The above worker has NO Fall Protection, NO Hard Hat, and you can probably add other potential problems.  Can you guess what it costs your company if this employee is disabled or killed due to a worker incident?  This might be a question you want to talk about with management, seeking addition money or defending current your safety budget.   While most companies consider safety as a non-revenue generating department, incidents can really affect the company’s “bottom line.”   AON now has a Calculate Your Facility’s Cost of Risk tool for their customers.  CNA also offer a wide range of programs for safety and risk management.

The National Safety Council puts the cost for a disabling injury at about $34,000/injury.  The cost of a worker death is over $100,000.  To put this into perspective, if your company operates at a 3% profit margin you need and additional 1 million dollars to offset that injury.  If your company does really well and has a 5% profit margin you will need approximately $700,000 in additional sales to break even.  Do the math.  If you have 3 disabling injuries a year, and reduce that number to 1, you have reduced your company’s cost about 1.5 million dollars.  Having a GOOD EFFECTIVE safety program will affect the bottom line.  There are also many studies that have shown that productivity also increases as your company becomes safer.  Productivity is another factor, that will affect your company’s bottom line.   Have we answered the question yet?  What cost can your company live with?