Whats safer?

[ericmark]

I agree health and safety can go mad. On a break down I forgot to put my waist coat on. Having then got caught I then wanted to wangle out of being disciplined so I told them it was against health and safety regulations for electricians to wear nylon because of the dangers associated with ionisation of the atmosphere.

This did work I got away with it. However they then looked into special overalls with strips sewn into them.

We also had similar on another site again with waist coats. Again issued and told we must wear them. So we all put on the waist coat then our overalls. We got stopped "Where are your waist coats?" we showed him. He said they should be warn on the outside of the overalls we said that's against health and safety the overalls are to ensure no lose clothing which can catch in machines as as the name suggests should be warn over all other clothing.

Again the special overall was the answer.

At a health and safety meeting we were told PPE should be as a last resort. In other words the site should be made safe and to require people to wear PPE means management have failed to make the site safe.

Open reach still have guys going up a pole wear a hard hat. Seems chicken licken works for open reach and is afraid the sky will fall on their heads!

 

[AndrewDavie]

Keep in mind that H&S enforcement by the managers isn't to ensure that you are safe, but to ensure they won't be sued. Often that is the same thing, but not always.
So when it's overly onerous and isn't making you safer, and you ignore some bits in order to actually get the job done in a reasonable amount of time...and then something happens - aha! it's not our fault, it's the employees fault for not obeying every single directive!
It wasn't so long ago that some American ports were reduced to a crawl because the managers decided to not pay out on any injury where not all the directives were being followed. Protest of 'work-to-rule'.

(Left to the reader to decide how much is truth and how much conspiracy theory)