| ExxonMobil Group Current News |
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| July, 2005 |
| Current News |
| A Different Point of View
Brothers and sisters: The e-mail from Mr. Brodie, after the recent recordable injury, needs to be answered. Let there be no misunderstanding, the union wants the refinery to be a safe place to work and wants the work done safely. However, we have profound differences over both the accuracy and significance of the company’s use of the TRIR in determining our safety performance. Using the data contained in the e-mail, we have had seventeen injuries over the last 4½ years. Our TRIR over that period is around 1.5. To achieve that level of safety performance only one employee in about 66 can be injured each year. Stated another way, each employee would need to average one injury every 66 years to achieve this TRIR. Given what we do, it is no small achievement to average one injury over 66 years of work. To honestly meet the company goal of a TRIR of 0.4 or less, we face a very daunting challenge. Each employee would, on average, need to work about 240 years per injury. To me, that is not likely to be achieved honestly. It has been a while since I have taken a math class, but I remember some principles. When you are looking at an infrequent occurrence, you need a large sample size to measure the true probability of that occurrence. During any shorter interval it is easy to get a misleading result. It is not uncommon in baseball to have players with a batting average over .400 during April. It would be a mistake to decide that the player is a .400 hitter. History shows that almost no one is a .400 hitter over a full season. Another sport that might be insightful is skeet. The difference between winning or not is most often one or two missed targets out of 100. Years ago, I watched a group of the top skeet shooters, which included a person who competed at the national level. Each of the members of this group rarely missed. One competitor, however, did something interesting when he missed a target. He would blame the teenager, releasing the targets for being too slow and would demand that he be given a fresh chance at the target. Given a second chance, he would break the targets and not have the missed target count against him. He did this twice on the 100 targets I watched. He turned his non-winning 98 into a perfect 100. He got away with it because he could coerce a teenager into submission and his status kept the other shooters from objecting. I was not impressed with the man’s honesty. This same man used to manage an oil terminal. That is until his dishonesty was discovered when his stealing of gasoline resulted in a product quality incident. The company is engaging in the same dishonest coercion regarding safety. They place so much importance on achieving a certain number that they coerce people into not being forthcoming with injuries. The company also reserves the right to discipline you if an injury is not reported. It is a rigged game we are forced to play. The other shortcoming of TRIR is that a fatality is counted the same as a cut finger. The e-mail mentions that we had our lowest injury rate ever in 2004. Given that someone was nearly killed, the low number doesn’t seem completely reflective of reality. Does our recent number of injuries signal a shift in safety performance? Only time will answer that question, but I believe that the answer is likely that the safety performance is unchanged. When we string together a long injury free streak, we aren’t that good. But we most probably are not nearly as bad as the recent time frame would suggest. We absolutely owe it to ourselves and each other to work as safely as humanly possible. As shown by the recent tragic event at the BP Refinery in Texas, bad things can happen in a refinery. The hazards we face demand that we remain ever vigilant. I don’t believe for one minute that through April of this year ExxonMobil had 2 injuries spread across 17 refineries. This is no truer than our skeet shooter shooting a perfect round. Both the company and the union would have a much better sense of our safety performance if the company would cease trying to prove to OSHA or themselves that when it comes to safety, ExxonMobil walks on water. I doubt that it will happen soon. |
| By Dave Noell |