Page 57 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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SAFETY EVERYONE GOES HOME SAFE
Today, Peterson employs over 1,500 people across three states.1 And every single one is backed by a family—a spouse, sons, daughters, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. And friends. No one stands alone. So when someone gets hurt on the job, it reverberates throughout their entire network of relationships: first the immediate family, then the work group family, and finally the company as a whole. “As we’ve grown larger, we’ve tried to continue our focus on being a family company,” says Erin Sorgel, Peter- son’s CFO. “That means we want everyone to go home safely to their family, every night.” Safety has become the foundation upon which the entire company strategy is built upon. Because without people, there is no company.
Safety practices have changed a lot since the early 1970s when CEO Duane Doyle Sr. first started working at Peterson. Back then, safety meetings consisted mainly of watching gory movies like Shake Hands with Danger, followed by a discussion and a quick roll call. Back then wearing safety glasses or gloves wasn’t mandatory and near-misses were brushed off in relief, and forgotten. One near-miss comes to mind for Senior as a high school kid working in the San Leandro main shop.
“I was working with another mechanic on an Allis-Chalmers scraper that belonged to Independent Construc- tion. We were putting a new king pin in the hitch. We didn’t wear gloves back then, but gloves wouldn’t have helped in this case. The other mechanic was on a forklift, moving the front part of the scraper up and down to line up the two holes so I could put the pin in. One bore was fixed; the other one was tied to the forklift. I had my hand down in the hole, probably putting some grease in there, when the forklift moved unexpectedly. I got my hand out of there just in time. Those two bores pulling apart would have acted like a guillotine if my hand
1 Includes Peterson-Cat, Peterson Machinery, Peterson Power, Peterson Trucks, The Cat Rental Store, Cresco, SITECH and BuildingPt. Pacific.
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