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Safety Culture & Organisational Transformation
Assessment of safety culture and management practices, followed by development roadmaps built on leadership, worker participation and ownership.
A STORY FROM THE FIELD
-700 metres: one of the first lessons that gave occupational safety its meaning.
A young engineer passes the public-sector examinations and becomes a labour inspector. Idealistic and determined never to stop learning, he accompanies a senior mining engineer on his first inspection. That journey becomes the first step in giving deeper meaning to his profession...
High in Anatolia, in a place where you look down on the clouds, they enter a coal mine. As they descend an extremely steep drift, the coal dust accumulated underfoot makes them slide almost at speed. There are no handholds; they stumble and half-fall their way downward as the heat and humidity increase with every metre underground. By then, sweat and damp have become indistinguishable. The work overalls they had just pulled over their underwear after taking off their suits are clinging to the body. And then... when they reach the coal face — the area miners call the “ayna” — a miner welcomes them with a face blackened by coal, brilliant white teeth and a warm smile I would never forget. He accompanies them during the inspection and even offers them tea brewed on a small gas cylinder underground.
It is now lunchtime. Happy to be coming up from 700 metres below ground, a chief labour inspector and his assistant crouch inside the coal wagons and, praying as they go, make their way back outside.
They inspect the dormitory. It is extremely primitive: doors and windows are broken, mattresses have thinned until they almost disappear into the bunks, and the curtains hanging at the windows dance in the wind as if, rather than hiding anything, they are saying: “Just look at the state of this place.”
Lunch has been prepared. The young inspector cannot help probing situations like this, so he sits beside the miner he met underground. Trout has been brought from a fish farm built around a pristine spring very close to the mine and fried in butter until golden. “Perhaps this is the most delicious fish I have ever eaten,” he thinks... Once everyone has eaten, the conversation deepens over tea. He asks, “How is the work? What is occupational safety like in this mine?” The miner replies, “Our boss is good. He pays on time, and our wages are good too.” He explains that his pay is well above the minimum wage. When asked, “What do you do with the money?” he says, “My wife and children are back home. The money goes into the account and they withdraw it from the ATM. I don't need money here.”
When the inspection ends, the young engineer is left with questions he will be unable to answer for years: Why would a person work in a job like this, live in conditions like these, and send all of his money home? Will trout ever be served for lunch again? How much money will he really not need here?
Those questions became the beginning of a professional philosophy built not only on rules and compliance, but on understanding the human reality behind risk and believing in decisions that protect people before occupational accidents occur.
