Originally Posted by
mike current
Cost cutting and technologies that reduce staff numbers have been leading the way for the last 20 years. As much as I don't like to lose staff like everyone else, what are the safety statistics saying? I don't think cost cutting over the last 20 years has made us less safe. Has it?
What I've seen is that new technologies - sometimes touted as the way forward/it's what the customer wants/it will improve safety/it will cut costs - often doesn't live up to the hype.
You take a new software to do a job. There are usually ongoing bugs to re-code. Then, when the hardware platform needs to be "upgraded", in some cases the software doesn't work properly with the new hardware. Long story short, it ends up costing a lot.
I don't know if it makes us more or less safe, in some cases the tech improvements make up for any shortfall in staff numbers and abilities. In others, probably not so much.
Statistics only tell part of it. An incident doesn't receive the same level of investigation and probing as a full-on accident, and fortunately, those are incredibly rare.