The fragile Sustainability of the Concept of Unsafe Act

Beliefs regarding causes of accidents at work as “unsafe act” or “unsafe condition” have ruled the completion of work accident reports in a simplistic and inefficient way. It is noticed that the concept of blaming the worker prevails in most of the literature on work accidents. Besides, the same bias may be noticed in most company registers, which are usually filled by those in charge of analyzing and preparing reports of work accidents in the organization. The conclusion of making the victim of the work accident guilty, tends to misrepresent the fault of the company or those in charge. In the present article, 311 work accidents occurred in a company of the sugar and alcohol sector within a two years period were analyzed. The amount of 196 accidents characterized as “unsafe acts” was identified. The analysis was used using ABNT NBR ISO 31000 (2009) and which suggests the Root Cause Analysis tool, which aims to identify hidden causes in reported accidents. The theoretical framework for analysis was built from specific Brazilian legislation and technical standards. As a result, the disclosure of root causes of the accidents at work indicated that the “unsafe act” concept is fragile and inconsistent, which made it possible to de-characterize the original concept of “unsafe act” defined by the company.