Rick Gleason: A teacher with a “broad perspective”
In September, Lecturer Rick Gleason was awarded the Lifetime Safety and Health Leadership Award from the Puget Sound Safety Summit, an alliance of government, management, and labor to develop methods and solutions to improve workplace safety.
On the wall above Rick Gleason’s office desk hangs the roster for each entering class of graduate students since 1996. That was the year Gleason started teaching occupational safety and health classes to graduate students in our department and to working professionals in the just-formed Pacific Northwest Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Education Center.
“Occupational Health and Safety” consists of two parts, explains Gleason. First, the occupational health or industrial hygiene part involves understanding and managing workplace-based occupational health, such as sampling to identify potential hazards. Hazards can be noise levels, potentially toxic chemicals, and air quality issues. An occupational safety and health professional must understand these hazards as well as develop strategies to prevent accidents or injuries. The second part of “Occupational Health and Safety” is just as important: understanding how to uphold occupational safety, such as safe use of machinery with proper guards rails or safety switches or managing electrical or fall hazards. A Health and Safety Professional also must ensure employees are properly trained on how to use certain chemicals and what personal protective equipment to wear.
Gleason is as close to a “perfect fit” for the classes he teaches, given the different shoes he’s filled in his industrial hygiene and safety career: as student, regulatory professional for both the federal and state government, and industry consultant.
When Gleason graduated from Montana Tech with a bachelor’s degree in Occupational Health and Safety, he took a job working as an inspector for OSHA, first in Montana, and then transferred to a position in Washington when he enrolled in a DEOHS graduate program. He graduated in 1980 with a MSPH in Industrial Hygiene & Safety, a degree now called Exposure Sciences. Soon he was recruited to a position at Washington state's occupational safety and health program called WISHA, an acronym that refers to the Washington Industrial Safety and Health Act passed in 1973. Then he worked as a consultant until he began teaching over a decade ago.
Gleason explains his experience in so many different roles allows him to give students a “broad perspective” of the field. He has inspected over 2,000 workplaces for safety issues, asbestos, lead, and silica. He has also reviewed confined space entry, such as when employees go into vats and tanks. Gleason has also inspected trenching and excavation activities, falls from scaffolding, and hazards from heavy equipment and cranes. Plus, Gleason says his split role as faculty in an academic department as well as an instructor for an OSHA worker training facility, allows Gleason opportunities to share what he learns from working professionals with the graduate and undergraduate students he teaches.
In a typical class, Gleason presents real-case histories for discussion, just like an OSHA or WISHA inspector would investigate—and asks students to look at the workplace-based accidents and determine how they could have been prevented.
Gleason holds up the current set of OSHA codes and regulations, and it’s as thick as a Seattle Metro telephone book. Gleason gives a copy to entering students as well as employees enrolled in the OSHA Center’s classes. Ultimately, says Gleason, “whoever you see in the mirror in the morning when you wake up, that person gets to be the most responsible for your health and safety for the rest of the day.”
In other words, the government mandates safety and code compliance, but health and safety is not just a companies’ responsibility but an individual responsibility as well, says Gleason.
