2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While touched on in ABET’s student outcome, worker safety is difficult to conceptualize for many engineering students and likely engineering professionals. For many safety professionals, only until the hazards of an industry are identified can safety protocols be developed. However, in a new industry, such as offshore wind in the United States, these hazards have yet to be identified. Broadly speaking, occupational safety and health in the US have a history of regulation starting in the industrial revolution, with a big push following the Triangle Shirt waist fire of 1911. The Occupational Safety and Health Act is perhaps the most known safety regulator in the public’s eye. OSHA was signed in 1971 by President Nixon, following a series of workplace catastrophes. Yet these regulations and standards are difficult to adapt to different industries, especially in new industries where contexts and hazards differ.

This paper is inspired by conversations between worker safety and safety regulators in the growing US offshore wind industry. One of the main safety initiatives outlined by researchers (Rosenberg, 2021) has been to design out hazards by bringing workers into the design discussions. Instead, engineers in offshore wind emphasize the need to automate more high-risk work. These different framings around worker safety in engineering have inspired us to examine how worker safety is discussed in engineering.

In this paper, we will first detail a brief history of worker safety standards and engineering accreditation criteria related to safety. Next, we will review engineering education and STS literature for discussions of worker safety related to engineering education and engineering studies. Lastly, we will focus on the case of the growing offshore wind industry in the US to highlight different actors’ responses to safety compliance through an analysis of public webinars and documentation provided by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (US) and the Health and Safety Executive (UK) relating to offshore wind.

Through this work, we seek to synthesize safety insights in an industry that is new in the US with scholarship around safety in engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor. By connecting notions of sociotechnical engineering to a case in worker safety in offshore wind, we seek to provide insights into engineering education that paints worker safety as a door to understanding the social, political, and economic contexts of engineering work.