Heil Trailer International Co announced its Athens TN and Rhome TX plants received the coveted Truck Trailer Manufacturers Association (TTMA) Plant Safety Awards for 2014.
Trailer manufacturing plants compete in three different categories based on number of labor hours worked. Heil Trailer-Athens won the “A” category, which includes manufacturing plants that annually have over 750,000 labor hours. Heil Trailer-Rhome won the “B” category, which includes manufacturing plants that annually work between 300,000 and 750,000 hours.
“This success comes as the result of maintaining safety as a core business value and also from the commitment of every employee to working safely,” said Karen Czor, EHS director for EnTrans International, parent company of Heil Trailer International. “Employee safety is something that we take very seriously at Heil Trailer.”
Overall, Heil Trailer has won 24 TTMA safety awards dating back to 1971. Heil Trailer- Athens won their first award in 1991 in the “B” category for manufacturers with 300,000 to 750,000 labor hours and has since been the recipient 18 times in the last 23 years. Since receiving its first Plant Safety Award in 1991, Heil Trailer-Athens has decreased its total number of recordable injuries by 78% and reduced its injury rate by 85% while growing its workforce by a third during this timeframe. The Rhome plant previously won a TTMA safety award in the “B” category in 2004 and has decreased its total number of injuries and injury rate since 2007 by 80%.
In 2014, the Heil Trailer injury rate was 50% of the industry average. From 2011-2014, the Athens-based plant worked 3.25 years without a lost time injury while working more than 3,000,000 labor hours. The Rhome facility worked 16 consecutive months from 2013-2015 without a lost time injury.
TTMA is a member-based organization established to build confidence between manufacturers of truck trailers, cargo tanks, intermodal containers and their suppliers to bring about a mutual understanding of the problems confronting all manufacturers. TTMA has been awarding Plant Safety awards for more than 44 years. Award winners are selected based on an evaluation and ranking taken from injury data recorded on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) annual injury reports. The evaluation includes seven areas: fatalities, total lost workday cases (TRIR), total cases with job transfer or restriction, days away from work, days of job transfer or restriction, total number of other recordable injuries and total injuries.