Exploring the Differences in Safety Climate Among Mining Sectors

Currently, the US mining industry is encouraged, but not required to adopt a formal health and safety management system. Previous research has shown that the adoption of such systems has been more difficult in some subsectors of the mining industry than others. Given the interdependencies between management systems and safety climate in addition to their predictive utility of incidents, it is important to assess differences in the perceptions of safety climate among mining subsectors in the USA. If significant differences exist, then mining subsectors may not necessarily be able to adopt a one-size approach to system implementation. To that end, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health assessed mineworkers' perceptions of several individual and organizational safety climate constructs. Participants consisted of 2945 mineworkers at coal, industrial mineral, and stone/sand/gravel mine sites throughout 18 states. Linear regressions were used to answer the research question. The results suggest that coal miners, in comparison to those miners in industrial mineral and stone/sand/gravel sectors, had significantly less favorable perceptions on each of the organizational climate constructs measured (i.e., organizational support, supervisor support and communication, coworker communication, engagement/involvement, and training) (p < 0.001 in all cases). Importantly, these results parse out organizational indicators to show that perceptions are not only lower in one area of organizational or supervisor support. Rather, engagement, training, and communication practices were all significantly lower among coal miners, prompting considerations for these significant differences and actions that can be taken to improve system practices.