Given Heinrich’s conclusion that worker error is the major cause of accidents, it is easy to see how companies began to blame employees for having an accident or causing one. Because of this focus, many of the early safety programs concentrated on stopping unsafe behavior through negative consequences[iii]. Of course unions objected to such approaches, as they should. It is also interesting that although Heinrich’s data focused the field of industrial safety on the behavior of employees as the cause of accidents, he was personally more interested in removing obstacles to safety than changing the behaviors that caused accidents, the very thing that unions want in safety.
Following the publication of Heinrich’s book, Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach[iv], companies began to take a more systematic approach to analyzing accident data. However, as far as we can tell from the literature, there was nothing behavioral in his “scientific approach.” His interest was in analyzing accident data and not in changing it. This is not to minimize Heinrich’s contribution to the systematic study of safety, but he is not in the lineage of modern behavior-based safety.