TSA Could Learn From Pete Correll

Businesses are told in a blue zillion ways that they should—must—protect workers from injury on the job. (When I worked in the FBO side of the industry, they gave us an OSHA manual that was thicker than a teenaged boy’s collection of Playboy magazines. Nowhere in that book could we find the word airplane or aircraft!)One of the problems in occupational safety is the learning curve for a new operation. It turns out the guvmint is no better at that than business, and TSA has proved it. The following quote is taken from FederalTimes.com: "In its first two years of existence, TSA was deluged with workers’ comp claims, mostly from airport baggage screeners who hurt themselves lifting heavy bags onto X-ray machines. It had the highest percentage of reported injuries and illnesses of any agency in 2003 and 2004—nearly six times the governmentwide rate in 2004." Holy cow! Many reasons are cited for this disaster, but most center around the fact that TSA was a new entity, involved in a job that never existed before. As the kids might say, "Well, I mean, like duh!" Frankly, the guvmint wouldn’t accept that as an excuse from a private business expanding into a new field. Besides, just how new is the job of lifting and toting baggage? The airlines have been doing it for years with a fraction of the reported injuries for the hours on the job. Also, the guvmint has been regulating people who lift and tote for years. Did they not learn anything from all of that? Now TSA is trying to turn the safety record around. Perhaps it is time to take some lessons from private industry and a good model would be Georgia-Pacific. When Pete Correll became president and chief operating officer (later CEO) of Georgia-Pacific, he had a problem. Making forest products is a rough business and the safety record was not good. Pete set out to change that. By 1997 the injury rate at Georgia-Pacific had become, according to OSHA, "about one-third the injury rate at the average bank—a place where the scariest piece of machinery around is most likely a photocopier." Pete is retired now. Maybe TSA could hire him as a consultant. (Pete Correll, BTW, was a high-school classmate of mine, but it really would not be fair to say that I taught him everything he knows.) We would love to post your comments. Just go to the top and click the comment box.