Podcast: On the Origins of National Safety Month

June is a month full of endings and beginnings. The end of spring; the start of summer. The end of the school year; the start of summer camps, jobs and internships. The end of well-honed routines; the start of those lazy, hazy, crazy days and even longer summer nights.

In other words, there’s a disruption of operations as usual, and that’s exactly why the National Safety Council (NSC) first designated June as National Safety Month back in 1996.

“Summer is a time when there's more travel, we're outdoors, lots more activity, people are more physical,” says Lorraine Martin, CEO of NSC. “June felt like the right place for us to raise that awareness each year to put down some markers to take action for ourselves and for those around us.”

Each week of National Safety Month has a different focus. The 2026 weekly safety topics are:

• June 1-6: Moving safety forward – advance a culture of safety with forward-thinking strategies and tools.
• June 7-13: Staying safe on the roads – help reduce crashes with practical guidance for drivers, pedestrians and fleets.
• June 14-20: Promoting holistic worker health – support total worker well-being with insights on mental, physical and emotional health.
• June 21-30: Preventing slips, trips and falls – reduce common workplace and home hazards with targeted prevention resources.

Martin says that the areas of focus change each year, partly as a way to keep the monthlong initiative fresh and partly as an answer to the two questions posed to the team:

1. What are the most pervasive safety issues that businesses are most worried about?
2. What are the safety issues that businesses aren't, but should be, worried about?

The rationale, particularly for that latter question? “The things that we’ve got attention on are [not necessarily] the most emerging, and perhaps, evolving things that we want to make sure we focus on,” Martin says.

NSC’s website includes free resources as well as some member exclusives to support organizations that wish to participate in National Safety Month.

Looking beyond June, Martin says there’s much to look forward to in safety right now, from artificial intelligence to exoskeletons to telematics. 

“There is a lot to be excited about compared to 30 years ago, or even just 10 years ago,” Martin says. “We have better tools, we have better data, we have better collaboration across industry types with the government.

“It's really a great time to be part of the safety profession because of all this innovation, especially [with] some of these tools that enable us to find risks earlier, improve our training, strengthen prevention and really be able to look at complex worlds—whether it's physical or data—and have it tell us where those risks are.”

At the heart of it, this monthlong initiative is another way to broach workplace safety conversations and help break through some persistent challenges (e.g., vehicular fatalities and slips, trips and falls) and embrace some new mindsets (e.g., that safety is affected by other aspects of workers’ lives). It’s a way to frame ongoing efforts and to remind everyone—including ourselves—the critical role that safety plays, day in and day out.

Martin says she’s constantly reminded of that personal connection to safety when she talks to others in the field.

“It's very clear when you're having those discussions, it's not about compliance and policies and checking boxes,” she says. “It's about people. It's about protecting the ones you love, the friends that you have in your community, the co-workers that are beside you. And it's about that, you know, very visceral feeling that we all want to feel safe and be safe and get to live our fullest life.

“That's what's really rewarding about not only National Safety Month, but safety every day and every year.“

Martin spoke with Managing Editor Nicole Stempak about National Safety Month and so much more in this latest episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. You can hear their full conversation below. Don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode!

Podcast Transcript Excerpt:

[Editor's Note: This excerpt has been lightly edited for length, grammar and clarity, such as to omit word repetitions, remove incomplete thoughts and punctuate run-on sentences.]

EHS Today: It's a pleasure to have you here today, Lorraine! June is National Safety Month. For our listeners who aren't familiar, would you mind sharing more about this initiative and why National Safety Council first started this?

Lorraine Martin: Well, thank you, Nicole, and I'd be happy to. The council in about 1996 had already been working to keep people safe around our nation for about eight decades—we've been around for over 100 years—but in 1996, we realized that we still weren't getting to everyone. There were still people dying and millions of people being injured, whether that was preventable activities at work, on our roads, in our homes or in our communities.

These risks that we were facing were very complex and varied. They could be a house fire, a car crash on our roads or an incident in a mine. And so, we said, we've just got to raise the visibility about what safety means across our nation and see if we could have kind of an annual moment where we all just paused and understood the reality of these injuries: That they are all preventable, in many cases predictable, and there are things that if we raise our awareness, we can truly decrease them and keep people safe.

We picked June at the time because summer is a time when there's more travel, we're outdoors, lots more activity, people are more physical. And so, June felt like the right place for us to raise that awareness each year to put down some markers to take action for ourselves and for those around us.

I'm just thrilled that literally this is still going on three decades later with just as much momentum and just as much vibrant a focus on what it means to keep people safe. So I hope we keep building on that for decades to come.

Each week of June has a different focus. There's culture, total or holistic worker health, road safety, and preventing slips, trips, and falls. How and why, if you were involved in the planning process, did NSC decide those four areas of focus this year?

Our focuses shift every year. Some of that is to keep it fresh and to bring new ideas to everyone in our country. But we often ask our team two questions as we try to think about what do we want to focus on this year.

The first one is, what are the most pervasive safety issues that businesses— because we do serve all of the businesses around our nation—are most worried about? What's on the top of their mind? What do they talk to their employees about?

And then, what are the safety issues that they should be worried about? It doesn't always mean that the things that we've got our attention on are the things that are the most emerging, and perhaps evolving, things that we want to make sure we focus on.

Sometimes, the answers are very straightforward. Things like slips, trips, and falls. They're a perennial worry for employees and for us as we walk around the world, right? Especially for elderly folks, slips, trips, and falls can be very devastating, but it's the same for all of us. They’re very preventable injuries if we take the right precautions. They're the third leading cause of preventable injuries at work, so it's an important one.

The other one that we're going to focus on here is roadway-related incidents. They are, which a lot of people don't realize, the top cause of preventable deaths at work. We know that when we go around in our communities, when we go to get in our cars, or be on our roads on a bike or just walking, that there's a lot of risk associated with that. It's also 38% of all workplace-related fatalities. It's a really important place for us to be, and that's a place that sometimes some employers aren't as aware that it is one of their highest risks. 

The other two issues that we picked, and you highlighted them as you spoke earlier, are a little squishier. They're a little bit more untangible. [One is] about having a good safety program, having a good safety culture [and] understanding what it means to have safety really baked into how you move around the world, how you go to work. The other one is about making sure we're looking at the whole person and what the hazards are around an individual and everything that is about who they are.

It's some of these real tangible ones, and then making sure that some of these more systemic or infrastructure activities are part of our focus. It's a mix of both. I hope I answered your question.

You did! I appreciate that because a lot of times when we think of safety, it's the occupational health, it's the physical health. As someone who hasn't been in the safety industry for a decade or two, I can't speak to whether or not emotional and mental health was a focus before COVID. It's just interesting to see and hear how the zeitgeist is affecting or influencing safety and vice versa.

That's a silver lining, I think, that came out of the pandemic. We realized that how someone feels and how they are is related to their physical safety. Everybody got taken off their game during the pandemic. Something got askew for each and every one of us.

For some folks, that caused a lot of mental health related challenges and substance use disorders. It could have just been fatigue, right? Being in an environment or trying to get your work done with your kids in the next room going to school. There was a lot going on for folks.

It became very clear for our nation and for businesses that dealing with—and addressing head on—those stresses was as important as the physical aspects of safety. And that they are related to each other.

[Workers who are] distracted or fatigued or just don't have their head in the game are putting themselves more at risk, whether you're in a car and distracted or working with a forklift. We almost don't care why you're not on your game. We just want to make sure you're not doing something that's going to put you at risk.

The National Safety Council has leaned into [providing those resources to help] folks to look at the whole person, to look at these other psychological aspects of being safe and connecting that with your ability to be safe at work. It was a big learning, and it's something that's going to stick with us. I'm really glad of that.

Considering that it's the 30th anniversary of National Safety Month—and I know you haven't been at NSC that entire time—but from your perspective, what has changed since 1996 in safety, for better and for worse?

We just talked about one, actually. I think it's that awareness that those stresses that a person has, you can't check them at the door. They come with you into the workplace. I do think since 1996, that has been—and maybe just even in the last decade—something that we've really understood is an important part of all of our responsibilities to care for the people around us, but specifically for businesses also to lean into that.

Every generation faces new risks. Every generation needs new things, new prevention guidelines, new leadership. That has to evolve with who we are, where we are as a nation, where we are in the industries that are prominent and specifically the technology that is around us— whether that's in the workplace or in our cars.

The last 30 years, we've really seen a major shift, truthfully, also around  compliance-based thinking for safety. From 'You need to follow the rules and check the box and figure out who messed up and hold them accountable' to really a much more culture-based leadership and a much more holistic perspective of the systems around somebody trying to get hard work and safety sensitive work done.

How do we make sure that those systems, the cultures, the processes and how we respond all support them going home at night or after their shift safely? That's very different than checking a box and making sure the training is done. That's been an evolution, too.

We now understand that safety performance and strong business performance go hand in hand. I think that's a new learning: that good business is safe business and vice versa. Safe business is good business.

I think the pandemic taught us that, too. When our employees weren't
safe to come to work, you didn't have a business, right?