The USW Health, Safety and Environment Department and Tony Mazzocchi Center (TMC) staff were recognized by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health as the recipient of the 2012 Tony Mazzocchi Award/Lifetime Achievement Award.  The USW was nominated because of the union's strong commitment to its members' health and safety and its leadership in protecting all workers.  The union continues its tradition of supporting local unions and its members' health and safety through support, technical assistance and education. Each week, the USW and TMC facilitate health, safety and environmental training for hundreds of members across the union.  It also supports those in the most need following fatalities and severe workplace injuries and has worked in alliance with other unions and environmental groups to protect the environment.

While accepting the award, Mike Wright, USW HSE Department Head said, "We humbly accept this award, but not just for the staff of the department. We are only doing our jobs.  We accept this award on behalf of every USW member and every workplace health and safety activist.  It is our privilege to work in support of their efforts."

The USW and the Tony Mazzocchi Center includes 32 full-time staff - 26 in the United States and 6 in Canada.  The staff works for the USW's Health, Safety and Environment Department in the US and Canada, the USW's Emergency Response Team and the Tony Mazzocchi Center.  The Tony Mazzocchi Center also coordinates the work of more than 250 worker trainers to facilitate training and education with our members across the union.

The award was presented on December 6 at the annual COSH awards dinner where the featured speaker was Clarissa Martinez de Castro of the National Council of La Raza. 

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the NIEHS Trainers Exchange in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where presenters from the many different grantee groups such as the USW Tony Mazzocchi Center gave workshops on the new innovative techniques and tools for effective worker training.  But what I found most interesting were the discussions that occurred after and between the workshops.  Surprisingly, they weren’t centered on the new ideas that were being shared.  Instead, the primary concern was that our focus on the “New and Improved” was causing us to lose sight of where we all started.  We were afraid, in effect, that we were losing our grasp on the basics of worker-to-worker training that we all learned back in our Train-The-Trainer sessions.

I can’t think of a better way to revisit those basic lessons than through a review of the three core values we have always tried to build into our own Small Group Activity Method (SGAM).

RESPECT

We believe in worker-centered training.

• Every person in the small group brings experience and knowledge to the table.
• The instructor’s task is not to tell stories and lecture but to draw out stories and information from the class participants.

SHARE THE POWER

We believe in overcoming apathy by sharing the power.

• We seek worker input.  We list their ideas and comments on flip charts and post them around the room.  We give as much credence to the contributions from the shop floor worker as to the manager seated with him at the table.  As instructors it is our duty to make sure this happens in the classroom – that no one’s ideas are ignored and no group taken over by a single, forceful individual.

WE WORK COLLECTIVELY

More heads are better than one.

• Whether in the classroom or in real life - workers WORKING TOGETHER to solve problems, are always more productive, efficient and creative than individuals working alone.  It’s not unusual to have a group where everyone is working on the task alone rather than pooling their resources.  Therefore, it is the instructor’s job to encourage them to work together as a group and gain the advantage of their multiple viewpoints and experiences.

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Thanks, and solidarity

The United Steelworkers, Communications Workers of America, and the Tony Mazzochi Center put together another successful Health, Safety & Environment Conference.  The 2012 conference included many unique opportunities for individuals to gain knowledge and key information to take back to their workplace, such as morning plenary sessions and afternoon workshops.  Attendees heard from various union leaders, subject matter experts, and health & safety activists.  Over 80 different types of workshops were offered that covered a variety of different health, safety & environment topics.  These topics included Near Miss Investigation and Prevention, Incident Investigation, Lockout/Tagout, Emergency Response, and Normalization of Deviation.  The United Steelworkers Health, Safety & Environment Department also utilized the expertise of outside facilitators to lead classes on post-traumatic stress, railroad operations, nanotechnology, global sweatshop working conditions, and the lessons learned from the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster.

Many of these workshops were designed and facilitated by the Tony Mazzochi Center Worker-Trainers, and many of them took of advantage of the Small Group Activity Method (SGAM).  This type of teaching style puts the workers in the center of the learning process, utilizing a collection of experience and knowledge to ensure that every participant is given the opportunity to gain as much information as possible.  This active and engaging approach to teaching is one of the keys behind the educational successes of the Tony Mazzochi Center.

While these workshops were a terrific opportunity to teach a wide range of topics, they were only a small taste of what the TMC has to offer.  Individuals interested in finding out more can use the USW/TMC website to see a more complete list of the in-depth and comprehensive courses that the Tony Mazzochi Center can bring to you.

Interactive Training Still a Vital Component to Safety Programs

A recent article published in the Journal of Applied Psychology regarding hazards and safety training has concluded that hands-on training is more effective than traditional one-way lecture forms of training for tasks that carry a high risk of death, injury, or illness.

Our findings indicate that, on average, the highly engaging methods of safety training are considerably more effective than the less engaging methods of training in knowledge acquisition and safety performance… From a practical perspective, these findings suggest the need for safety managers to more carefully consider the relative costs and benefits of placing a trainee in a passive versus more active type of safety training for knowledge acquisition and performance enhancement… although distance learning and electronic learning (e-learning) approaches to training offer economies of scale and may appear cost effective from a short-term financial perspective, a lack of participant engagement in such training approaches has been acknowledged as a major issue… Given the importance of knowledge and performance as outcomes of safety training, balancing training engagement with the short-term financial costs becomes critical both to keeping workers safe and to avoid the long-term financial costs of safety-related disasters (Burke et al., 2011).

In other words, training programs with active discussions, trainer feedback, and actual hands-on activities are more effective than traditional one-way lecture style training programs, which is why the USWTMC utilizes the Small Group Activity Method.  

The SGAM used by the USWTMC puts the learner in the center of the workshop.  Instead of simply listening to trainers talk or watching video presentations, participants are put to work solving real-life problems, building upon their own skills and experiences.  The tasks require that the groups use their experience to tackle problems and make judgments on key issues.  TMC worker-trainers create a learning environment where open discussion and in class participation are fundamental to finding solutions. 

New forms of technology, which allow us to reach more and more individuals, may actually be a step back when it comes to safety training.  Videos and webcams, while a helpful tool, do not supplement live interaction and hands on components.  The short-term financial benefits gained through the use of passive forms of training are dwarfed by the potential long-term costs that accompany a safety disaster.

A recent example that exemplifies the significance placed on engaging forms of training can be found regarding air line pilots.  The Air Line Pilots Association is hoping that the recent findings regarding levels of interactivity in training methods will help the FAA and United Airlines see that more engaging training is needed.  Some 6,000 United Airlines pilots are dissatisfied with the training they have received following United 2010’s merger with Continental Airlines. A report by the ALPA is currently being circulated through congress.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The document, dated Nov. 10, lambasts United for using only individual, computer-based training to help United pilots absorb a large volume of procedural changes without including classroom work or practice sessions in flight simulators. The report alleges that new cockpit procedures imposed on United crews are causing stressed pilots to report higher-than-normal numbers of safety lapses, including instances of nearly forgetting to lower landing gear before touchdown. Other pilots, according to the report, have been so distracted and unfamiliar with the changes that they have failed to properly follow taxi instructions on the ground, while still others took themselves off duty because they felt they weren’t fit to fly.

This is just one example of the lack of engagement hampering the acquisition of knowledge. Several more exist, which is why the training courses that the TMC offers all include a strong foundation on the interaction between facilitator and the participants, as well as numerous hands on activities that are collectively completed and require the participants to engage.

To view the entire study, or find out more about the dread factor, click here.

Mark Dudzic was the president of Tony Mazzocchi’s local in 1984 and worked closely with Tony throughout the 80s. He is currently the coordinator for the Labor Campaign for Single Payer healthcare reform.

 Where’d you first meet Tony?

I joined Tony’s home local in 1979 when I kind of helped organize a plant that I worked at in New Jersey. At the time it was Local 8149, Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers for 149 of the Steelworkers, so I’d heard about Tony before I actually met him. When I joined the union in 1979, he was actually running for national president of Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, and people that I really respected in the local were just really enthusiastic about that, so I was really intrigued about Tony.

I think the first time I met him was in 1980. He came to a local union meeting and swore in the newly elected shop stewards and local officers. He gave a little talk to people at that meeting. He had just lost his race for national union president, and it was a really close race, he lost by like 2% of the vote. There was all this stuff going in the labor movement, I think Reagan had just been elected and stuff like that, but Tony actually talked about the history of the local and this crazy strike that took place to organize the local in 1941 at the Helena Rubenstein plant right after Pearl Harbor. The company and the cops were really vicious, they brought scabs in, women on the picket line used to follow the scabs into the subway and strip their clothes off in the subways to humiliate them. And he told this whole story about that, and it was really significant, because Tony sort of understood before you do anything you have to create a culture of solidarity, and a sense of continuity and tradition, and everything else. He wanted to establish that with these newly elected shop stewards in the local.

What was it like working closely with Tony?

Well, he was in Denver after he lost his run for the Presidency in ’79. He was the director of Health and Safety, and in ’81 he ran again. I actually worked on his campaign, just kind of low-level stuff like bartending at his fundraisers, things like that. He lost that also by 2% of the vote, and it was just really heartbreaking, especially because what Tony was running on in ’81 was basically saying, “Look, the 1980s are going to hit us like a ton of bricks and we have to be ready for it,” and the guy who ran against him was like, “Ehhh you know Tony you’re full of it, the 1980s are going to be just like the 1970s and the 1960s, we’ll have our fights, but there’s nothing new coming at us.” And then, in fact, we were devastated in the 80s by industrialization and vicious anti-labor government and everything else. So I worked a little on his campaign in ’81 and then Tony ended up getting fired by the union after he lost the election, and he moved back to New Jersey, and actually went to work for Les Leopold’s organization, the Labor Institute in New York. During that period from ’82 through ’88 when he got elected secretary treasurer, he hung out a lot at the union hall, and kind of used it as his base of operations, so I saw him a lot in the 1980s. And by then, I got elected president of the local in ’84 and I was a fulltime officer of the local.

How was your friendship with Tony?

I mean Tony was just this amazing person. He was incredibly… warm isn’t quite the word, but he’d create a sense of purpose, and a sense of fun. He could make you feel like you were helping to change the world by driving him to the airport. He just had this ability to put whatever you were doing into a broader context of history and moving forward and things like that.

Ideas would just come off of his head. I mean one day we were moving some furniture around in the office and it was a really hot summer day and he started saying, “You know this global warming stuff, maybe there’s really something to this. We really got to be on top of this stuff and not just let this wave wash over us.” And the next day I see him like calling up people at Harvard University and asking them what they think about global warming and all of a sudden he has this new broad project in mind, based on the fact that he was pretty hot when he was helping to move some furniture. So that was the kind of person that he was to be around. He was always having these incredible brainstorms. I used to room with him sometimes when we went to meetings and conventions and I would see he’d open up a newspaper in the morning and look at an article and make a comment about it and then he’d go down to a convention and give a one-hour speech about this little article he’d just read in the newspaper and what it meant for the workers.

One of the things that he really always understood was that workers had to have ownership over these projects and ideas. And it was very important that people understand and participate in the conception of what we were doing. Because in Tony’s mind a lot of this stuff, in the end, was really to build power for working people in a corporate world.