I just saw an interesting safety item in my morning safety alerts about the Dollar General Stores.
If you have been paying attention to the safety news, you know that Dollar General is under a lot of scrutiny from OSHA over their very poor safety and injury performance. They have been experiencing a lot of safety violations, accidents, and deaths.
When I go into a Dollar General Store, it is amazing to see all the variety of things that I can buy. They are the modern-day version of the old country general store. They are quite popular and new stores are springing up in many communities around the US. They really seem to focus on pleasing the customer with all sorts of things we most need and want. In just looking around their stores, it is hard to see why they are having safety problems.
Their safety problems are not usually in the front of their stores, but rather back, behind the scenes where new merchandise in being delivered and empty boxes and other wastes are being disposed of. They have mobile equipment like fork trucks and push carts to help unload their delivery trucks, move heavy pallets of goods around and restock shelves. They also have trash compactors to crush and bail cardboard boxes to make them ready for the paper recyclers to pick up.
Slow moving, heavy equipment is dangerous. The equipment is very heavy, does not make much noise as it is moved around, and is easily overlooked by other workers. There is a lot of history of people being maimed or killed by equipment like this. There is also a lot of training that needs to be done for everyone who works around or with this equipment to keep them safe.
The cardboard trash compactors are also very dangerous and need to be carefully used by well-trained people. How many stories have you heard of people being caught and pulled into a compactor with tragic results? You must know what you are doing when using equipment like this. Do all their people get the training they need to do their work safely?
Dollar General tries to keep their labor costs as low as they can, so they keep their workforce at a minimum level. This means that their people are very busy and preoccupied with getting their jobs done. Do they take the time to have the people thoroughly trained and knowledgeable about the safety hazards?
Very busy people mixed in with slow-moving, heavy fork truck and movers, and having to get the trash out of their stores as fast as they can is a very dangerous mix. In this article I just read, they mentioned that Dollar General has had 49 fatalities in the last 10 years. OSHA is pushing them hard to improve with little progress being made. Their board has not been very aggressive in improving the safety in their stores.
However, the Dollar General shareholders have had enough, and they have voted to over-rule the Board’s resistance, and to have safety inspections and audits in their stores. This is a powerful and great event of the shareholders deciding that killing and injuring people is wrong and that it is time do what is the right thing to do. This effort combined with the efforts by OSHA are very likely to have a major, positive impact on Dollar General’s safety performance. We’ll see.
Why am I emphasizing this situation at Dollar General? Because in your own workplace, there can be similar situations: crowded conditions, products and goods being rapidly moved around, housekeeping concerns, fork-trucks, and pallet movers, etc. Diligently adhering to the safety rules and keeping logistics running smoothly, while fully training your people – all come together for reducing the potential for injuries and incidents.
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