The Influence of Work Environment, Occupational Safety and Health Training, Work Experience, and Education Level on Work Accidents through Unsafe Actions in Turn Around Activities at RU IV Cilacap

Abstrak

Turn Around activities in the oil and gas industry involve the mobilization of thousands of temporary contract workers with non-technical backgrounds who face extreme and risky working environments, creating a high potential for work accidents that threaten lives and the operational sustainability of strategic national refineries. This study aims to analyze the influence of the work environment, occupational safety and health (OSH) training, work experience, and education level on work accidents, considering the mediating role of unsafe actions as manifestations of risky behavior that directly trigger incidents. An explanatory quantitative approach was applied through Structural Equation Modeling-Partial Least Squares, involving 242 Turn Around worker respondents to test a complex structural model. The results reveal significant findings where unsafe actions are proven to be the dominant predictor of workplace accidents, while work experience actually increases the risk of accidents both directly and through the mediation of unsafe actions due to the phenomena of overconfidence and complacency. OSH training and education levels, which should be protective, significantly increased unsafe actions because they created an illusion of competence without real practical skills, while the work environment had a direct effect on accidents but not through behavioral mediation. The academic contribution of the research lies in the empirical validation that in the ultra-complex petrochemical industry system, the Normal Accident Theory and Swiss Cheese Model are more relevant than the classic individual approach, while the practical contribution is the recommendation for a fundamental transformation of the safety management system from a quantitative-formalistic approach to the quality of interventions that are contextual to the actual operational complexity. The study concludes that workplace accidents in the context of Turn Around are the result of systemic interactions between organizational failures in providing relevant training, the mismatch between worker competencies and task demands, and the normalization of risky behavior reinforced by overconfidence from pseudo-experience and inapplicable education.