Green hands
September 11, 2008 By: Carl R. Metzgar, CSP Pit & QuarryInsurance companies have to collect enough premiums to write the checks for injury and damage claims following auto collisions. The companies have to have accurate crash experience. Since teenaged driving is a major source of losses, Allstate Insurance measured that experience. As a result, we have useful, unambiguous facts. “16-year-old drivers have crash rates three times higher than 17-year-olds and five times higher than 18-year-olds.” These facts were included in an Allstate Insurance advertisement in a July issue of the Wall Street Journal. This quantified information illustrates a point for managers and mining loss-control professionals.
To quote a friend, “There’s nothing wrong with a 16-year-old that a bit more growing up won’t cure.” At a training session, there was an opportunity to ask some loss-control representatives from contractors and some large and small stone producers about their hiring standards. All of them had the same answer: “We don’t hire anybody less than 18.”
It is unlikely that driving injury experience has a 1:1 relationship to mining injuries. However, it is likely that the same lack of experience that is a part of auto crashes would find some parallel in mining injuries if 16-year-olds were in the quarries. By hiring 18-year-olds, some injury risk is avoided.
One company representative added an important extra to his report of the hiring standard on 18-year-olds: “No one can drive a company vehicle until he/she is 21.” That could be an insurance company requirement or it could be company policy from experience. In either case, it is a policy that takes advantage of experience and the timely development of the “what if switch” that quarry hands need from hour to hour to keep themselves and their coworkers injury free.
Policy for new hires
Several years ago I was in a plant that had a green-hands policy. The policy called for everyone at the plant to look after new hires. To make new hires obvious, there were two green hands painted on the hard hat. The paintings were poor representations of hands. (The paint jobs of the hands were done with a whole lot of love and not much skill.) But the message was clear. “The miner under this hat needs and deserves special care and attention!”
A young person hired at 18, green hands until 19, and the knowledge that others were watching out for the new guy set the stage for a long, safe work experience. A year’s worth of that conditioning probably had another positive effect. Is it safe to suspect that knowing others were watching out for him/her planted the seed of looking out for others as an extended way of working?
Graduated license
Most states have worked out a way to support the maturing phase in young drivers. Most states have beginning restrictions that allow for some driving but not unlimited freedom – get a permit at 15 and a half, a minimum of 30 hours of supervised driving, a minimum of 16 years old to get an intermediate license, 17 years old to get a full license, a nighttime restriction and a restriction on carrying passengers. All of this is preceded by classroom work. Reductions in fatalities in states with Graduated License Plans are well documented.
Application to mining
A green-hands program is a good start. The thing that would make it exemplary would be a structured checklist of things expected of a new employee by the end of the first year. Something radical like a job analysis or checklist of productive methods and hazards for each job or task assigned to the new hire throughout the year would go a long way toward injury-free work at the plant.
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