The last time I spoke with Ruth Cox, she was furious. As president and executive director of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association, she told me how frustrated she was that the Obama Administration wasn’t taking fuel cells seriously as a viable alternative source of clean energy.

“It has been politicized based on preferences that some people in the White House had for other technologies and they don’t want competition for what they believe is the answer to the problem,” she told me. “That’s why Congress is getting behind our movement. They want the market to decide. It is not the responsibility of this Administration to pick the winners and losers. Given the situation we face with imported oil, the disaster we had in Japan with the nuclear facility, the fact that there are issues with the clean energy technologies that can be mitigated with fuel cells, there’s no excuse for fuel cells and hydrogen not to be embraced as an integral component of this portfolio. We need every clean energy option to reach our goals.”

Well, it looks like her allies in Congress are making progress in keeping fuel cells in the clean energy mix. Congressman Paul Tonko, a Democrat representing the 21st District of New York, and who was president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority from 2007-2008, has teamed up with Congressman Chris Gibson, a Republican representing New York’s 20th district, on a bill to simplify and improve the tax credit for fuel cell-powered industrial vehicles. The goal is to boost new investments in clean technology and create thousands of jobs. They made this joint announcement during a press conference at Plug Power’s headquarters in Latham, NY. Plug Power makes fuel-cell-based power solutions for lift trucks.

When I spoke with Cox last week she said she was only cautiously optimistic that fuel cell research would be a beneficiary in the Senate Appropriations Bill for 2012. However, the real hope for this technology lies at the grass roots level, and if material handling professionals start putting it to work en-masse, that may get the Administration’s attention.

The best way to encourage investment is to make tax credits easier to get, and that’s the idea behind Tonko’s and Gibson’s efforts. Currently, the tax credit for industrial vehicles is based on a confusing formula intended for technology that provides electricity for stationary property, like a building. Unlike buildings, vehicles have thousands of moving parts that are all integrated and adapted to use fuel cell power as efficiently as possible in a much smaller area.

“Many new industrial vehicles use highly integrated systems, making it nearly impossible to separate out which individual pieces of the vehicle are part of the ‘power plant’ and eligible for the tax credit and which parts are ineligible,” Tonko’s official press release states. “When the credit is applied to something like a forklift, the result is an engineering and accounting nightmare confusing not only for manufacturers and consumers, but also for the IRS. As a result, the current credit goes underused and America loses a valuable manufacturing boost in a clean energy industry where we are uniquely competitive in the global market.”

Under the new Bill, rather than going through a complicated back and forth with the IRS and vehicle manufacturers, buyers purchasing fuel cell-powered lift trucks will immediately know the exact amount of their tax credit just by looking at the weight of the vehicle they are purchasing – just like the tax credit for clean energy cars and trucks. Vehicles weighing up to 8,500 pounds will receive a $4,000 credit, plus an additional $1,500 for an energy efficiency rating of 40% or better. The legislation would also restore the full credit of $8,000 for passenger cars, which had been reduced by half at the start of 2011.

If you’d like to fertilize this grass roots movement to develop the market for fuel cells in material handling, you can visit the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy website and use the tool on that site to write a letter to your Congress person. If anything, the folks in the White House could gain a better appreciation for the unseen technologies that support America’s standard of living.

It may not have dominated the headlines (rumor has it there’s some royal wedding coming up that apparently is much more important to the international media), but hundreds of Chinese truck drivers went on strike at the port of Shanghai to protest high inflation in that country as well as to oppose fees the port authorities were levying on containers. Although you wouldn’t know it by the soft headline in the Wall Street Journal (“Shanghai Truckers’ Strikes Fizzle Out”), the truck drivers were successful in gaining some relief from the government, and they agreed to return to work.

Back in the Cold War days when we used to refer to the country as “Red China,” the news that any kind of organized labor dispute was taking place in opposition to the Communist government-controlled infrastructure would have been worthy of major coverage by all the TV networks and major newspapers. But, as I noted earlier, apparently in these days of media shrinkage and travel cutbacks, the few remaining reporters covering international beats must be in London this week. Cargo terminals, after all, aren’t nearly as glamorous as Buckingham Palace.

According to news syndicate AFP, the Chinese government basically gave in to the demands (at least to the extent that the Chinese “give in” to anything) partly as a way of minimizing the possibility of an uprising similar to the unrest occurring in the Middle East. The AFP article notes, “China’s government is on edge over spiralling prices, particularly after inflation became a factor in the popular uprisings that have rocked the Arab world.”

There is no evidence that the strikes had much, or indeed any, impact on global trade at the port, but then again, as the WSJ article points out, there was a virtual news blackout by China’s state-controlled media on the strike. The simple fact that China is now acknowledging the strike, and more to the point, that China has addressed at least some of the truck drivers’ demands, ought to be a far bigger story than it is. At least, so far. The fact that Chinese truck drivers could organize largely via cellphone and other stealth measures could be an indication as to how seriously the Chinese government is concerned about copycat strikes. Whether granting concessions to the truck drivers nips any further labor disputes in the bud remains to be seen.

This blog post will give you plenty of ammunition to use against someone who tells you that material handling and logistics are boring—especially if that someone owns a business.

Just ask them how their inventories are weathering the crisis in Japan. They might look a bit confused for a moment and than say, “Japan has nothing to do with our business. We don’t source from there.”

Then ask them if they’re sure—because they can’t be unless they’ve taken a deep dive into their supply stream. Brett Wood has done that and it has improved his relationship with all suppliers, offshore and onshore. Brett is president of Toyota Material Handling USA, one of the top lift truck suppliers in this country. We had dinner together a month ago in Chicago during ProMat—not long after the earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of Japan. At that time he told me none of Toyota’s locations in Japan were devastated and that the people working at these sites were OK. He did say, however, that just as a tsunami’s impact isn’t felt immediately after a quake, the repercussions of this disaster for U.S. companies sourcing from Japan might not be felt for another month. We made a date to revisit our discussion in a month.

That visit happened last week, by phone. I wanted to let you in on our discussion in case you run into someone who thinks they’re not affected by Japan’s situation—or in case that someone might be you.

Andel: So, Brett, give me an update on what’s happened since our discussion last month. What do you know now that you didn’t know then?

Wood: It looks like the electronics industry is being affected most, with components like chips, microcircuits and boards. You see more of those in cars now than in forklifts. It’s almost like we got lucky with our products compared to the automotive industry. So far we’re weathering the storm a little better than our sisters and brothers in the automotive world.

Andel: So is this time to breathe a sigh of relief?

Wood: Think of it this way: You have a board that goes into both forklifts and cars, then you have the chip that goes on that board. The company in Japan that makes that board might be OK but what about the manufacturers making a chip that goes on that board—they might have been impacted by the quake. Beyond that, even if they’re both OK, what about the chemical that goes into that chip, or the glue that holds the chip together? The message is to learn from this. Supply chain professionals may need to better understand their supplier dependencies throughout the chain. This can help them react a little faster than some other companies that don’t go that deeply into their chains or develop alternative sources. Speaking for Toyota, our relationship with suppliers, both in Japan and the U.S., will be better than ever after this.

Andel: How is Toyota Material Handling USA monitoring the situation in Japan?

Wood: We formed a Japan Supplier Task Force and we meet every day to chart the number of containers shipped from Japan–their vessels, their departure times, their status, arrival dates and the progress of each of the shipments that goes through our systems. We look at status from ocean to Chicago’s port, through customs until it arrives at our factory in Indiana.

Andel: Are U.S. customers concerned?

Wood: Some have asked if some of our components have radiation on them. We purchased a Geiger counter to test the parts and components and verified that none of them have radiation on them. We even put together a letter we can show customers if they need to see proof of that.

Andel: Should they be concerned about component availability?

Wood: We do an inventory check on all our critical part numbers in our entire system—finished and unshipped parts at the supplier, parts availability at our factory in Japan, we’ve even checked for critical part number availability in Europe. So the message there is if you’re a manufacturer with facilities around the world you might want start seeing what’s in inventory at your other facilities if you get to a critical point you may want to call on them and see if they have something you can use. We check on our in transit parts and we have our own storage facility on line side for production. It’s a deep inventory check on all critical part numbers and we monitor it daily.

Andel: So it looks like the supply situation is stabilizing?

Wood: We are also looking at the demand in inventory levels for aftermarket parts to see if any measures are needed. That’s an area I thought we might have some issues with but so far it has been good. But I don’t want to paint too rosy of a picture. There are some months ahead of us that may affect our inventory and stocking. It’s been four or five weeks since the earthquake and ships are just arriving in the U.S. after leaving four weeks ago, so we’re probably not at a critical key date yet. I’m talking to my friends and competitors in the industry and they also say so far we’re getting parts to our customers and there are no problems with part shortages at our dealers. Our fill rates are still at 97% and our backlogs are normal. But I told my staff to keep an eye on this because there could be some negative impact ahead.

Note to Readers: It’s been widely reported that several regions in Japan are still dealing with rolling blackouts and the pressures on their electrical grid. This has interesting implications with regard to alternative power sources, particularly hydrogen fuel cells. I spoke with Ruth Cox, president and executive director of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association, the other day, after she visited Northeast Ohio for the annual Ohio Fuel Cell Symposium held on the campus of Kent State University. Here’s what she said about the situation in Japan, and then you’ll read Wood’s take as we continue our Q/A.:

Ruth Cox: “Given that their electricity grid is crippled for years now how could they roll out millions of battery powered vehicles that will put all that pressure on the grid? They can’t. They were already committed to the rollout of fuel cell vehicles and the hydrogen infrastructure and committed to 100 fueling stations being operational by 2015 and they are looking at whether that can be accelerated now. They still have to lower their dependence on imports, and fuel cells still provide the most efficient mechanism to process fuel, no matter if it’s a fossil fuel or bio fuel. I can’t imagine they’ll go to a battery infrastructure that will put more pressure on the electric grid when they could immediately turn to fuel cells and hydrogen to get their operations back up and running. They already lead the world in residential fuel cell deployment.”

Wood: Interesting take. Hydrogen fuel cells in the lift truck industry are more prevalent in the U.S. than in Japan and one of their challenges has been the infrastructure. In Japan there are more hydrogen suppliers and infrastructure put in place–not for lift trucks, but to power the country. For material handling there might be some tangential benefits from that. There might even be more government support. However, it might be a bit of a stretch in Japan because there are more internal combustion lift trucks than electrics. And remember, the whole country has not shut down, just the parts devastated by the earthquake. It could have been a lot worse. Here in the States government subsidies are helping the fuel cell and lift truck industries. The fuel cell itself is still more expensive than an electric battery but subsidies have helped encourage people to purchase fuel cells and to get a hydrogen source to their facilities. The industry still needs to get its price points down, and that will come with volume.

Andel: Let’s wrap things up with any further lessons we can learn from the situation in Japan.

Wood: We just mentioned the grid situation. It’s a good idea to know the suppliers’ production conditions, which plants are operating, which aren’t, and which ones are having rolling blackouts. If you find a supplier plant with issues, make arrangements, maybe even at the supplier’s sister plant when necessary. The blackouts aren’t much of an issue any more. A lot of companies took it on themselves to conserve energy. The Toyota factories are fine, but there were a couple days when they shut down to conserve electricity to help the rest of the country. People don’t often think about electricity and power until a natural disaster strikes and you start running into it.

With the way the economy has been sputtering along the past few years, we’ll take good news any way we can get it. In the category of “it’ll be nice when it happens, but why do we have to wait so long?” comes a prediction that the unemployment rate will be down to 6%… by the end of 2015, more than four years from now. That’s according to LifeWork Search, a recruiting company specializing in supply chain planning.

LifeWorkSearch polled its network recently and 51% of the respondents believe that within five years unemployment will reach a more “normal” rate. The company’s network, by the way, is mostly supply chain planners, i.e., analytical types who study trends and historical data on a daily basis.

“There has been debate on what the new ‘normal’ rate is,” says Jason Breault, managing director of LifeWork Search. “Economists have argued that the normal rate, which used to be considered 5%, is now actually above 6% (6.7%, according to a paper released by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco). Extended unemployment benefits, mismatch of skills and needs between job seekers and potential employers, and deterioration of skills due to the length of being unemployed, are all reasons why the norm has increased.”

So there’s two pieces of bad news right there: “Normal” unemployment has been nudged upward nearly 2 percentage points, from 5% to close to 7%. Plus, it’ll be quite a few years before we even get back to the revised-normal unemployment rate, and who knows when it’ll be before we get anywhere close to the old-normal 5% again?

But before you get too depressed, here’s some good news. Breault says that his company has seen “a major uptick in hiring this past year. Companies are opening their doors again.”

He goes on to add, though, that “some companies are responding to the increase in demand for their products by expecting more out of their already exhausted workforce. Luckily we have seen many companies realize that to totally embrace the increase in demand, teams need to be expanded and investments need to be made in talent acquisition. Companies also need to be aware that their workforce is aging and will be retiring soon, more of a reason to invest now.”

So how do we get from here to there, developing a new generation of material handling and logistics professionals to inherit the jobs that come open when the Baby Boomer generation starts to retire?

As I wrote in a previous blog post, one way is to create a workforce diversity plan. Another way is for logistics companies to partner with local schools in programs designed to train young people coming right out of high school, or even younger. At this year’s ProMat 2011 show, for instance, I was part of an education-oriented program that included representatives from the Greater Altoona (Pa.) Career and Technology Center, a technical training high school.

According to Kathy DePiro, an instructor at the tech center as well as a licensed logistics technician, “Technical training in high school actually starts with recruiting at the middle school level.”

One of her former students, Craig Eckenrode, was also part of the program and he explained how the school helped prepare him for his current position, working full-time in material handling for Stevens Co., a manufacturer of janitorial supplies. At the tech center, not only did he learn warehouse management skills as well as how to drive industrial vehicles, he came away well grounded in a logistics curriculum. “I learned that transportation is the Number 1 thing that keeps a company going,” he said.

Meanwhile, package delivery company UPS recently signed on to participate in the Skills for America’s Future program, a national initiative that aims to connect employers with community colleges to provide 21st century skills to American workers. Several major companies, including Accenture, Gap, Pacific Gas & Electric, McDonald’s and United Technology Corp., were early supporters of the program.

UPS’s participation is a natural extension of other activities it is already supporting, as the company says it has trained more than 15,000 community college students through various programs in Chicago, Louisville and elsewhere. UPS provides tuition, book reimbursement, bonuses and other incentives to UPS employees who attend the Metro College Program in Louisville and the Chicagoland Regional College Program. The company plans to create a consortium of employers who will work with the community colleges to identify needed skills for the jobs of the future and hire the students once they have graduated.

According to a press release, “UPS’s commitment to Skills for America’s Future will involve bringing more Louisville employers into the process, promoting career opportunity for community college students, and boosting local economic growth. Its Workforce Advisory Board Initiative will encourage students at Metropolitan College in Louisville to choose identified career tracks and academic plans that currently are in high demand by employers. Specifically, new employers will have an interactive role with the educational institutions to assist in identifying academic skills their companies need.”

Skills for America’s Future is an initiative of the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan partnership of businesses and community colleges.

When the Material Handling Industry of America developed its technical career program for high school students in 2009, order fulfillment was an important part of the curriculum. But two years later, the author of the textbook being used in the program is talking about a different kind of fulfillment as a bittersweet sign of the times. It’s the fulfillment students in the program at the Don Frazier Center in Rock Hill, SC, are getting from making sure some of their less fortunate fellow students are fed.

It may surprise you that hunger is a problem afflicting some suburban public school students as much as it is the inner city’s homeless. According to NBC News, 12 million children go without adequate food every weekend when not attending school. That’s why the Rock Hill school system started a program called “Back the Pack.” It’s designed to make sure kids who don’t eat on a regular basis at home get enough nutrition to make it through their school day. It even helps some get through their weekend.

The kids in the warehousing and distribution curriculum that Rock Hill runs are using the material handling practices and equipment applied in MHIA’s Technical Career program to get nutritious food into kids’ backpacks. Of course I would have thought that just having a program dedicated to teaching high school kids about logistics as a career would have been enough to draw national media attention to the Frazier Center, but it was the hunger factor that got NBC’s attention.

Sue Kutz, who runs the Back the Pack program, was interviewed about it on the Today Show last week. The segment quoted some troubling statistics—in addition to that national stat I cited above . One in 17 students in the Rock Hill school district goes through their weekends hungry. To help carry them through those weekends, every Friday, students at the Don Frazier Center help pick, pack and distribute 500 bags of various food items donated to the program.

I wanted to learn more about this program, but not from Kutz. I wanted to talk to Allan Howie, author of the textbook used at the Center, “Fundamentals of Warehousing and Distribution.” He’s also director of continuing education and professional development at MHIA. Allan told me it’s not just the students at the Center who are pitching in. Many in the local community donate $10.00 per month, which is enough to feed one child. Some food is bought from vendors and some is donated outright. But just as material handling and logistics are the enablers of the supply chain, it’s the students in this program that get these supplies in the right backpacks at the right time.

“Certain students in each of the high school classes serve as ‘quality control,’” Howie told me. “These students not only make sure all the items are in the bags, but they also know and monitor the number of bags prepared for students that are lactose intolerant or allergic to peanut products. These green bins are taken to the school nurse or guidance office and screened a second time to avoid having a child become ill.”

This is great training not only in order fulfillment but in good citizenship. Still, one thing bothered me while watching the Today segment. If there are so many kids missing meals throughout the course of an entire weekend, where are the parents?

“Your guess is as good as mine where the parents are,” Howie answered. “Some may just not care. Others spend their money on things other than feeding the children. Others may simply not have the money to buy food as well as pay rent, utilities, etc. My neighbor is a family court judge and he has seen every reason imaginable for child neglect. It runs the full gamut.”

I couldn’t help but notice while watching the Today segment how well fed the mother of a couple of these hungry, skinny kids looked. She told the interviewer that rent and electricity bills had to come first. Now it’s not for me to judge whether some people are gaming this system, but if there are so many kids going hungry every weekend in Rock Hill and other school systems throughout this country, it’s time for a new curriculum—Parenthood 101.

I owe my career to obliquity and never realized it until hearing this word the other day. It’s the title of a new book that’s been getting media attention lately. “Obliquity” has to do with attaining a desirable goal without trying—or even intending to try. When I was in college trying to find my calling, material handling and logistics weren’t making a peep. Yet, here I am 30 years later, writing about what you do for a living.

Author John Kay offers examples of such dumb luck. Louis Pasteur is a great one. His pasteurization process came from the unexpected results of an experiment.

In the business world, pharmaceuticals to be precise, Kay cites the case of George Merck who intended for his company to “make medicine for the people…not for profits.” His company just happened to be profitable in that enterprise—until later leadership took a more direct route to profit and failed in that attempt.

In paging through my ProMat Show notes from a few weeks ago I stumbled across another great example of obliquity. It came out of a TranSystems press conference. TransSystems, a logistics consultancy, had a guest speaker—one you wouldn’t expect to hear at a material handling trade show. His name was Justin Wilson, an Indy Racing League driver. What’s the connection between racing and logistics?

Even Wilson wasn’t sure until he took a walk on the ProMat show floor. The direct connection for his presence was the partnership between TranSystems and Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, in supporting the Racing for Kids Foundation. Through this charity TranSystems executives and their clients will make dedicated visits to children’s hospitals and participate in numerous silent auctions, coinciding with multiple race events in 2011. The oblique connection between racing and material handling, according to Wilson, is what goes on during the pit stops.

“The racing teams that win are the ones that are the most organized,” he said. He added that after talking to TranSystems and seeing what other exhibitors do for a living, he realized that logistics teams are similar to Indy pit crews. Ten years ago the philosophy in racing was to throw people at problems in the pit. Today, stronger teams are leaner, more efficient and better coordinated.

TranSystems is featured on Justin Wilson’s No. 22 car for the 2011 racing season and he’ll be driving in this weekend’s Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach as well as the famed Indy 500. He’s heading into this race on the heels of some rough action from the last race, where he had some unwanted contact with another car. Here’s an excerpt from his most recent post on his own blog:

“We are now finding situations that are happening five or six times a race that would normally happen two or three times a season. The racing has changed and I don’t think any of us have really appreciated that it has. We are running side by side for half a lap – and that never used to happen before. I think the fact that all the drivers and teams are finding this season even tougher than last year has proven some preseason theories wrong. Some people thought the teams would try and save money for the new 2012 car but, no, they’re used to the mentality that every year counts. Everyone’s going for it. This year’s IZOD IndyCar Series championship means just as much as next year’s and just as much as last year’s.”

Logistics professionals learn that lesson every day in their supply chains, but it’s good that the TranSystems team is seeing it on a race track. That’s a context that will resonate with the hospitalized children they visit this weekend as part of Racing for Kids. From industry to the race track into the mind of a child: Strive for today and advance to tomorrow. That’s an oblique track but a worthy finish line.

I received a press release last week about a huge crane being shipped to China, and the headline on this blog post is the best I could think of to call your attention to it. Actually, the most interesting part of this announcement isn’t in the headline. FESCO Transportation Group, a multimodal transport holding company in Russia, put out the release, announcing it is transporting a 4.1 million pound Lampson Model LTL-2600B Mobile Crawler Crane from the Port of Everett in Kennewick, Washington to the Hunan province in China. The crane is scheduled to arrive in China on April 15th.

Normally this kind of release wouldn’t have grabbed my attention, but one sentence buried in the middle of the piece—about what the crane’s being used for—did the job:

“It will be discharged in Shanghai to assist in nuclear power plant construction.”

I found it fascinating that while its neighbors in Japan are struggling to deal with the festering remains of their own post earthquake, post-tsunami nuclear power infrastructure that China would be embarking on its own brand new nuclear power facility. China certainly isn’t happy with how Japan is handling their situation, especially the fact that they’re pumping back into the sea the now contaminated seawater they’ve been using to cool their reactors.

A recent report in Reuters quoted China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei as saying “”We hope that Japan will act in accordance with international law and adopt effective measures to protect the marine environment. As Japan’s neighbor, we naturally express our concern about this. We ask that Japan reports the relevant information to the Chinese side in a swift, comprehensive and accurate way.”

Who knows, maybe as I write this Chinese officials are frantically trying to change the course of the huge ship carrying that huge crane. I wasn’t able to get a comment from them for this blog, but Bryan F. Pepin-Donat was nice enough to give me an update. He’s director of contracts for international business at Lampson International.

“The issues raised in Japan’s Fukishima power plants, due to the devastating effects of the earthquake and the tsunami, will cause a short term review of existing and planned nuclear power plants,” he responded to me. “In the long term nuclear power will be validated as a clean and cost effective method of producing power.”

Until that plant finally does get built in China, I have a suggestion for whoever is taking delivery of that huge crane: why not re-route the ship carrying it to Japan and donate its use to their cleanup effort? Isn’t that the kind of thing a good neighbor would do?

I visited OSHA’s website this morning looking for something to write about and scanned through a couple months worth of press releases. Apparently OSHA subscribes to the network news philosophy of “if it bleeds, it leads.” I’m talking about scads of safety violations. Almost every press release is about some clueless employer who, by neglecting to train their people or to give them a safe work environment, allowed an employee to hurt themselves. Very often employers are cited for both. Lift trucks were a common vehicle for pain delivery.

One of the more recent press releases was datelined Denver and involved homebuilder DR Horton and four subcontractors. They were cited for fall hazards at a Parker, Colo., construction site. Proposed penalties for all employers at the worksite total $93,640.

“D.R. Horton failed to properly manage a residential project jobsite by allowing subcontractor employees to be exposed to serious fall hazards,” said John Healy, OSHA area director in Englewood. “This employer is well aware of the requirements for fall protection and has been cited several times for similar infractions.”

Horton was cited for one repeat violation of OSHA’s residential construction fall protection standard, which alone accounted for $70,000 of the penalties. The remainder was divvied up among Denver-based subcontractors Kellory & Co. Inc., Webb Construction Inc., Dain Construction Inc. and LBR Construction Inc. Their repeat and serious violations amounted to $23,640, and entailed a lack of fall protection during framing and sheathing, and inadequate training on the use of forklifts. That last violation caught my eye because Material Handling & Logistics has been preaching about the importance of site-specific industrial truck operator training for decades now. I just wonder how this particular violation manifested itself.

I guess it doesn’t matter. No matter how much we beg, cajole, and warn about the consequences of failure to train, the carnage goes on. If you look at a list of the top ten OSHA violations for the past three years, they haven’t changed much in position or number of instances. Number one involves scaffolding, and you can count on roughly 9,000 of these violations every year. That’s followed by fall protection violations, at around 6,500 a year. Number three involves hazard communications violations, and there are around 6,000 of these every year—although there was a dip in 2009 at about 4,000, for some reason—probably unemployment at the Recession’s peak.

Powered industrial truck violations ranked consistently at either number seven or eight—with around 3,000. What’s both amazing and confounding is the consistency of these lists. Other than the Recession’s mitigating effect on the numbers in 2009, you could almost reprint the same list every year and not be far off from the real numbers. No matter how many citations OSHA issues or how much ink we devote to preaching, industries don’t seem to be changing their unsafe ways.

Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, and sometimes you’ll read about an employer making safety its number-one priority. But usually that’s an “oh, by the way” type of thing that makes its way into an overall report about best practices. It’s rarely what leads—because nobody bleeds.

I will give OSHA’s p.r. people credit for occasionally spreading some cheer. Occasionally you’ll come across an announcement like this among their press releases:

BETHLEHEM, Pa. – The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has recognized the employees and management of Milliken Valve Co. in Bethlehem for excellence in the company’s employee safety and health program. The Milliken Valve facility has been designated as a “star” site, the highest honor in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs.

“Milliken Valve’s dedication to ensuring a safe workplace for its employees makes it most deserving of this honor,” said OSHA Deputy Regional Administrator Edward Selker, who attended a ceremony at the Bethlehem facility and presented the company with a plaque and flag.

The Voluntary Protection Programs recognize private and federal work sites with effective safety and health management systems that have maintained injury and illness rates below national Bureau of Labor Statistics averages.

The VPP is a great program, but it’s a shame we need it. Are we little kids who need a pat on the head and an “atta boy” to do the right thing? Eight years ago, my predecessor, Bernie Knill, reported on OSHA’s new strategy for enforcement to be a last resort, “after all voluntary efforts have failed.” Time has shown us how that worked out.

The only consolation for industry writers like me is that on slow news days we can always find something to write about by rifling through OSHA’s bloody press releases. Now excuse me while I wash my hands.

The need to source and sell globally is running up against rising transportation costs. However, necessity being the mother of invention, I believe rising oil prices in the next year will result in shippers being able to take advantage of some game-changing supply chain options.

We’re already hearing how logistics service providers (LSPs) are offering ways to help clients get around the “pay me now, get your goods much later” requirements of overseas suppliers. For example, Amerinada Distributors, LLC, a U.S.-based hydroponics supplies and accessories company, sources 60 percent of its annual inventory from a single Chinese supplier. This supplier requires payment upon order fulfillment, which can tie up Amerinada’s working capital for weeks while their goods travel to them on a slow boat from China.

Amerinada is now working with UPS Capital, the financial services arm of UPS, to improve its cash flow by using that in-transit inventory as collateral. In other words, it borrows against those imports before they arrive. According to UPS, because Amerinada uses its ocean freight services, UPS can not only give the company visibility and control over the goods, but access to the value of these goods as well. That resulted in Amerinada more than doubling its revenues in 2010, according to UPS.

Tompkins Associates, supply chain consultants helping clients establish trade relations with China, notes that supplier management is a cultural process as well as a contractual process. In a new whitepaper on how “China is Changing Supply Chains Around the World,” Tompkins’ principal of global supply chain services, Greg Hazlett, notes that even the best supplier relationships will suffer setbacks associated with East-West cultural differences.

Of course that leaves the door open for Hazlett to make the case for your using a logistics service provider to help identify more effective ways to work with Chinese suppliers who “might feel more comfortable conferring with on-the-ground resources to report problems or raise issues, thus enhancing the overall relationship.”

So you can not only work with a service provider to make sure your money is working for you while your goods are being shipped, but a service provider on the ground in China can also make sure that before those goods are shipped the supplier will meet its delivery dates or will institute contingencies early enough should due dates slip.

“As China’s inland transit capabilities have improved, global shippers are now reevaluating commercial terms with suppliers, and in some cases, electing to take control ex-factory instead of ex-port,” Hazlett writes. “Currently, inland transport costs are likely buried in the cost of goods. Duties are levied on these product costs, and there is little to no transparency to the transport component. Managing goods ex-factory [rather than ex-port] can reduce duties, decrease transportation cost and increase cycle-time reliability as product pickup and delivery times provided by the LSP are communicated real-time via the web.”

But there’s another way tables are turning in these relationships with overseas suppliers. It’s conceivable that a small U.S. manufacturer with domestic markets could someday become the supplier to a Chinese company doing business in the states. Hazlett tells of a Chinese manufacturing company that developed a renewable energy wind farm in the U.S. The U.S. Steelworkers Union was able to bang out an agreement that required a significant portion of the materials to be sourced domestically in the U.S.

“Even five years ago this scenario would have seemed impractical,” Hazlett writes. “At that time, the expectation was that an American company would win the job and the components and raw materials would be sourced wherever they were least expensive – most likely China. Instead, now, Chinese manufacturers are winning large projects in the U.S. and only through bilateral negotiations does American labor and manufacturing find a way to play a supplier role. Chinese companies are also looking for a long-term domestic supplier as they continue to develop additional projects. In this case, the role of supplier and customer seem to have been completely reversed from what was expected only a few years ago.”

Global supply chains are changing radically thanks to market forces. Whether you find those forces creative or destructive depends on your next move.