How Alcoa increased profits by focusing on Worker Safety
Increasing Safety Signaled that the Company Cared
Sociopathic leaders who focus on Financialization alienate workers by shirking safety and trying to nickel and dime employees and signaling they don’t care about workers.
Questions:
Have you ever worked for or heard of a company engage in counter-productive cost-cutting?
What are ways you have heard of businesses successfully signal to their employees that the company cares about their employees or work?
Do you think high-level leaders fail to take into account the signals they send to their workers? Why do you think they fail to take this into account?
Have you found that employers take advantage of their leverage during economic downturns? What, if anything, is the consequence of this?
Transcript:
0:02 Paul O’Neal had had been head of OM and sort of come out of government and the board chose him to run Alcoa and I’m I’m
0:09 going to shorten the story just to make a point and he he comes in and he does a whole review of the company and looks at everything and he comes back to the
0:17 board and he said, “Okay, my number one priority is worker safety.” And a bunch of the guys on the board went nuts. They thought, “Oh god, this is a government guy. He’s not going to make any money.
0:27 he’s going to fail, you know, blah blah blah, anything. One leads to another and he was very serious. There was a real worker safety problem. And uh the
0:36 process goes in place. He makes worker safety number one. And um and so suddenly people start caring about their
0:44 jobs and the business and because they believe he’s sincere and he really is.
0:49 And the next thing you know, Alco is performing fabulously financially because he turned around the culture.
0:55 And when I read all your stories of, you know, explosions and fires,
1:02 what I’m feeling is, you know, when you’re on the financial side and you see the financial guys financialized, they
1:10 are constantly sending signals to the workers, we don’t care about you. We don’t care about you, and we’re going to nickel and dime you, and we’re going to
1:18 nickel and dime your benefits, and we’re going to play games with you. And then what you get is you get a workforce that’s like the workforce Paul O’Neal
1:26 found when he went to Alcoa. And I look at all these companies and I’m thinking these companies have a Paul O’Ne we call at the investment screen company we call
1:34 it a Paul O’Neal problem. They all have a Paul O’Neal problem.