Stop work authority (SWA) is the explicit, formally granted right and obligation of every person on site, employee or contractor, junior or senior, to halt any work they believe is unsafe, without waiting for permission and without fear of consequence. Most serious incident investigations find someone who saw it coming; SWA exists so that seeing it is enough.
The policy is easy; the sociology is not. Stops are rare where people doubt they will be backed, where production pressure is the loudest voice in the room, or where the last person who stopped a line spent a week explaining themselves. The honest metric is not zero stops (which means fear, not safety) nor constant stops (which means chaos), but a steady trickle of stops taken seriously, most confirming that the system works. Leadership response to a borderline stop is the whole program: thank the person publicly, fix the trigger, and the next hesitation disappears.
A contractor electrician notices a scaffold tag dated eight days ago, inspection is weekly, and two castors unlocked. The work above involves two fitters and a 60 kg gearbox. She stops the job. Elapsed cost: 45 minutes for a scaffold inspector to re-verify, lock the castors, and re-tag. The counterfactual does not need imagination: a shifting scaffold under a suspended gearbox writes its own report. The site logged the stop, thanked her at the weekly tier meeting, and quietly fixed the real finding: scaffold inspections had slipped from the schedule that week, a program failure one alert person caught. The stop that costs 45 minutes and finds a systemic gap is the program working exactly as designed.
Work resumes when the concern is resolved, the resolution is communicated to the person who stopped it, and any changed conditions re-planned, through the JSA or permit as appropriate. A restart by seniority ("I say it is fine") teaches everyone what the policy is actually worth.
Fabrico gives stops a home in the workflow: a stopped job’s work order is flagged with the reason, on-hold status is visible to everyone dispatching or waiting on it, resolution steps and the restart authorization are recorded, and the stop history is analyzable, which lines, which hazards, which recurring triggers. The courage stays human; the follow-through stops depending on memory. EU-built, with EU data residency.
Experience across industries says abuse is rare and fear of stopping is common; design for the real problem. Handle a genuinely frivolous pattern as a coaching conversation, never as discipline attached to a specific stop, the chilling effect outweighs any lost minutes.
It must, in both directions: contractors can stop site work, and site personnel can stop contractor work. The induction should state it explicitly, and contractor contracts should protect it, a contractor who fears commercial consequences for stopping has no authority at all.
The andon is a production-quality escalation built into standard work; SWA is a safety right that overrides all work, everywhere, held by everyone. They share the deeper principle: the system is designed so that raising a problem is cheap and suppressing one is expensive.
Want stopped jobs, reasons, and restarts visible instead of verbal? Book a Fabrico demo to see safety holds flow through work orders your whole plant can see.
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