Making Safety the Priority

As 2024 approaches its end, many of us are focused on numerous activities – from closing out year-end work priorities to honoring personal commitments to planning for a
busy 2025.

This time of year can be a blur, and it’s easy to get distracted with all we have going on – both at work and at home. Despite – and because of – these distractions, I want to remind everyone the most important thing any of us can do is keep ourselves and those around us safe.

We have the foundation to be a world-class safety organization, and I believe we are heading that way. For example, we are on track to achieve our second-best year for safety in a decade as measured by the company’s total recordable incident rate, which tracks work-related injuries and illnesses during the year.

On the other hand, too many of our recordable incidents are falling into the high-risk category. These are events with the potential to result in permanent disabilities or fatalities. Our goal for 2024 was to reduce high-risk events by 25 percent compared with 2023’s performance. Unfortunately, by October, we already had too many incidents to allow us to reach that goal.

Even more concerning is half of all high-risk incidents this year have been repeat events. Simply put, we are not learning from these occurrences that can have a catastrophic impact on so many people. In addition, fatalities across the industry also have been on the rise. These trends are alarming. We must do better here, and I know we can.
We all should be performing our work safely every single day. This means taking personal accountability for your safety and the safety of the people around you, being intentional to look for risks, recognizing and addressing hazards, and never compromising on the job.

In October, leaders from our global operations came to Phoenix for the 2024 Health and Safety Summit to discuss our current state, industry best practices and opportunities to be our best when it comes to safety. President and Chief Executive Officer Kathleen Quirk opened the event by discussing the Freeport Five, a set of principles designed to help guide the organization.

Those principles are: Keep our people safe; execute reliably and responsibly; develop our people; embrace innovation and technology; and develop our assets for profitable, long-term growth. Her message to those in attendance was that everything we want to do as a company starts with keeping our people safe. There simply is no room for compromising our focus in this area.

That sentiment was further emphasized the following week during a company-wide Stand Down for Safety. Employees and contractors around the world paused their work to have meaningful conversations about the current state of Freeport’s safety performance and how the company can do better in that area. You can read more about that effort in this issue.

Let’s continue to drive the importance of safety with our teams, finish this year strong and make 2025 our safest year yet.

Sincerely,

Stacey Koon
Vice President-Safety, Health and Technical Training