Just Don't Call It an Accident

Abstract

Jessie Singer, author of "There Are No Accidents", works for a nonprofit dedicated to making cities safer for pedestrians and cyclists, but her views of error and accidents go far beyond urban life and cars. One in 23 people in the U.S. will die by accident, she writes, with an annual cost for all injuries and fatalities of more than $1 trillion. Another revelation in Singer's book is the work of safety researcher Crystal Eastman, who catalogued how workers died in Pittsburgh in 1907. "For the first time, accidents born out of a sped-up assembly line or an unventilated coal mine would affect profits," says Singer. "Accidents suddenly had a price."America's largest corporations responded by launching industry safety campaigns, "And those campaigns focused on changing workers' behavior by teaching them not to make mistakes," the author says. Just as there is no such thing as an accident or an error-prone worker, there is no such thing in traffic safety as a jaywalker. Importantly, Singer adds, stop saying "Accident" because "Of all the blame and distraction from real causes that comes with it." For safety professionals, that battle is won: Incident is now used in place of accident, with good reason.