Under Canadian OHS law, workers are protected from reprisals for exercising their rights under these laws. For example, a worker can’t be suspended, fired or otherwise disciplined for, say, refusing unsafe work or participating in the JHSC. The point of this protection is to encourage workers to actively engage in their role in the IRS and take steps to ensure safety in the workplace. But despite this protection, workers may still fear reprisals if they speak up about safety issues. And this silence can have disastrous consequences.

Workers Feared Reprisals if They Reported Safety Problems

Workers in the US are also protected from reprisals for voicing concerns about workplace safety. But this protection was cold comfort to workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded. According to an article in the New York Times, workers on the rig were worried about safety problems but too afraid to report them.

Mere weeks before the rig exploded, Transocean, the rig’s owner, commissioned two confidential safety surveys: one on the rig’s “safety culture” and the other on the status of its equipment. The company that did the safety culture survey conducted focus groups and one-on-one interviews with at least 40 Transocean workers. (BP leased the rig from Transocean; on the day of the explosion, 79 of 126 people on the rig were Transocean employees.)

According to a 33-page report on the safety culture survey, workers said that company plans weren’t carried out properly and that they “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.”  Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, which they believed was a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance.

Although the report described workers’ concerns about safety and fears of reprisals, it did say that the rig was “relatively strong in many of the core aspects of safety management.” For example, workers believed teamwork on the rig was effective and said they were mostly worried about the reaction of managers off the rig.

“Almost everyone felt they could raise safety concerns and these issues would be acted upon if this was within the immediate control of the rig,” said the report. In addition, more than 97% of workers felt encouraged to raise ideas for safety improvements and more than 90% felt encouraged to participate in safety-improvement initiatives.

But investigators also said, “It must be stated at this point, however, that the workforce felt that this level of influence was restricted to issues that could be resolved directly on the rig, and that they had little influence at Divisional or Corporate levels.” For example, only about half of the workers interviewed said they felt they could report actions leading to a potentially “risky” situation without reprisal. “This fear was seen to be driven by decisions made in Houston, rather than those made by rig based leaders,” the report said.

Investigators also said “nearly everyone” among the workers they interviewed believed that Transocean’s system for tracking health and safety issues on the rig was “counter productive.” Many workers entered fake data to try to circumvent the system. As a result, the company’s perception of safety on the rig was distorted, the report concluded.

Lessons to Be Learned

The results of Transocean’s survey provide several valuable lessons. First, the fact that workers are legally protected from reprisals doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll feel comfortable raising safety concerns. It’s unclear whether Transocean actually retaliated against workers who complained about safety. But clearly the workers feared retaliation—enough so that they often kept their mouths shut. Lesson: Whether real or imagined, fear of reprisals can keep workers from speaking up about safety problems, which may then go unaddressed.

Second, the disconnect between the rig and headquarters is telling. Although workers seemed to feel that between the so-called four walls of the rig they could speak up about safety and be heard, they definitely didn’t feel that senior management would be receptive to their concerns. The good news is that workers apparently had confidence in the supervisors and other managers on the rig itself and felt comfortable raising some safety concerns in that limited context. Lesson: Senior management sets the tone of the safety culture in the workplace. If HQ isn’t committed to workers’ safety and doesn’t demonstrate that commitment through concrete actions, the workers will notice and act accordingly.