Consequences of workplace death for one business unit
In early 1997 our business unit was a buzz of activity. Four years of strategic marketing were beginning to pay dividends. Only the year before, our business had been purchased and incorporated into one of the world’s largest coating and industrial gas manufacturers, and the influx of much needed capital was a welcome sight to the employees who had struggled through the lean years of a fledgling business. Finally, we would have the tools to enable the business to thrive.

Trade show booths were expanding to accommodate prospective new customers, the phones were ringing constantly, and sales were plentiful. Even though we had anticipated it for years, when the new business arrived we found ourselves ill prepared. We didn’t have the personnel to sustain the growth we were experiencing. Nevertheless, we were living our collective dream of making the business successful. Job descriptions expanded to include any function that needed attention. There was little patience for the “not my job” mentality. Employees poured their lives into the effort. Technicians became machinists, phone sales people became shipping clerks, and engineers became service technicians. The lights burned into the long hours of the night. Wherever there was a shortage of help you would find someone out of place, and more likely than not, they were happy for the opportunity. The mantra throughout the plant became “anything and everything” until our Human Resources Manager, saddled with the unenviable task of finding qualified help in a tight labor market, could bring in fresh reinforcements. We had arrived. Our gross sales-to-employee ratio had reached Microsoft levels. Our earnings before income tax were the marvel of the accountants at headquarters. We were awarded a Zero/Zero plaque, the highest annual award given by corporate, for a perfect safety record. Our attitude became infectious. We had become corporate darlings. We got up every morning looking forward to coming to the plant.

Everyday there were new employee names to learn. Although safety awareness had been an important part of the selection process, new faces have a way of making even the most experienced Safety Manager nervous. Work ethic is one thing, but the corporate safety culture, or lack thereof, from which the worker comes, can have a deleterious affect on the new employer. The General Manager shared that concern, and immediately made it mandatory for all employees, administrative, managerial, and production alike, to attend monthly safety meetings. All supervisors and department managers also included safety in their weekly meetings. Experienced employees were instructed to take a mentor role and watch over the new employees. The chain always snaps at the weakest link.

Our integration had not yet addressed safety policies specific to our new owners, nor had any consideration been given to engineering controls, design reviews, and quality or service policies. The communication lines were confused by micromanagement, and the standard hierarchy was by-passed. But, it was important to present a unified image and a seamless blending of our business unit into the parent company, so it was imperative to those who engineered the acquisition that a new product be released to the market as soon as possible.

Friday, April 24, 1998 is a day that will forever live in my mind. At 9 a.m. I was standing in the corridor outside spray booth number one with the senior coatings engineer. We were watching the technician prepare to start the new High Velocity Air Fuel system that had been acquired and mandated by our Division Headquarters. It appeared that the product was not going to make it to market as scheduled under the aggressive plan. There had been a constant battle between the experienced technicians of our business unit and Division Headquarters concerning quality and safety issues with the product. As the technician started the unit and ramped up to operating parameters I could hear the engineer say through the loud hissing sound of the system, “This thing is too loud, too powerful, and too dangerous to put on the market. Someone is going to get killed!”

“Then why are we doing it?”

“Because they (the marketing department at Division Headquarters) think the market wants it!”

As he walked down the hallway toward his office I could hear my name being paged over the intercom. There was a telephone call waiting for me from Division Headquarters. Little did I know that it was a call that would forever change my life, and the lives of all the employees within our business unit.

The call was from a colleague at headquarters. Normally we shared a jovial relationship, but this time his voice was very serious. Something troubling had happened.

“Do you have all of your safety records up to date?” he asked.

“Yes of course”, I said. “Why?”

“There has been an accident, and one of your employees is …injured”.

Pictures of my morning plant tour raced through my mind. I had made it a practice to go around the plant early in the morning to see the employees. A walk-around management style is always effective for safety management.

“Can’t be. Everyone is here, or accounted for,” I said.

“Where is your Service Manager?”

“He’s on a service call somewhere in England,” I answered.

There was a long pause. Then the dull thud of reality hit me. He was talking about Dave Pickett. Dave had been living in the fast lane for well over a year now. Not only was he trying to manage the department but also, because we were short of field service technicians, he was making many of the service trips himself. Earlier in the week we had attended a flurry of meetings together. I was having lunch with him when the conversation turned to his upcoming trip. He was tired and not looking forward to the ridge schedule that he would have to maintain as he flew to England, then Norway, then Sweden, and then possibly over to India before he would return to the office. He had over twenty years experience in our industry and was known for his dedication to customers and his strict attention to safety practices. For the ten years he was with our business unit, he had performed his job without incident.

“Tell the general manager to call us as soon as he gets back into his office, and don’t breathe a word of this until an announcement is made.”

I did as instructed. Our corporation had evolved from a company accountable for one of the worst industrial accidents in history. I knew that serious incidents or fatalities were not overlooked at the corporate level. The rest of the morning was a scurry of front office activity. Closed-door meetings, cancelled agenda, and long faces with serious expressions were the rule of the day. Although I did not know the extent of any injuries, the somberness of the upper managers told me that things were not good.

The General Manager called a plant wide meeting in the conference room at 2:30 that afternoon. As employees poured into the room there was the usual good-natured folly that accompanies plant meetings, but some of us knew, or suspected, that the pall of death hung heavily in the fresh April air.

“I have some tragic news to report,” he started saying as the room quickly fell into a whispered hush. “There has been a terrible accident involving one of our gas consoles (at a customers location) in England. A hydrogen leak was ignited while the unit was being serviced. Four people were seriously injured…and Dave Picket was killed”.

A collective groan filled the room like planks of a wooden ship being stretched by a restless sea. Some employees ran from the room with their hands covering their mouths. Others fought back tears, and still others sat stone-faced in

We had the weekend to struggle with our misery. On Monday the mood was just as somber. The telephones kept ringing and orders were still coming as fast as we could fill them, but the light-hearted spirit had turned into a solemn bond. A lifeless stare now filled the eyes of even the most enthusiastic among us. We were told not to inform the local press, although, thankfully, someone did so anonymously. The General Manager told us to expect an influx of visitors during the week. Corporate and Division Headquarters were sending in a team of “experts” to evaluate our facility. Like clock work they showed up on Tuesday morning. Even though the fatality had not actually happened at our facility, they demanded a full safety, quality, and engineering audit. Their attitudes seemed almost offensive. They had little sympathy for the fact that we had just lost a very good friend. It was obvious that some of them had not come to evaluate, but to implicate and vilify. Someone would be held accountable. Someone would have to pay for the black mark left on the corporation by this very dark moment. Little did we know that the final price would be a pound of flesh from each and every one of us.

The audits and reviews lasted well over a week. Every file, design review, and the facility itself were examined in meticulous detail. Although they found little for which we could be held accountable, they did, of course, find things on which we could improve. Their final summation was that although we ran a safe facility, we had not been properly assimilated into the “corporate culture” when our business unit was first purchased. I thought that might be the end of it. I hoped so, but one of the auditors told me privately not to breathe too easily, as it had been his experience that whenever there was a fatality that made the corporation look bad, someone’s head had rolled.

A week later his prophecy was confirmed. The very popular Vice-President and the Director of Sales for our division had mysteriously “decided to retire”. The Division Director of New Product Design was released. Our own General Manager who had provided us with unrelenting compassion and leadership during our darkest hour was reassigned as Production Manager. A new, younger, less experienced General Manager was to be assigned from the ranks at corporate headquarters. Many of us threatened to protest, but our former General Manager would have none of it. We were no longer the corporate darlings. As we struggled for some semblance of sanity, we could now flail for justice as well. It would prove to be a long, hard fall to the bottom.

The new General Manager settled into the business. For the next twelve months things seemed to be returning to a sense of normalcy. Cognizant of our loss, he took a soft approach in implementing changes he wanted to make. Several equipment lines where recalled and new safety features retrofitted in others. Even though the measures were costly and considered unnecessary by some, it signaled the industry that we were taking a serious look at the design elements of our equipment. All of us knew that these changes had nothing to do with the cause of Dave’s death, but we sold the idea to our industry well. Our sales took a slight dip immediately following the accident, but sprang right back after a few short months to once again surpass our sales projections. Even though our employees had lost a step, had lost some of that unbridled enthusiasm, we seemed to be back on track.

Great news in September of 1999! Our division headquarters announced it had just purchased our immediate competitor. The news put the skip back into our step. This was truly good news. Our marketing department had done a wonderful job several years earlier of gathering competitor information on this company. We knew that although they exceeded our gross sales, they had not turned a profit in the last eight years. We also knew that they had production and quality problems that we could easily fix. Having been sold several times over the last few years, we felt there was no way their morale could match ours even with our latest disappointments. We were about to move from the number three position in our industry to number two simply through osmosis.

Over the next few months many of our managers were invited to visit the newly acquired facility. They returned with stories of a lack of productivity, poor housekeeping, and above all, a disregard for the most basic safety standards. All of those who visited seemed sure that we could easily assimilate their facility into ours.

Thursday. 9:30 a.m., January 13, 2000. Another plant wide meeting was called. The new division vice-president, the protégé and hand picked successor of the vice-president who had “retired” immediately after the accident was to deliver news of decisions made by division headquarters. The news was swift and emphatically delivered. Our plant would be shut down and incorporated into the newly acquired facility! July 1, 2000 would be our last day of productivity, and our doors would close forever on August 31. Shock and disbelief once again registered on the faces of the employees who, in this very same room, had heard about the death of our friend and colleague. This time there was no sound…no sound at all. The employees simply got up and left the room. It would be futile to argue, futile to even discuss it. There was not a soul in that room who did not believe that the closing of our facility was the political aftermath of the forced retirement of the division vice-president and director of sales nearly two years before. All of us knew that the corporation had a long memory, and that they had perfected the art of the blame game. For the next two days the bad news bearer and his entourage tried desperately to convince selected employees to make the move to the new facility, but in the end not one employee who was with our business unit at the time of Dave’s death elected to transfer. As employees we had simply grown tired. We resigned to our fate and decided to move on with our lives.

Slowly some of our employees began moving away or leaving for new jobs, but the majority stayed until the bitter end. We continued to break sales and production records until two weeks before we closed the business. The next few weeks were spent disassembling equipment, packing furniture and files and loading it onto the moving vans eagerly waiting at our shipping docks. Some how it seemed only fitting that those who had built the business up from the ground should be the ones to tear it down. At high noon on August 31, 2000 we gathered in the parking lot as the doors to our facility were locked. It was there that we said our last good-bye. It was there that we ended sixteen years of memories.

We see each other occasionally in the shopping malls and restaurants around town. There is always time to stop and inquire about how an old friend and former colleague is doing. There is always time to take a moment to reminisce. There is always time to say a silent prayer for Dave Pickett.

Dedicated to the memory of David W. Pickett 1956-1998, and to the men and women who faithfully served the thermal spray industry from Appleton, Wisconsin.

About the Author

Charles P. Howes is an Industrial Safety & Security Professional, Freelance Technical Writer, and Corporate Trainer. He lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and can be reached at www.charleshowes.com, or by telephone at 920-432-7334.