UP employees achieve best-ever January-June safety performance

Union Pacific employees achieved the best first-half-of-the-year safety performance in company history. For the period January 1 through June 30, Union Pacific's employee reportable injury rate was 1.31, a nearly 10 percent improvement over the previous company best 1.45 reportable rate for the first six months of 2009. Union Pacific's employee injury rate improved 50 percent from 2001 to 2009.

A company’s reportable injury rate is
calculated using the number of lost workday injuries per 200,000 worker hours,
or per 100 employees working in a full year.

"Our approach is that all injuries can
be prevented," said Bob Grimaila, Union Pacific vice president – safety, security
and environment.  "Great teamwork
combined with employees embracing best practices and looking out for one
another is critical to each person’s individual safety."

Many factors account for Union Pacific’s
safety performance, including:

• Implementing job safety analyses,
where each task is broken down into its component parts to identify the best
way to perform each job. This leads to standardized work processes that are
incorporated into training and coaching.

• Evaluating new ideas that challenge
the status quo to improve work rules.

• Committing to the company’s Total
Safety Culture, an employee-owned process that empowers employees. The
voluntary process focuses on training, observations and feedback.

• Developing proactive safety
improvement efforts that evaluate close calls to better predict the potential
for accidents.

• Establishing risk mitigation and
assessment processes.

• Communicating with fellow employees
about safety best practices as well as at-risk behaviors.

• Dedicating $40 million in 2009 to
enhance workplace training.

"We believe a
zero accident rate is achievable because in every accident there is an
opportunity to prevent it," Grimaila said. ""We want everyone to go home from
work in as good or better condition than when they arrived."