Safety professionals and the clerk-skill led bureaucracy

There is something about safety which I have learnt after so many years of seafaring .

That , the very concept of safety by its nature is pitched against the business profits.

Look at all the safety items you see around yourself on the Merchant ships. The lifeboats, the liferafts, the EPIRBS, the SARTs, ...you name it, everything.

Have you ever considered the worth of these items from the point of view of a finance manager? If you ever do, you will notice that all of these items are a waste of money, a reduction in the profits of the business.

The challenge of all the argument that come to promote the cause of Safety is that they deal in the imaginary and unseen, unheard events for the finance manager and other non-seagoing people. So it is always difficult to argue out how something is important, particularly when the argument have to contest their battle against the business profits by using scenarios which they may have hardly experienced from the comforts of their offices and homes.

But we owe it to professionals-led Democracy of the western world that today such items are found on every merchant ship. The philosophers of the Safety argument had an understanding of the weaknesses of the Safety crusaders. They knew how in this world the safety thought will have trouble to come around. This will particularly be an issue where the Government is led by the clerk-skilled Bureaucracy.  The only way to bring about safety was by arming it with the force of Law. That may explain how every set of action which has been reasonably agreed to be contributing to safety was put into the industry by making it Mandatory. Mandatory is that force of Law that helps the arguments of safety to overcome the challenges posed by the profits-minded finance managers , and the job-secured clerks who have the evergreen advantage of never being held responsible for any Negligence, no matter how much loss of life or property has occurred over those files which they have been indefinitely sitting for the final decisions.

There is trouble we encounter with our own seafaring people. After leaving seas we too become clerk-minded and become oblivious of the Concept of Safety, its nature and its weaknesses against the other interests. We forget as to what interest we are the representative of. 

But that, in turn, is because the trouble with us is that we are ourselves never in consensus. This, because there is another unique Newtonian property in the Concept of Safety. That Newtonian property is that, - to every idea of Safety, there exist the equal and opposite idea of Safety.

Simply speaking, doing what can be proposed as a measure of safety, the non-doing can also as much forcefully argued to be a measure of safety from another point of view.

There is just one way, therefore, for the safety professionals to overcome the Brownian-movement nature of the Safety argument, in order to come to a consensus. Measurability, that is, the use of quantifiable methods which are commonly agreed between them. 

Of course, that will require events such as seminars and lecture series to happen at frequent intervals and a good, robust attendance by the member of the professional fraternity.