Looking back over the past 30 years, everyone can see that life and nearly everything in it has changed. One area of professional and personal life that has seen as much change as any is safety. Improvements in personal, workplace, and general-public safety have truly been dramatic over the past few decades. I can remember myself as a young man, working for the construction company owned by my father and grandfather, climbing on, around, and through buildings in various stages of construction or demolition. In the interest of saving time, which I now understand means saving cost, we took many shortcuts. Never did we allow the quality of the finished product to suffer from these cost-saving steps, but if it meant the workers had to take a chance with their personal safety here and there, we all knew and accepted that fact simply as the way things were done. Many a lunchbox conversation centered around how difficult the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would make it on construction companies like ours to get a job done on time and still turn a profit.
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