Address Before the President's Conference on Industrial Safety.

Secretary Tobin, ladies and gentlemen:

I am very glad to welcome you here today to this conference on industrial safety. You are meeting in the interest of one of the highest purposes of mankind--to save human lives. Your presence indicates your firm resolve--which I share--to reduce the present tragic toll of 2 million injuries a year in industry.

You are meeting to consider a long-range cooperative program of action to improve industrial safety. The program has been worked out during the past few months by some 500 persons from industry, labor, State and Federal governments, insurance companies, and private safety organizations. These men and women have given generously of their time. I believe you will find their work good, and the program they have developed a sound and practical one.

I hope you will perfect this program in the next few days. I hope that you will accept it and that you will put it into practice in every workplace in the country. Your committees have shown how this job can be done. They have pointed out the practical steps that the organizations you represent can take to apply tested safety measures throughout American industry. When you accept this program, it will be a challenge to each of you personally to see that action results.

I am sure that action will result from this conference--the same kind of action we have been getting from highway safety and fire prevention conferences. Since we started the highway safety conference nearly 3 years ago, we have been making steady progress toward reducing highway accidents, because the people most directly concerned are working hard to put the program into practice. We should make even greater progress in ,-educing industrial injuries, because it ought to be easier to educate management and workers in industry than it is to educate drivers on the road.

The job of reducing industrial accidents is primarily a job for employers and workers. They are the men and women who bear directly the cost and suffering of unnecessary accidents. When businessmen understand how expensive it is to lose production time as a result of accidents, they will be prepared to make the small investment in equipment, in training, and in supervision that a safety program requires. When workingmen and women understand the loss of wages and the human suffering that result from work injuries, they will be prepared to cooperate in developing such programs and in observing safety rules.

All of you here can play an important part in achieving better safety practices. Those of you from business and labor groups should consider yourselves as ambassadors of safety with employers and labor unions.

Insofar as government action is concerned, the State governments have the principal responsibility for helping to make workplaces safe. For that reason I wrote personally to every Governor inviting him to attend this conference or to send his designated representative. I hope the chief executive of each State will take a personal interest in the success of this industrial safety program.

Many of the States have already made remarkable progress. I am informed, for example, that the industrial safety program of the State of Rhode Island has resulted in 36 percent reduction in industrial accidents over the past 4 years. Suppose we could get that result in every State in the Union-and we can, if we try--wouldn't it be remarkable?

I promise you all the help that the Federal Government can give.

The role of the Federal Government, as I see it, is primarily to stimulate cooperation for safety and to encourage the use of the best methods and standards. Technicians from the Federal Government working through State agencies, can help to install safety programs in business establishments and help to solve the many technical problems involved.

In addition, I have recommended that the Congress authorize Federal grants to State labor agencies to strengthen their industrial safety activities. The Federal Government and the States spend many millions of dollars a year to rehabilitate injured workers. It is only common sense to do what we can to prevent injuries in the first place. So I hope very much that the Congress will approve this grant-in-aid program.

The plain fact is that our Nation cannot afford the needless loss of skilled workers if we are to produce for prosperity in this country and for peace abroad. That is why the work of this conference is of such vast importance.

In your work here this week, and in your even more important work later in the States and in thousands of workplaces throughout the Nation, I suggest that you should have a definite goal before you. We are now suffering 2 million job accidents a year. I propose that our first goal be to cut that in half by the end of the next 3 years.

Companies with good safety records have proved time and again that this can be done. Their safety records are no accident. They have come about because management accepted its responsibility for day to day leadership. They constructed safe buildings. They guarded their machinery and equipment. They planned production layouts to eliminate hazards. They trained supervisors and workers. In these cases, workers and their unions, too, accepted their responsibility as part of a cooperative program to achieve safe work practices.

What progressive management and labor groups have done in the past, others can do. As you know, the need is greatest in the smaller plants, where 70 percent of the accidents occur, and where the organized safety movement is weakest. We can and we must reduce accidents in small plants as well as in large ones.

I hope you will want to continue these conferences. They offer us a yardstick to measure progress. They can provide a clearinghouse for our common problems and experiences.

If you who are here today will roll up your sleeves and go to work, you can be well on the way to the goal of a million fewer work accidents each year by the time we meet in another national safety conference.

We stand today at the threshold of accomplishment. Our experience in accident prevention has shown us that we can reduce industrial injuries to a fraction of what they are now. The work of this conference will be to show us how to do it.

You who are here representing labor, employers, and the community, and all groups in our society, are together in this campaign to make working conditions safe and to eliminate industrial accidents. The injuries which people suffer in their daily occupations are the concern of all of us.

The common concern may seem perfectly natural to us, but it really offers remarkable proof of the success of what we call the democratic way of life.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, there was no such general concern for the safety and well-being of the people who did the work. Men and women, and even children, were exposed to terrible hazards in factories and mines. In those days, injuries and occupational disease were assumed to be a necessary part of industrial life. Men were thought of as tools, as instruments to be used, broken, and cast aside.

But now we have rejected that philosophy, and placed the value of human life above private profit.

There are other countries, however, in which this is not the case--even today. Those countries live under a totalitarian system where men are thought of as tools of the state. As a consequence, there is indifference to pain and human suffering. This is demonstrated most clearly in the slave labor camps where the bodies of men are deliberately destroyed by inhuman conditions of labor.

Under the democratic way of life, we protect the values of human life and human happiness against exploitation by individuals or by the state. In our democracy an injury to one is the concern of all of us.

This conference is an example to the peoples of the world of our common determination to put our ideals into practice, and to increase the measure of happiness that mankind can enjoy. I urge you to keep this high purpose in mind in your work, and I wish you every success in this conference, and every success after you go home.