Exercising such authority, of course, would require an enormous federal policing force, perhaps in the thousands. Already, employers, in their long-standing voluntary programs to make their plants safer, scratch hard for qualified safety experts. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz blandly explained to Congressmen that getting people would be no drawback. He said he could staff his safety policing team with the hard-core unemployed. These presumably would then show up as federal ‘inspectors’ armed with power of life or death over your business.
The human factor is the most important cause of accidents and injuries. It has been estimated that 75 to 85 percent of all such occurrences have been caused by a negligent or unsafe act on the part of an individual...This cannot be [fixed] through legislation.
We find that 80 to 90 percent of the injuries which are occurring in our company [Du Pont] are due to a human failure rather than a piece of equipment, a machine, or so on.
