No disrespect to either of you-I do understand the importance of what you do.

What I can tell you is that after 25 years of being self- employed- working for mostly small businesses is that safety is a concern, but the cheapest safety under the law is what matters most. All my customers at one time or another get on a safety kick, get involved with training, equipment, etc. In 99% of the cases, it doesn't last all that long. Safety involves time, energy & money. Small businesses don't have alot of that to go around (for whatever reason).

The larger businesses I service do get alot more concerned with safety. Usually I hear the phrase "We have to be careful because we have deep pockets". I have seen the most elaborate safety systems (IMHO) fail because someone was in a rush, the boss wasn't in or some other excuse. The operators who caused these systems to fail knew they were not following procedure, but in the end the outcome was the same- regardless of the reason.

To date- the most effective safety system I've seen is when cameras are installed. It's amazing how differently people act when they know they are being watched. I believe it's all about personal responsibility- which folks seem to find when they loose the ability to make up some story on how the manual shifted forklift left running in the parking lot jumped into gear on it's own, the forks raising to about 3'-again on it's own- & speared an employee which required a 911 emergency call- emergency surgery & a visit from OSHA.

The above situation did happen to a large- multi national company with a very sound safety system in place. I was called in as the forklift servicing vendor. The official report from the employee was that the forklift did these things all on it's own. The one thing he had forgotten was the parking lot survailance cameras. The look on his face was precious when he found out it was on film that he jumped off the forklift with it in gear & ran to his car. I'm sure he knew batter, but that didn't stop the poor decision that cost a fellow employee his spleen.