Paper Safety Is Not Real Safety: The Truth About Stop Work Authority| Risk Matrix Episode 150
Risk Matrix #150: Paper Safety Is Not Real Safety: The Truth About Stop Work Authority
“If nobody can name the last stop that cost real money, you do not have stop work authority. You have a slogan.”
Stop work authority appears in nearly every health and safety plan written today. It gets mentioned in new hire orientation and posted on the wall. And then, as James Junkin has seen consistently across nearly 30 years of incident investigations, it gets pulled out after an incident to shift blame to the worker who did not speak up.
In this episode Dr. Logan F. Martin and James Junkin mark Episode 150 by going back to where it all started. Episode 1 of The Risk Matrix was called Paper Safety Is Not Real Safety. One hundred and fifty episodes later, that thesis is still unfinished business. This week they tackle stop work authority and what separates a program that lives on paper from one that actually works.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- If nobody can name the last stop that cost real money, you have a slogan. Stop work authority that only gets exercised in orientation and in post-incident investigations is not stop work authority. A real program tracks when work was stopped, why, what it cost, and whether that cost was weighed against what could have happened if the stop had not been made.
- Restart authority is the whole program. Who can restart work after a stop, under what conditions, and with what documentation determines whether stop work authority has any teeth. If supervision can restart the job unilaterally under schedule pressure, the stop never really happened. Restart must be escalated, documented, and reviewed.
- Retaliation is almost never overt. It is the crew composition next rotation. If the workers who exercised stop work authority over the last six months are no longer on the job, the program has a problem that no policy language will fix. Hiring clients should ask their contractors to track who stopped work and whether those workers are still with the organization.
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