This week at CES Hire we have focused on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as part of our Toolbox Talk Tuesdays. Please take a look at our blog post below where we consider how lucky we are to have such stringent safety measures in place and how using the correct PPE could save your life…
Have You Had An accident That Wasn’t Your Fault?
What strikes you about this picture? The barefoot workers? The grim conditions underfoot? The casual shorts and shirt attire? This is in fact a ship recycling yard in Bangladesh where workers include young children and work goes on 12 hours a day 7 days a week for less than 50p and hour! Workers wear no protective gear and many work barefoot (walking through cut steal).There is hardly any testing systems for the use of cranes, lifting machinery and tools. The yards re-use old warn out ropes and chains recovered from the broken ships without testing their strength. There are frequent fires, gas explosions, falling steel plates, exposure to poisons from bunker oil, lubricants, paints and old Cargo contaminates as well as asbestos leaving thousands with respiratory diseases.
Each day a worker is seriously injured and each week there is one fatality. Even knowing this shocking statistic nothing is done about the lack of safety as there is a queue of others dying (pardon the pun) to work on the yard so workers are just seen as commodities; it doesn’t matter who they are, they get the job done. They are expendable!
If this was happening in the UK, there would be uproar. However we have laws and regulations such as Personal Protective Equipment Regulations (1992) that protect us. Not to mention we’re bombarded with ‘have you had an accident that wasn’t your fault?’ adverts claiming to protect us.
Remember this little fella voiced by Joe Pasquale persuading us to follow up those injuries caused by that unfortunate slip in the workplace foyer when water was carelessly left spilled…you know the advert! Yes, these freak and unavoidable accidents do happen but there are also accidents that can be avoided by simply wearing your PPE. We are incredibly lucky in the UK that our employers provide PPE but many take this for granted and don’t take safety seriously.
Knowing what the workers in Bangladesh go through (and all over the world) we should never have that ‘oh it’ll only take a few minutes’ attitude whilst carelessly discarding those gloves/googles/masks. In 2015-16 there were 144 fatalities in the workplace and some 621,000 non-fatal injuries. Many of these incidents could have been prevented by simply wearing PPE. So this week as CES Hire focus on PPE as part of our Toolbox Talk Tuesdays consider how lucky we are to have such stringent safety measures in place and look after your PPE it could save your life. We have the opportunity to protect ourselves, many don’t…WE DO CARE…many don’t.
Remember CES Hire supply tools and PPE at competitive prices. You can view our full range of PPE here.