ABSTRACT
The New View seems to recognize only goodness and promise and possibility and human potential. Technological developments were so rapid, so pervasive, and so complex, that no amount of intervention toward the human worker alone could solve the emerging safety problems. Safety conferences and professional meetings in the decades after the Second World War started to call attention more to managerial responsibilities and engineering solutions for safe work. Safety improvement comes from abandoning the idea that errors are causes, and that people are the major threat to otherwise safe systems. Testing workers and carefully vetting and selecting them, excluding the accident-prone ones from the jobs where they could do most harm, was thought to be a great investment in safety. The responsibility–authority mismatch brings us back to the basic goal conflicts that drive most safety-critical and time-critical work. Depending on the safety level of the activity, a confidential reporting system is a key source of safety-related information.
