Summary of Jessie Singer's There Are No Accidents

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 To understand accidents, we must first understand error. And to understand error, we must first understand how powerful people can use our mistakes against us. This book begins with error because questions of error almost always follow an accident.
#2 The Bad Apple Theory states that a factory is inherently safe, and that accident-prone people make it unsafe. The New View, on the other hand, states that the factory is not inherently safe and that people are getting hurt when they make mistakes.
#3 In the spring of 1931, a young man named Joseph Weitz was driving a truck for H. S. Trucking Company when he heard screams rising above the noise of the city. He pulled the truck to a stop in the middle of the street, and was arrested for the killing of six-year-old Irwin Ouser.
#4 Before cars, no one told you how or when to walk. With the arrival of the automobile, and the traffic signals and traffic laws that followed, pedestrians were not just demoted but also killed in the streets in skyrocketing numbers.

Sujets

• Général
• Public policy

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669356547
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Jessie Singer's There Are No Accidents
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

To understand accidents, we must first understand error. And to understand error, we must first understand how powerful people can use our mistakes against us. This book begins with error because questions of error almost always follow an accident.

#2

The Bad Apple Theory states that a factory is inherently safe, and that accident-prone people make it unsafe. The New View, on the other hand, states that the factory is not inherently safe and that people are getting hurt when they make mistakes.

#3

In the spring of 1931, a young man named Joseph Weitz was driving a truck for H. S. Trucking Company when he heard screams rising above the noise of the city. He pulled the truck to a stop in the middle of the street, and was arrested for the killing of six-year-old Irwin Ouser.

#4

Before cars, no one told you how or when to walk. With the arrival of the automobile, and the traffic signals and traffic laws that followed, pedestrians were not just demoted but also killed in the streets in skyrocketing numbers.

#5

The automobile was initially cast as a weapon, but over time, the blame was shifted to human error. This allowed automakers to continue selling cars, and it took a political radical like William Bunge to point that out.

#6

The auto lobby, which was previously in the business of advocating for paved roads and lower taxes and fees for drivers, was transformed by the outrage around traffic accidents, and was forced to concern itself with safety.

#7

The automobile lobby was successful in reframing the car-murder narrative, and as a result, when we talk about speeding, we almost always talk about speeders as the problem, not how fast those cars can go.

#8

The automobile lobby also found new ways to inject human error into the car-accident conversation. They began to place items in newspapers to ensure that jaywalker appeared in the press.

#9

The jaywalker is a modern-day scapegoat, and the distracted pedestrian is a new version of this. Automakers first learned this from a campaign waged during an earlier rise in accidental deaths - those in the workplace.

#10

The so-called careless worker appeared in industrial workplaces, coal mines, and rail yards a few decades before the jaywalker. The idea that certain workers were more likely to have accidents than others - people who would eventually be branded accident-prone workers - ramped up after 1911, when several states passed the nation’s first workers’ compensation laws.

#11

The idea that some people are accident-prone and others aren’t, and that this is why certain people are accident-prone, was popularized by the National Council for Industrial Safety in the 1920s. None of these studies ever proved that accident-proneness exists.

#12

The concept of accident-proneness has been questioned by researchers for decades. It is hard to disprove, and it doesn’t matter if anyone can prove it or not, because the point is not to find truth but to create ambiguity.

#13

One way to explain human error is to make rules against mistakes. The workplace safety manual is a great example of this. The rules become more difficult to follow when the pace of the operation is accelerated, and thus the work becomes more dangerous.

#14

The tension between safety and production defines the industrial workplace, where the pressure and desire to make money manifests in accidents. The slaughterhouse or meat processing plant is a good example of this.

#15

The slaughterhouse is a good example of how rules and safety manuals can institutionalize human error as the cause of accidents. The primary incentive for a person who owns a slaughterhouse is to process as many animals as possible, but for a person who works in a slaughterhouse, there are two different incentives: not getting hurt and not getting fired.

#16

The Hamlet Fire is a tragic example of how accidents can happen in America. It was a one-story building in the Black half of town, and 25 workers died. Most of them suffocated behind locked doors, while others burned to death.

#17

The Hamlet fire produced little outrage and few reforms. It was mostly Black women who died, which meant the response was different than if it had been white men.

#18

The difference between saying this is a tragic anomaly and a tragic inevitability is whether or not everyone saw the accident. The more people who see an accident, the harder it is to ignore how it happened.

#19

The accident-prone worker, the jaywalker, and the chicken thief are exaggeration