Rousmaniere: The Frontier of Work Safety in China

Technology which cuts work injuries by reducing unsafe acts is the frontier of work safety. It’s likely China will adopt this technology more aggressively than the US. Here is why.  

To see this, look long range. Work safety trends mirror industrial challenges. The Industrial Revolution has over two centuries changed the culture of work toward ever greater regimentation, shifting employer and worker expectations.  Full-time hourly wages began to replace largely home piece work in the early 1800s.  The early 20^th century introduced assembly line workers.  And most recently, work organizes around disruptive information technology. Witness Uber, a digital platform enterprise; and warehousing is being redesigned with robots.

The workplace is increasingly digital-intense. The Brookings Institute says that in 2002, 56% of jobs demanded low digital skills. By 2016, these jobs dropped to 30% of the workforce.  High digital jobs jumped from 5% to 23%.

Today’s frontier in safety improvement is technology to monitor worker acts, conditions and behaviors that contribute to injury. These include working while fatigued, over-exertion, driving errors, and many falls mishaps in dangerous situations such as in construction and mining. 

Monitoring work very closely can prevent these acts. A large share of work injuries occurs in environments amenable to careful digital monitoring. These include trucks, mines, warehouses, and hospitals.

Think of monitoring not to so much to document the injury for claims, but to understand what leads to injuries. These are leading indicators. Until today, they involve worker observations, inspections, near-miss reports, and safety committee reviews. (These are well described in a white paper by Sphere titled, “Measuring Safety Culture.”)  They are at least as useful as lagging indicators, such as recordable incidents and workers’ compensation claims.  And information technology can provide extremely detailed leading indicator insights.

I talked with Anthony Harris, an occupational medicine doctor who has introduced a wearable monitoring device by Harris Fitness. It measures the unique body mechanics of the worker. He told me that the science of overexertion is well established. For 40 years we’ve known how the body’s exertion, say of shoulders, will progress to when risk of injury goes up a lot. Wearable measuring equipment, itself inexpensive, can spot the workers whose habits greatly raise their risk of injury.

The agenda today is figuring out the most practical ways for employers to use the technology.

Dorsalis is an Australian firm, that entered the U.S. market a few years ago. It sells a wearable monitoring device usable for both prevention and to guide injury recovery. Guardhat, located in Birmingham, Michigan, has launched a smart hardhat. adaptable to many work scenarios.

Kinetic, a New York City-based firm, focuses on the materials-handling industry.

The products are multiplying. One marketplace site lists 68 wearable devices for industrial use.

Besides wearables, driver safety systems monitor driver behavior, such as swerving, acceleration and hard stops.  Originally intended for commercial fleet drivers, these systems have reached a stage of maturity at which inclusion in private passenger cars is feasible.

What does China have to do with this?  Again, at each major step in the evolution of industrial work, employers and workers adjust to increasingly more regimented organization. Change can conflict with contemporary norms of personal autonomy.  Technology to monitor worker activity is very intrusive.  Culturally, China may be readier to adopt close worker monitoring. 

It has introduced what many in the United States would consider a creepy level of monitoring of personal behavior, in public and at work. According to a series of articles in the South China Morning Post, the city of Shenzhen police can now identify car drivers using facial recognition surveillance cameras. It will use this information to identify and fine violators. A fugitive was arrested in southeast China after facial recognition technology helped identify him in a crowd of about 50,000 attending a pop concert.  

Brain-reading technology is being used to monitor worker behavior. A Chinese professor of brain science told the newspaper, “When the system issues a warning, the manager asks the worker to take a day off or move to a less critical post. Some jobs require high concentration. There is no room for a mistake.”

Horrifying to many Americans? Yes. But America itself experienced such a shock over one hundred years ago, with scientific management, which proclaimed “the scientific selection, education and development of the workman,” in the words of productivity prophet Frederick Taylor.

Chinese intrusiveness will likely not be seen much here for a while. Yet, we need to figure out own our future with this technology.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Rousmaniere is widely known throughout the workers’ compensation industry, both for his writing and consulting experience. Based in the picture perfect New England town of Woodstock, VT, he is a regular on the conference circuit, and is deeply in tune with trends and developments within the industry. His passion is writing and presenting on issues largely related to immigration, and he maintains a blog on the subject at www.workingimmigrants.com.

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