Organizational causes of accidents in manufacturing sector.

Abstract

: Occupational safety is an important issue. Industrial engineering and management plays an important role in a socio-technical view of accident causation. This paper analyzes 418 official investigation reports of non-slight accidents in the Andalusian manufacturing sector from 2004 to 2008. Investigation reports include 1,311 causes identified and coded, of which 669 causes are directly related to safety management and work organization. This paper shows how different scenarios are related to specific causes of accidents and the association between organizational and management causes and the mechanism of the accidents and their immediate causes. In order to prevent, both severe and fatal accidents, managers and safety experts should take into account these results in order to include the most frequent causes as inputs for safety assessments.