An exploratory study of changing occupational injury risk during the closure of industrial operations

Companies go out of business on a regular basis, and industrial plants close as a result. Various social, economic and interpersonal dynamics accompany such events. Environmental health and safety (EH&S) aspects are not exempt from those dynamics during a programmed closing of a manufacturing operation. How does this condition fit the industrial hygiene paradigm of anticipation, recognition, evaluation and control? This paper describes an exploratory enquiry into the nature of risk to human health and safety associated with the planned closure of a manufacturing operation. As a starting point, the recognition of risk was explored using a qualitative opinion survey of a group of independent EH&S professionals. The survey, reflecting what is often referred to as the 'art' of industrial hygiene, gathered professional impressions of change in potential risk of injury during a hypothetical plant-closing. The results suggested that a plant-closing might be considered a real issue by most EH&S professionals, and pointed specifically to management of personnel behavior, employee satisfaction and outside influences as primary potential sources of increased risk of injury during this final phase of a plant's life. Next, a specific real-world example was considered to evaluate actual change in injury statistics. For this, compensation claim records were examined for a malt beverage manufacturer before and after an official announcement of closure for four geographically distinct North American plants. Risk was evaluated first in terms of the one-monthly and three-monthly rates of injury incidence and then in terms of severity (expressed as cost), based on data derived from compensation claim records as of the month of plant closing. The rate of injury incidence appeared to have increased during plant-closing for one of the plants, but the results were equivocal for the other three plants. On the other hand, when the results were transformed so that the injury incidences were weighted with respect to the cost, the effective impact on the injury rate appeared to increase for three of the plants. Most importantly overall, this paper identifies-for the first time-that there is the potential for increased injury risk during a plant closure phase, and so poses an alert for EH&S professionals and management to implement possible preventative control options in such situations.