If you are feeling a tad lethargic after your holiday weekend, we are warning you that you may find the contents of today’s posting a bit of a wake-up call. Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board has unveiled a series of graphic public service announcements designed to highlight worker safety. The theme – There Really are No Accidents – is intended to send the message that work injuries and fatalities are unacceptable and preventable. The campaign includes television and radio commercials, print ads, transit shelter and outdoor ads, web-based ads and a Prevent It website. In addition to running in English and French, the print and TV ads will run in Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi and Spanish.
Take a look at the spots, but please be warned, these are graphic video clips:
Sous Chef suffers kitchen burns
Retail worker falls from ladder
Forklift driver dies in an accident
This approach is markedly different from anything that we seem to have here in the U.S. These work safety ads are startling, both in the shocking and gruesome nature of their content and in the fact that they are run on public television. Other than an occasional reference to workplace safety in an insurance spot, we can’t recall ever having seen TV ads devoted to worker safety. And despite pervasive graphic violence in films and on TV, it’s hard to imagine spots like these being run on network or cable TV in the U.S. Another remarkable thing in comparing Ontario’s approach to ours is in the variety of languages that the print and broadcast ads are employing to get the work safety message out.
Does shock value work? It would certainly seem to be effective in drawing awareness to an issue, although it’s hard to measure if heightened awareness translates into better on-the-job safety. Ontario has been running graphic ads for a number of years now, and last year, there were 101 work fatalities in a population of some 12 million people. That’s roughly comparable to the population of Pennsylvania, where there were 240 workplace fatalities last year or to Illinois, where there were 207 work-related fatalities. Alabama had about the same number of work fatalities (100) for a population of about 4.5 million. Maybe we could indeed use a few PSAs here. (For state fatality stats, see BLS report on fatal work injuries in 2006).
What do you think – effective or no? We’d be interested in hearing of any other public awareness campaigns for workplace safety – perhaps there are some sate-sponsored efforts. If you know of any, please let us know in the comments.
