Comment by Modified3019
2 years ago
Makes sense, this kind of work can have an extremely “toxic” anti-ppe culture that’s impossible to mitigate against without outright burning the industry to the ground. Fines and inspections are easy to dodge when everyone involved is trying to do so.
Hell I work in agronomy and it’s hard enough getting seasonal helpers to wear earplugs when riding ATVs all day. Then there was an old supervisor from a former oil change and tire repair shop job I had, who had hand shakes from nerve damage due to automotive chemical exposure, and he was actually comparatively decent about PPE, especially for helpers.
I work in the construction industry. We have about 1:10 ratio of “supervision” to contractors. Getting people to wear PPE is a constant, ongoing 12 hour a day battle. We kick about 1 person off site permanently, every day for something egregiously dumb. The contractor just sends them to another job. And of all the places I’ve worked, my current employer is one of the best, takes it very seriously.
Early in my IBEW (union electrician) training, a particularly outspoken oldguy asked me, mockingly "are those tampons in your ears?!"
My response was "No, Carl — they're sound dampeners SO I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO YOUR CONSTANT BITCHING SO MUCH."
Old journeyman immediately took me under his wing, and we were inseparable (he even would wear PPE around me). I learned much from this "kind" old curmudgeon.
Why the machismo exists in construction, I'll never know — just as many former co-workers will never understand how I was one of them, once.
Bad safety standards create strong unions. Strong unions create good safety standards. Good safety standards allow stupidity. Stupid people allow safety standards to get rolled back.
Had a friend who worked in construction. He said every day the workplace health & safety person would come in and show them a video of the "dumb [expletive] of the day" doing something very stupid by not following WHS rules, and suffering the consequences of it. Allegedly this helped with compliance quite a fair bit.
"Getting people to wear PPE is a constant, ongoing 12 hour a day battle."
Why is this? I often see firsthand or on television people working in dusty environments with little or no concern for the dust that they are breathing in. It especially horrifies me when I know that dust is silica or like, or perhaps even contains some asbestos. I wince every time I see professional stonemasons chiseling away or using diamond saws to cut up slabs of stone without wearing masks. Surely, if anyone, they ought to be aware of the risks.
I've occasionally had to work in such environments for short periods but I've never done so without wearing a n95/P2 type mask and even then I consider them inadequate protection and go to considerable effort to minimize my time in the dusty environment. I even go to the extent of putting on the mask and removing it outside in a dust-free area so as to minimize breathing in any residual dust.
Whenever I ask others around me why they don't take precautions I never get sensible answers or they offer paltry excuses such as masks fog one's glasses.
Despite all the exposure about the dangers of asbestos in recent decades, the greater dangers of dust inhalation generally just hasn't sunk in. The question is why.
In many respects this rejection seems to closely mimic the rejection of masks during COVID. One wonders what's actually needed to overcome the resistance to wearing PPE. (We've overcome PPE resistance re visibility with the full acceptance of fluorescent hi-vis clothing, so why not dust masks?)
Ppe is usually bad designed, horrible to wear and has bad side-effects that are not documented. Better solutions exist(like sucking dust away into filters at the saw blade or actively air pressures masks) but companies want the cheap unusable minimum crap. Which then nobody uses and which then gets them thus out of all future lawsuits. It's a ritual to calm the lawyer priests, the workers health does not factor into it.
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Having watched several Thai builders using the squint method to protect their eyes when stick welding, happily welding together galvanised steel, working on electrical circuits without turning off breakers, and just flat out skipping electrical earthing, I'll never again be surprised by how many safety corners people will cut just because.
> I never get sensible answers or they offer paltry excuses such as masks fog one's glasses.
Working with power tools while not seeing much due to fogged glasses is much less safe than breathing in the dust, though...
I used to work in defence manufacturing, we initially had a very macho, play it by ear culture, now it's the complete opposite. You can and will be fired very quickly for not following health and safety rules.
This mainly came out of a series of lawsuits and happened industry wide (the fear of millions of dollars of compensation was enough to get all the players to get very serious)
Part of me feels like this is partially the government shirking it's duty to protect workers. Imagine if in the early days of aviation the government looked at the dangers of flight and the difficulty of wrangling pilots, and just threw it's hands up and banned all aircraft.
I understand your concerns about meddling and disruptive regulation and I could cite some instances thereof that are overly heavy-handed but I won't do so here as they'll only distract.
The difference with the early aviation compared to dust-borne diseases is that with aviation it was unclear at the outset what it was that needed regulating and the extent of any such regulation so it's understandable that regulation grew with the industry whereas the effects of dust-bourne diseases on health had been known about for centuries.
Two thousand years ago the Romans knew about the dangers of asbestosis and mesothelioma as the result of mining asbestos although they called it the wasting disease—only criminals and bad slaves were sent to mine it. Similarly, volcanic ash and sand/silica on the lungs disease—whose medical name I cannot pronounce let alone spell—and coal miners' black lung disease have also been known about for centuries.
Moreover, in more recent times (late 19th and early 20th Centuries) these diseases, especially asbestosis and mesothelioma were the subject of government inquiries and the dangers well established. For example, the British Admiralty held inquiries after workers and sailors became ill from the effects of breathing asbestos dust from the lagging on steam pipes. That nothing was done and that no significant regulations introduced as a matter of expediency has to be one of the most unconscionable government decisions of all time—that delayed the introduction of effective regulation in respect of asbestos for over 80 years.
(The lack of regulation is a bit close to home, my father, a mechanical engineer, was exposed asbestos on war ships during WWII and afterwards in the power industry and it severely affected his health. Also, I recall as kids when my brother and I would visit my father's place of employment asbestos was that common we'd make mud balls out of it and throw them at each other. By that time government was well aware of the dangers of asbestos and black lung disease for going on a century but had still done nothing about it.)
Unless you're suggesting the government hire literal nannies to follow every construction worker around and forcibly make them wear the correct PPE, it seems like this action IS the government doing its duty to protect the workers - largely from themselves it seems.