Engineering News-Record: When we need to reach a little higher, we strap extensions—stilts—on workers’ legs. When fearing a fall, we tie workers to buildings with a length of rope, and then we hope. We still use ladders developed 10,000 years ago to get from here to there and when materials are needed high up in a building, we install a pulley and rope like my mother used on her clothesline. Enough.
5 comments:
I was frustrated by this article because while taking a closer look at Osha and ensuring that workers are as safe as they can possibly be while working is important, this article just felt like some random person ranting with no facts to back up their requests. Living in the 21st century, we should be able to minimize injuries and ensure the safety of all workers. While this is a great goal it cannot be achieved purely through regulation. If there is any hope of real progress being made, companies, bosses, and individual employees all have to do their part to ensure their safety. A company rule is meaningless if everybody ignores it on the job site. A regulation is irrelevant if it is not enforced, but it is not practical for an organization such as OSHA to be able to individually inspect every worksite all the time. Even if they could there would still be unexpected injuries that would occasionally happen.
This article was more an opinion piece than anything else, and while some good points were made the others felt extraneous. Overall it just felt like a rant more than anything informative. I’ve taken Sean West’s OHSA 30 training and am certified, and one of the things he says is that OSHA rarely visits a site unless there has been an accident, or something has been reported. They just don’t have the people to visit every single site, since OSHA covers so many areas. OSHA tries to put the onus on employers and employees to create safer work environments for themselves, because they can’t be everywhere at once. My dad works in the mining industry and since the semester I took OSHA he and I have had conversations about both OSHA and MSHA. MSHA is so much stricter than OSHA and also do site visits more often. But then you need to thing about the difference in how many sites fall under MSHA versus OSHA.
I think the article brings up a lot of good points about being prepared to prevent injury as opposed to eliminating the dangers that cause injury in the first place. I think it’s not shocking at all that safety comes second to money in OSHA’s conflict of interests seeing America will do anything to protect the cheapest ways of operating things. I think hard hats should be mandated for small hazard protection such as on the job human errors like dropping a pencil. However, I don’t think the hard hats should be for making life threatening injuries less life threatening. I also think about how OSHA probably doesn’t have theatre work as their first focus for safety regulations and wonder if theatre regulations are at more risk for experiencing the consequences of OSHA’s gray areas since it’s often run of people who learn just enough of the trade to fake it.
Employee and worker safety is something I have always had a love/hate relationship with. On one hand, I am thankful that there is a set of rules and standards in place to ensure that an employer cannot ask me to do something that is not safe. If this were to ever happen, I know that I am within my rights as an employee to say no and cite the OSHA regulation that would show a situation to be deemed unsafe. If that were to happen, I would also have further ways to get in contact with them if saying no were to put my employment in danger of retaliation. On the other hand, there are very seldom times where it seems silly to have to spend so much time and effort to achieve OSHA compliance while trying to complete a task quickly. Sometimes all you have is an 8' ladder and you might need a 10' to get that extra step, but this needs to get done now because the house is waiting on you to open and taking that top step on an 8' won't be the end of the world. I know this is a flawed way of thinking, but it does seem like sometimes OSHA codes can be a hinderance to getting a job done when you are right there with something that can achieve the task but is not what OSHA would say you can use to do it.
I don’t know if I agree with the points made in this article. Old ways aren’t bad simply because they’re old. Ladders are really old sure but there isn’t an easier thing that does the same purpose, anything else is only easier at higher heights like genie lifts. And look at stairs, the only alternatives we’ve made so far that’ve stuck are an elevator and moving stairs. I agree that safety helmets with the chin strap and everything are better long term and for more uses but a safety hard hat is just as good under certain conditions. Hence why OSHA says the helmets should be considered but only the hard hats are required. OSHA is a regulatory force, when it says something is how it has to be done then people are subsequently forced to use that method. Hard hats aren’t useless and work just fine in a lot of scenarios and so they shouldn’t be disqualified entirely.
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