Building World-Class Safety
Every smart company works to make safety a priority. A safe work environment is a key factor in nurturing a successful workforce and a successful company.
Southwire has an impressive safety record. The wire and cable industry’s average for lost-time accidents hovers at 1.4 accidents per million hours worked. Southwire’s 2007 rate was 0.23 – roughly 16 percent of the industry average.
No matter how hard we try, it’s not likely we can sustain a record that good. But our lost-time accident rate over the past four years has stayed consistently well below the industry average. That record we will sustain. Our goal is to keep our lost-time accident rate below 1 accident per million hours worked.
Our rate of reportable accidents as defined by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration averaged 3.78 during the same period – well below the industry average of 5.9. Our goal is to get this number down below two reportable accident per million hours worked.
Our goal for fatal accidents is zero. We did not have any fatal accidents in 2007. In fact, the last fatal accident at a Southwire facility happened in 2003.
Our impressive company-wide safety numbers reflect the achievements of our individual facilities.
- • In June 2008, our Long Beach, California plant marked 21 months without a recordable or lost-time accident before a recordable case ended the streak.
• A t the end of 2007, Southwire’s Carrollton Utility Products Plant marked one million man-hours without a lost-time accident. That plant has achieved one million hours without a lost-time accident on several previous occasions, and in 2006, it reached three million hours.
• Three of our customer service centers – in Orlando, Salt Lake City, and York, Pennsylvania – celebrated accident-free years in 2007.
We take safety seriously. In 2006, we started implementing a key strategy called behavior-based safety. We began by analyzing the interactions between people’s behavior and their working environment to identify combinations that lead to safe or unsafe outcomes. Then we changed the combinations that lead to unsafe outcomes – either by changing the environment or by helping employees change their behavior.
We’ve demonstrated that behavior-based safety can dramatically reduce a company’s lost-time accidents and minor injuries, too. Our goal is to have programs in all facilities by the end of 2009.
The process has worked so well at our Carrollton Building Wire Plant that a team from the facility recently was asked to present its work at a national conference on behavior-based safety.
As we work to integrate behavior-based safety into our daily routines, we also are raising the bar with regard to other safety initiatives. Our top three plants are currently working with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to achieve certification in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP). One of those – Forte Power Systems in Heflin, Alabama – achieved VPP status in July 2008.
The VPP program recognizes the achievements of employers and employees with exemplary occupational safety and health programs. Our goal is to achieve certification at all of our manufacturing and distribution facilities by 2012.
