It is especially important for companies to show support for their employee safety during challenging economic times, she notes.  "Employee morale may be low and employees may be carrying additional workloads, such as working additional hours or doing unfamiliar tasks due to cutbacks," she notes. 

Comstock adds, "In order to remain viable long-term, a company must maintain a solid safety process even through difficult times.  The most successful companies in the long term also have the strongest safety performance." 

"We realize these are tough times, but during economic down-turns, employers seeking to cut expenses may target variable operating costs such as travel, training and safety," Brown says. "Money cut from safety processes now could have an enormous cost later; this can be from injury and health care costs, fines, lost production time, employee morale, or worst of all, employee injury or even death. There are better and smarter ways to protect the bottom line."

The South Carolina ASSE chapter suggests employees can also take measures to help companies save money such as by: following safe working procedures and practices to prevent injuries, related downtime and expenses such as costly fines; by properly using, cleaning and caring for protective equipment such as hardhats and respirators; reusing gloves whenever possible for as long as possible; and by keeping track of safety glasses and reusable hearing protection. 

Investing in safety pays and contributes positively to a company's bottom line. Businesses spend about $170 billion a year on costs associated with workplace injuries and illnesses and pay almost $1 billion every week to injured employees and their medical providers. In addition, a recent investment firm study in Australia showed valuation links between workplace safety and health factors and investment performance. It found that companies who did not adequately manage workplace safety issues underperformed those that did.