18
By keeping detailed records on committee and subcommittee projects, he argues that the central
safety committee can be more accountable to employee concerns as well as accountable to
management. Deadlines provide a time frame in which committee members are expected to
complete designated tasks. According to him, record keeping and deadlines sustain active
involvement among employees.
Regarding the relationships between the safety committee, employees, and management,
committee members contend that the building and maintaining trust relationships are an
important background condition for collective learning, probing, and collaborative problem
solving. If the conditions of trust are met (as sociable economic agent theory suggests), then the
virtues of democratic experimentalism – collective learning, collaborative problem solving, and
deepening opportunities for participation – can be built upon. The experiences of employee and
management representatives at the lumber mill illuminate these principles.
Committee members do not describe too much contention between labor and
management during the meetings. Most of the problems that arise relate to new issues over
which members are uncertain. An employee representative contends, “If there is discussion that
isn’t resolved, I think it is lack of information. We then send someone to get that information
from employees and from our resource person, and then we have better, more direct discussion
on a hazard.” The chair of the committee echoes the same sentiment with an example:
The meetings between labor and management aren’t contentious; I’d say that
discussions often wander. Time management is then a key objective during all of
our meetings – we try to keep them at an hour but we meet twice a month. So if
we don’t come to an agreement, it is usually because we don’t have the necessary
information. We assign someone to get that information, and then we can
continue the discussion at the next meeting. For example, we had a rut in the lot,
and some forklift operators thought it was a hazard for them. We had some
people argue that it should be fixed, others who speculated that it would be
expensive and they should avoid operating the lift in that area. I took the task on
myself, asking what money we had in maintenance, and looking at the problem.
As it turned out, we could fix the rut. Then myself and others in maintenance
went around the lot and fixed other ruts that hadn’t been identified. So, we get
information, and we do the best we can once we have it.
Delegating people to gather information keeps the meeting running smoothly without exhausting
time by following needless tangents, according to the chair. Potential disagreements that may
break down relations of trust are massaged by delegating inquiry and problem solving to
individual members, who then probe the problem further.
Convention