RESUMO
Worker trainers not only teach health and safety in the classroom setting but also serve informally as important peer resources on the shop floor. They are often the "go to" people, for both hourly workers and managers, when there is a health or safety question-be it about tank vapors or personal protective equipment, confined space, or specific chemicals. These worker trainers actively use health and safety resource materials, both hard copy and online. Documented here, through two surveys of worker trainers-at U.S. Department of Energy facilities, trained through the International Chemical Workers Union Council Consortium of the Worker Training Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-is documentation of this additional contribution that worker trainers make toward safer and more healthful work places.
RESUMO
This study of Afton Chemical Corporation's Sauget facility and its International Chemical Workers Union Council (ICWUC) Local 871C demonstrates how significant safety improvements can be made when committed leadership from both management and union work together, build trust, train the entire work force in U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration 10-hour classes, and communicate with their work force, both salaried and hourly. A key finding is that listening to the workers closest to production can lead to solutions, many of them more cost-efficient than top-down decision-making. Another is that making safety and health an authentic value is hard work, requiring time, money, and commitment. Third, union and management must both have leadership willing to take chances and learn to trust one another. Fourth, training must be for everyone and ongoing. Finally, health and safety improvements require dedicated funding. The result was resolution of more than one hundred safety concerns and an ongoing institutionalized process for continuing improvement.
