Professional standards – Page 22

Yesterday,the CEO of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld Jr, faced an inquisition at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. It was uncomfortable to watch but fascinating.

Video of the hearings shows the questions focused on Fuld’s accumulation of wealth in the good times and the retention of wealth in the bad times. There are parallels with the non-financial accountability of corporate leaders on matters such as workplace safety and corporate social responsibility.

The chair of the committee, Henry Waxman, spoke of company documents that

“portray a company in which there was no accountability for failure”.

Waxman said he was troubled by the attitude of Fuld where Fuld would not acknowledge any wrongdoing. Fuld did accept responsibility for the failure of the company but would not accept that his behaviour or the behaviour of the company he lead, contributed to the failure. In other words, Fuld would not accept that his company had a culture that may have contributed to the bankruptcy.

There will be more of this type of inquiry and in many countries other than the United States. OHS managers should not sit back and watch the chief financial officer squirm with discomfit and anxiety for the way that the financiers handle this crisis, as there are important lessons about their own accountability, responsibility and disaster planning.

There are some in the safety profession who question whether OHS practitioners have the right to describe ourselves as professionals. Comparisons have been made to the medical profession where one is either a doctor or not, a nurse or not, a medical practitioner or not. This is an unfair comparison as the medical profession has a history going back centuries. As a regulated profession, the history is shorter but that it is a profession is unarguable.

A profession focusing on safety is a recent development, only a couple of decades old. I would mark the new approach to safety from Lord Robens but others may take it from Australian OHS legislation in the mid-1980s. (An argument could be made for the beginning to be from the increase in safety engineering in the 1960’s and maybe even Ralph Nader’s safety activism). The safety profession is still embryonic.

The added challenge is that additional hazards and social safety issues seem to be appearing much faster than happened decades ago, as manufacturing processes change much quicker and society applies more psychosocial hazards in a work context.

Maybe it is not yet a profession but it is becoming one and perhaps we need to focus on the journey more than on the result. Business and legal concerns have evolved just as rapidly as our approaches to OHS and becoming a profession is more complex than it was previously. The level of business regulation, government oversight and reporting has never seemed higher.

Previously business and employers could be trusted in some business areas. In the early 21^st century trust has evaporated.

One element of the comparison between the OHS profession and medicine is particularly useful to consider. It is now an accepted practice that if a serious health matter is diagnosed we seek a second opinion. We don’t seek a second opinion from safety advisers even though that “profession” is far less regulated than medicine. That seems an absurd business practice to me.

For a primer on what is meant by a profession, Wikipedia is a good place to start. It’s not authoritative but it is free and always a good place to start.

Category: Professional standards

Corporate accountability – Lessons from Lehmans

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