Somebody who has been in the industry for a while and seen people fired and laid off has learned that someone's job is no more or less safe with a friendly, empathetic manager. (Your personal stress levels are another question, and an important one, but complying with a toxic manager doesn't decrease your stress levels, so it isn't leverage to make you do or not do anything besides change jobs.)
That's why I mentioned aviation mechanics being unionized, and I wondered if a worker's history of safety infractions follows them. Those would seem to be very important factors. A safety-critical worker should be able to say, "Look boss, you're telling me if I don't break this rule I could lose this job, but 1) the union has my back, and 2) if I do break this rule I might not get my next job."
That's important, because threatening in a loud and obviously abusive way is not the only way to make someone afraid for their job. You could even say that it's the amateur hour way to manipulate an employee. If management wants to scare people into skimping on safety, they can do it without doing anything you could point at specifically as "abusive" behavior, so you need protections that don't rely on identifying obvious misbehavior by management.
Is this really the defense we're using?