that are out there, use them, right? No, I've had to do a couple of workplace violence investigations, you've never had a fatality, and we always hear, man, that guy was always a hospital person, usually a man, they're always a hospital person. With a woman involved in workplace violence situation, it's usually someone coming from off-site to your facility to commit to the act of violence, that's my understanding of it, at least that's often what the case is. Again, you got to go out there and you have to, you know, address this, if you have somebody acting crazy, you have somebody that's like, you know, that's a little bit odd, maybe you want to address it, because I tell you what, I hear all this stuff, oh, well, that didn't, you know, hey, you know, I wasn't out there, I picked up the microphone, I backed up here. How could we have known about that, why didn't we know about that, and all the other nonsense that goes along with it, you know, very frustrating, you know, oh, we didn't know. Yeah, usually they have known, they did know, there were indicators, and even if they weren't, you could at least have peace of mind say, look, I go out of my way to see if there's someone has a problem, right, and that's what I've learned over this stuff, now I incorporate all of this into my training classes, everything that you've just heard, on how do you manage people, how do you manage safety, maybe you want to get this video on the other one, you know, we're going to be uploading this, and the other one that we have, later on, right, after this show, and I am saving this, I didn't save it, right, I will go from there, so we're going to take a break here, and we'll be coming back to you. You were listening to Safety Wars, tomorrow's safety today, have you, oh, we already did. In the professional safety community, communication and planning are just a few keys to your program's success, the question many practitioners have, is where do I start? 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