Work-related injuries are a well known problem all around European Union (EU): every year, at
least 170000 workers die and even more suffer severe and permanent injuries.
Even if EU placed the goal of reducing this number by 25% by 2012, in many countries the situation remains
unchanged despite the enforcement of increasingly stringent laws that, anyways, elude the most important
question: why?
Moreover, in spite of a lot of American and European studies demonstrated that at least 76% of work-related
accidents are due to workers unsafe behaviors, blaming workers is not a effective solution because it eludes
again the question: why a worker should act unsafe?
An answer to this last question comes from studies about human behavior: a person acts a certain way
because he is subject to a number of external stimuli, before and after his act. So, if a person receives a
positive consequence as a reward for his behavior, he continues to output the same behavior.
Till 80's, Behavior-Based Safety (B-BS) uses this mechanic to provide positive consequences to safe
behaviors, instead of negative ones, increasing safety and reducing injuries.
But does B-BS work? Even if a lot of literature case studies of successful B-BS implementation are present,
all across the world, there is a lack of scientific experiments to unequivocally state that B-BS increases safe
behaviors and reduces injuries. This work provides two different case studies, using not only a before-after
analysis but also using an appropriate mathematical test (Young\u2019s C Test), to examine workers\u2019 behavior
changes during time.
The work puts in competition two different B-BS protocols, which share all the fundamentals but differ for
start-up time and cost, applied on two different Italian industrial sites: a glass bottle factory and a paint
factory.
These protocols obtains the same results, demonstrating not only that B-BS works, but also that behavioral
safety can be achieved at low cost even for small European industries
