Fifteen years in, Jay Anderson says the foreman sets the standard, and he tells new supervisors what it cost one who let a rule slide. 

“My whole attitude is to keep you out of trouble.” 

Jay Anderson did not plan a career in safety. “I literally fell into it,” he says. Moving back to his hometown in central Texas, he was asking around about what was available when a pipeline company in town put him in front of their safety people. He stayed a decade. 

Fifteen years on, Anderson has crossed into mechanical contracting and written Safety is NOT a Four-Letter Word, a short field guide for foremen and superintendents. He now leads a safety team on one of the enormous data center builds going up outside Abilene, Texas, working for RK Industries, the second-generation family business out of Aurora, Colorado. 

Ask him what works and he goes straight to the foreman. “There’s always limited safety personnel that are on site,” he says. “And the ones that actually have the boots on the ground are the foreman level.” Get the foremen and the superintendents on board and “the job’s easy.” Fail to, and protecting people becomes “very, very frustrating and difficult.” 

Make the number personal 

In orientation, Anderson has each worker take their own hourly rate and multiply it out, step by step, until they land on the most they could collect in a week if an injury put them off the job. Then he lets the number sit there. “They say, oh my God, there’s no way,” he says. Only then does he point out at the field and ask whether anything on it is worth that. 

“So whenever you do that and you bring it home in a way that they understand, it’s a lot easier to get buy-in.” 

He runs the same move one level up. Imagine you send a man into a position you know could hurt him, he asks his foremen, and he gets hurt. “What are you doing not only to them, but what about their families? You know, what if they’re disabled for life?” 

The story he tells foremen 

A young man was 24 years old and four weeks into running a crew of his own. He had been with the company since he was 16, and across those eight years he had been frugal enough to put away almost $200,000, with plans to marry and buy property. On his crew was a 48-year-old who, as Anderson puts it, “had the right last name,” and who wore earbuds every day against company policy. The foreman raised it once, got an expletive and a flat refusal back, and decided not to push it. 

On the day it happened the crew was clearing a pipeline right-of-way in West Texas. The foreman ran the toolbox meeting, sent everyone off in one direction, and got on a motor grader to finish the cleanup in an area where nobody was supposed to be. With his earbuds in under his hoodie, the 48-year-old heard none of it. Desert sand, beige pants, beige hoodie, bent over picking up sticks. “The foreman hit him with a motor grader, broke his back in 3 places, and killed him instantly.” 

Eight months later there was a trial. One of the first things anyone asks for after an incident is the pre-task plan. Under hazards, the young foreman had written that the crew should watch out for snakes and stay hydrated, with nothing about the equipment and nothing about mitigation. He spent eight hours on the witness stand. “And the guy was in tears by the time all this was said and done.” Because it was a criminal matter the company paid nothing toward his defense, and the $200,000 went to attorney fees. 

The lesson Anderson draws is a legal one foremen rarely hear put plainly. It is called implied consent: let someone in your crew work against company policy and, in his words, “you’re giving your consent for them to be able to do so.” The earbuds the foreman let slide became his own liability. 

He is careful this does not tip into fear. “Now, do I want the guys to be paranoid? No.” The paperwork exists so the people who fill it out properly are covered when something goes wrong anyway. “You’re doing it not only to protect the company, you’re protecting the employee and you’re protecting yourself.” 

Run it like it’s yours 

On the data center, Anderson has several safety people under him, and he runs them the way he wants foremen running crews. “It’s not me, myself,” he says. “You know, I have a team.” He teaches them the standard and then steps back, giving them “the freedom to be able to operate it like their own business” and, he adds, “the freedom to make mistakes. You know, if they screw up, okay, that’s fine. Let’s learn from them and let’s go from there.” His summary of the trade: “ownership equals accountability.” 

Fifteen years ago, he says, the industry treated a safety officer as a cost the general contractor forced on you. He worked out early that the way past that was not enforcement. When he corrects one of his own people now, it is “not to get them in trouble, it’s to keep them out of trouble.”