Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations is involved in the most comprehensive survey on health and safety issues ever done in the steel industry -- and perhaps the most comprehensive in industry altogether. The results will improve worker safety in the steel industry and may help prevent injury and death in other industries, as well.

The survey is being conducted at National Steel's four plants in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota. The plants, which are wholly owned by a Japanese company, had poor health and safety records -- with five job-related deaths and numerous injuries in a single year. The workers challenged the firm to improve. What followed is something almost unheard of in the industry. The firm not only agreed to pinpoint and correct the most flagrant problems immediately, but it also is supporting a group of concerned employees, most of them chosen by their union, United Steelworkers of America (USWA), while they work full time on health and safety issues and administer the in-depth survey to all 7,000 of the company's U.S. employees, not just a sample group.

Thanks to $95,000 in funding from National Steel, the group of 60 workers and 10 managers is being trained in sophisticated surveying techniques by top labor experts at Cornell and elsewhere. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a faculty member with the Office of Labor Education Research at Cornell's ILR School, and Tom Juravich, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are the principal investigators of the in-depth survey. Also involved is Cornellian Michael Wright, B.S. '69, who heads health and safety at USWA. The project is being managed at Cornell, and most of the funding is directed here.

"It's the people on the floor who really know what's safe and unsafe in the plants," said Wright. The researchers asked for their suggestions on survey questions, and Bronfenbrenner and the project staff helped refine the survey instrument. The goal was to elicit honest, candid responses about safety problems in the plants while ensuring that workers' jobs would not be jeopardized because of their answers.

"We spent weeks training people in interviewing techniques and issues of confidentiality," said Bronfenbrenner, who helped put together a code of ethics that addressed such thorny questions as how to handle the discovery of an unsafe situation (answer: right away and without repercussions) and how to protect confidential medical information (answer: keep it confidential).

"It is to National Steel's credit that they acted to improve health and safety at the U.S. plants," said Wright. He lauded them for permitting the survey to be conducted entirely during working hours and continuing to pay the surveying group's members their full salary while they were essentially working full time on the project.

To ensure complete confidentiality, survey interviews were immediately sealed in envelopes following each interview and mailed with priority to Cornell, where they are being entered into a database and analyzed. The work is being coordinated by Anne Sieverding, and the project team includes seven Cornell undergraduate and graduate students. Some of the funding from National Steel helped pay for computers and computer programs to sort through and manage the wealth of information collected.

Bronfenbrenner anticipates that when the project is completed in late 1999, the group not only will have produced an in-depth analysis of all the elements that contribute to on-the-job injuries and work-related illnesses at National Steel's U.S. plants, but it will have provided a model for health and safety improvements in other industries, as well.

"The survey is important because its results are relevant not only to National Steel and the steel industry," she said, "but also to health and safety in manufacturing facilities around the world."