August 9, 2017
Millennials Are Helping To Make Safety A Top Concern In Industry
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You can’t go far on the internet without coming across future predictions about industries, corporate culture and the workforce in general. And no such prediction is complete without taking millennials into account.
This generation already represents more than a third of the American workforce — and that number will rise to three-quarters by 2025. By the time that day comes, it’s possible the professional world will have several new priorities, opportunities and values.
One value we’re already seeing, and one unmistakably positive change to come from all this, is that millennials seem to value safety in a whole new way.
Recent And Not So Recent HistoryIt’s possible we could attribute the millennial focus on safety to factors such as current events and newsworthy violence, but the truth is that millennials seem to be responding to patterns set in motion long ago.
You may have learned in grade school about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment factory workers in New York City in 1911.
It remains memorable because it’s a horrific case study of what goes wrong when safety isn’t a top workplace priority. The building and its owners weren’t merely unprepared for a fire of this scale — they had in fact already locked their workers inside to prevent “time theft” and “unauthorized breaks.”
Fast-forward 87 years and another fire in Bronx, New York, claimed 87 lives, this time at Happy Land Social Club. And then, 27 years after that, the world was treated to a weeks-long news cycle when a high-rise fire at Grenfell Tower in London claimed as many as 79 lives.
Article retrieved from Forbes.com
