Spend enough time in safety and you eventually learn two things:
Most workers are good people.
Those same good people will absolutely take shortcuts that get them hurt.
But you'd never know that listening to lawyers, insurance adjusters, or the "safety theorists" sitting comfortably in climate-controlled offices explaining to the world why every incident is actually the employer's fault.
Let me save you some time:
That narrative is fiction.
And after 32 years in this profession, serving as a Subject Matter
Expert in over 100 legal cases, I can tell you exactly why the fiction
was created — and who profits from it.
Not "fifty-fifty."
Not "shared."
Not "systemic."
Two.
As in: one plus one.
In literally every other case, the root cause boiled down to something brutally simple:
If you work in the field for even one month, this won't surprise you.
If you work in a courtroom, apparently it's shocking.
I open large safety meetings the same way every time.
Hundreds of workers. Union. Non-union. Young. Old. Doesn't matter.
I ask:
"Raise your hand if you've ever hurt yourself — anywhere, doing anything."
About 90% of hands go up.
(The remaining 10% are simply lying to themselves.)
Then I ask:
"Whose fault was it?"
And the answer rolls across the room like a wave:
"MINE!"
No hesitation.
No overthinking.
No blaming the company, OSHA, bad luck, Mercury in retrograde, or
anything else.
Just honest human truth.
But the moment a lawyer gets involved?
The story magically transforms into:
Funny how honesty goes out the window the second money enters the room.
Let's stop pretending humans are wired for safety.
We're not.
We never were.
If you want to understand workplace injuries, don't read a
regulation.
Go watch people live their lives:
This isn't training failure.
This isn't leadership failure.
This isn't culture failure.
This is human behavior — the same behavior we had 5,000 years ago and still have today.
You can coach until you're blue in the face.
You can engineer controls.
You can write procedures.
You can put guards, signs, cones, barriers, and PPE on everything but
their shadow.
And someone will still take a shortcut.
One reason.
Money.
The contributory negligence system — where even 1% worker fault killed a case — prevented:
Comparative negligence fixed that.
It opened the door to:
Accidents didn't get more complex.
Human behavior didn't change.
But the cash flow certainly did.
We're out there in the mud, the heat, the cold, the trenches, the shutdowns, the outages.
We see the behavior.
We see the shortcuts.
We see the repeated warnings.
We see the coaching ignored.
We see the PPE "forgotten."
We see reality.
Meanwhile, people far from the field write books and laws claiming:
"Every incident is a failure of the system."
Sure — but the system they're describing isn't the workplace.
It's the legal and insurance system that profits from blaming the employer, every time, no matter what.
Yes, we must create safe environments.
Yes, we must train, coach, mentor, and lead.
Yes, employers absolutely have responsibilities.
Good ones take those seriously.
But let's be honest:
You can eliminate 99 hazards,
train 99 times,
coach 99 times,
inspect 99 times,
and someone will still take the 100th shortcut.
Not because they're bad.
But because they're human.
And until the legal world admits that?
We're going to keep blaming the wrong people, for the wrong reasons,
while the people cashing the checks keep getting richer.
If you want a fairy tale, go to court.
If you want reality, go to the field.
Injury prevention will always come down to this unchanging fact:
• Humans will take risks.
• Humans will make choices.
• And most injuries happen when those choices go sideways.
No legal doctrine will ever change that.
Because you can't legislate human DNA.