Florida Chamber Safety Conference: Mike Rowe advocates for ‘safety third’ philosophy

The Florida Chamber Safety Council Advisory Board is focused on making Florida safer, healthier and more sustainable.

The Florida Chamber Safety Council wants the Sunshine State to lead the nation in workplace safety.

That requires buy-in from businesses in the form of up-to-date training, proper equipment, checklists and more. But even rigorous safety drills and the best gear will do little if employees don’t take their own safety seriously.

That’s according to Mike Rowe, the host of the long-running Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs.” Across more than 170 episodes, Rowe has shadowed workers who perform some of the most dangerous and, of course, dirty jobs in the world — he’s been to coal mines, climbed to the top of 1,000-foot towers and tagged along on a crab boat.

During the Safety Council’s 2nd Annual Southeastern Leadership Conference on Safety, Health + Sustainability, Rowe told FPL President and CEO Eric Silagy that he’s come to believe a “safety first” culture can have some unintended consequences — namely, it can plant the seeds for the very workplace injuries businesses are hoping to prevent.

“You don’t have a show on the air for 20 years based on not getting the vehicle stuck in the mud, based on the bag of gravel not falling off of the roof. It’s calamity. It’s risk. It’s constant pie-in-the-face stuff. Dirty Jobs was and is a tribute to work as it really exists in the field. And so for that reason, over the years, the network accumulated a number of files,” Rowe said, referring to letters of concern from PETA, the Human Society and OSHA, among others.

“I was constantly in this world where we had a show that was a hit, but that looked very dangerous and, in many cases, borderline irresponsible. How do you walk that tightrope knowing that me and my crew want to go home after each one of these adventures and we want to do it safely?”

Rowe recounted his first mandatory safety training for the show, saying that he and the crew “held onto every word” as they prepared to head into the San Francisco sewers.

“I can tell you that for the first two years of Dirty Jobs, nobody on my crew got hurt, not a bruise,” he said. “And then came season three, and the wheels came off the bus.”

Rowe signed off his eyebrows, smashed his toes, broke a finger, cracked a rib and even melted a contact lens to his eye. Crewmembers logged several injuries as well. The show wasn’t cursed, Rowe and Co. had simply become complacent.

“What it came down to was we began to believe that somebody else cared more about our wellbeing than we did. And to this day it, in my view, is one of the unintended consequences of the safety-first culture. Can safety really ever be first? My view was ‘well, it’s too important to rank, really it’s safety always.”

How did the streak of injuries end? By putting “safety third.”

“We started to say Look, guys, when a company tells you safety is the most important thing peel back a layer look a little closer,” he said.

“In the real world, a measure of personal responsibility has to be assumed by the employee or the customer in order to have the safest possible experience. Safety third just became a way on ‘Dirty Jobs’ for us to remind each other that just because we were in compliance didn’t necessarily mean we were out of danger.”

Silagy didn’t necessarily endorse the “safety-third” philosophy, but he did agree that true workplace safety requires employees to take a measure of personal accountability. Both men agreed that when people believe they are safe environment, they take more risks, some of which invite disaster.

“The most hazardous intersections in the world have the little man walking. It trains you to look, to see, the little man walks and you step off the curb, right? And that’s when the big blue bus gets you. You were in compliance. You were in the crosswalk. You waited until the little man started walking and then you stepped off the curb,” he said.

“You know, I saw in the literature that Florida wants to be the safest state in the country. I think that’s great, but I believe it also starts with being in a state — safety is a state of mind, regardless of the state you happen to be working in. That’s the short answer.”