Health and Safety, do you partake or keep your mouth shut?

esoteric

esoteric

esoteric

Soldato
Joined
5 Aug 2004
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Yeah I know there are many nitpicky areas within H&S we ignore on our day to day but there was an occurrence today where I stepped in.

I work in a manufacturing plant, I'm a peon and we have a structure of team leaders and supervisors and an ops manager. There are 4 other peons who do our health and safety stuff in the factory.

Yesterday we had some scaffolding delivered as we do every year for maintenance work while the factory has a 1 day downtime from production. I'm sure the past few years the scaffolders delivered and built the tower but today 1 of the supervisors built it and sent a peon up the tower to clean a fan.

Now I'm thinking why is he building that tower, he's not qualified. Then the peon was sent up the tower without the tower being inspected by a qualified person. The peon does not have a CSCS card at all so shouldn't be above 2 metres high. The peon didn't have a harness though I don't know if he should have.

I informed 1 of the H&S peons while the tower was being built and he said he didn't want to do anything about it because the supervisor who built it is his and he didn't want to damage his working relation with him. The tower was built and the peon went to clean the fan so at that time I went and informed the ops manager of how many H&S laws are potentially being broken, he was dismissive at first claiming the supervisor is qualified but when I told him about the peon he said he'd take care of it in a huffy manner.

So he called the supervisor and H&S peon to his office, I don't know what they spoke about but my name was dropped by the ops manager so once they got out of his office they approached me saying I can't go running off and telling. I told the H&S peon I did it because he wouldn't and the supervisor said if he doesn't do anything about it then go see him instead. Then we chatted about it for a few mins about the actual situation and went back to work.

While the chat seemed amicable and there doesn't seem like there will be any tension between us, I wonder if I should have just kept my mouth shut. The peon stayed cleaning the fan and later the tower was dismantled and reassembled in the location it needs to be in for the maintenance work when Monday an outside contractor is coming to use this scaffold.
 
You did the right thing

There is a culture of turning a blind eye or people afraid to say anything in some places of work. Luckily my employer encourages safety first and gives all employees the right to stop work or stop another employee if there's anything that may be unsafe
 
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I never keep quiet about health and safety stuff personally even though unfortunately it often causes quite a bit of aggro. Fortunately where I've worked I've always had managers that, despite any other fault, are very aware of the responsibility and have always taken direct action.

The last health and safety one I had to deal with - one of the delivery drivers was parking their van across a fire exit so the doors couldn't be opened properly - my did I get some attitude from the driver for pointing it out resulting in him having to do a couple of minutes extra leg work :| which just resulted in me taking it higher and him getting disciplined proper.

The number of places I've been though where stock is just piled up in front of fire exits, etc. is crazy.

I used to (just checklist stuff) do health ans safety, security and compliance audits and the stuff I've seen... including blocking up fire exits (the most common one) and while not health and safety a supposedly secure room where the key was supposed to be kept either on someone or in a safe was just hung on a peg right outside the room marked with "security room key" :|
 
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ask yourself this:

if the peon on the scaffolding fell and broke his neck, either through his own lack of training/harness, or because the scaffolding collapsed. do you feel satisfied that in the inevitable tribunal you did enough as a witness to keep yourself clean?

if the answer is yes then you did the right thing.
 
Yep, you did the right thing.
Its all about safety these days. Not performance.

Contracts are often mostly rewarded to the companies that have the best H&S record, rather than who bids for the cheapest price to do a job.

If this was a global thing then its a proper 100% awesome thing, but not while East European workers are doing the work for cheaper, and then machines/AI will take over their jobs so then safety won't exactly matter.
 
And this is why people need to go to jail when things go wrong. Otherwise, they ignore H&S, and sooner or later someone gets hurt or killed. I bet none of these slackers would be happy to get on a airplane where the pilot ignores the safety checklists, or a bus where the driver doesn't care about the passengers falling over, or goes in for an operation where the surgeon can't be asked to follow safety procedures.

It all comes down to managers and companies not taking their responsibility seriously when it comes to looking after their staff, and that should always be punished.
 
It's a hard situation to be in, but i would be tempted to report it anonymously to outside H&S as it is the sort of thing where people can get seriously hurt/killed if it's not done properly.
I think they can if need be ask to see the proof of who put it up and the qualifications/training records.

Although having said that one of my friends works in a factory that has had warning after warning due to serious H&S breaches resulting in major injuries (broken bones, lost "minor" appendages).

People complain about H&S, but I wouldn't trust something like scaffolding put up by someone who is not trained in how to do it safely, and would be wary of going up it without proper gear.
 
I'm quite relaxed when it comes to health and safety. If it only endangers yourself then go for it, it's your fault for being an idiot and I couldn't care less. If it endangers me or some other 3rd party then I'd definitely start whistle blowing.
 
Steampunk said:
And this is why people need to go to jail when things go wrong. Otherwise, they ignore H&S, and sooner or later someone gets hurt or killed. I bet none of these slackers would be happy to get on a airplane where the pilot ignores the safety checklists, or a bus where the driver doesn't care about the passengers falling over, or goes in for an operation where the surgeon can't be asked to follow safety procedures.

It all comes down to managers and companies not taking their responsibility seriously when it comes to looking after their staff, and that should always be punished.
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But then think of yourself as a CEO of some company, all you've done is gone to high school, college, university, climbed your way through the ranks of the office with basically no work experience. You finally get to the top spot, you're king, you've achieved your life goals, you're rich af, your management staff is doing everything they can for the safety of frontline staff. Then one day an incident happens that kills someone that could have "somehow" easily been preventable. YOU will go to prison for no reason at all just because you were the ultimate responsibility, all because you did not eliminate literally ALL possible risks to your front line staff of a specific task - that you may not have even had a clue about. Life is fair, eh.
 
Evosparki said:
But then think of yourself as a CEO of some company, all you've done is gone to high school, college, university, climbed your way through the ranks of the office with basically no work experience. You finally get to the top spot, you're king, you've achieved your life goals, you're rich af, your management staff is doing everything they can for the safety of frontline staff. Then one day an incident happens that kills someone that could have "somehow" easily been preventable. YOU will go to prison for no reason at all just because you were the ultimate responsibility, all because you did not eliminate literally ALL possible risks to your front line staff of a specific staff - that you may not have even had a clue about. Life is fair, eh.
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That's why they get the big bucks. No one saying people should go to prison for accidents, but when a manager knocks together his own scaffolding and then sends a worker up there without experience or safety gear, then that is a failing of company culture. If OP can see that it's wrong, why can't the manager and the H&S guy (that is his job after all)? That attitude is down to the people at the top deciding that making a bit more money is more important than risking someone's safety or life. If the guy in charge of H&S won't speak up for fear of upsetting his boss, then that's a company failure.

I think we can all tell the difference between someone tripping over their own feet and hurting themselves, and someone falling off a roof because they had no training or safety gear and shouldn't have been up there in the first place.
 
Evosparki said:
But then think of yourself as a CEO of some company, all you've done is gone to high school, college, university, climbed your way through the ranks of the office with basically no work experience. You finally get to the top spot, you're king, you've achieved your life goals, you're rich af, your management staff is doing everything they can for the safety of frontline staff. Then one day an incident happens that kills someone that could have "somehow" easily been preventable. YOU will go to prison for no reason at all just because you were the ultimate responsibility, all because you did not eliminate literally ALL possible risks to your front line staff of a specific task - that you may not have even had a clue about. Life is fair, eh.
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this is the problem with company responsibility, whilst ceo's do need to be held accountable for certain situations (for example during cases of blatantly poor h+s culture going unchallenged) but you have a point that the buck needs to stop lower down too.

in the op's case plainly it's the manager who "built" the scaffolding's responsibility, the ceo only has culpability if the report goes undealt with even from health and safety.

people need to stop thinking of it as a culture of ratting people out, and more of a culture of pointing out issues directly when observed, without immediately proportioning blame (especially if it gets dealt with), ratting out is what needs to happen when that culture doesnt exist.
 
esoteric said:
Yeah I know there are many nitpicky areas within H&S we ignore on our day to day but there was an occurrence today where I stepped in.

I work in a manufacturing plant, I'm a peon and we have a structure of team leaders and supervisors and an ops manager. There are 4 other peons who do our health and safety stuff in the factory.

Yesterday we had some scaffolding delivered as we do every year for maintenance work while the factory has a 1 day downtime from production. I'm sure the past few years the scaffolders delivered and built the tower but today 1 of the supervisors built it and sent a peon up the tower to clean a fan.

Now I'm thinking why is he building that tower, he's not qualified. Then the peon was sent up the tower without the tower being inspected by a qualified person. The peon does not have a CSCS card at all so shouldn't be above 2 metres high. The peon didn't have a harness though I don't know if he should have.

I informed 1 of the H&S peons while the tower was being built and he said he didn't want to do anything about it because the supervisor who built it is his and he didn't want to damage his working relation with him. The tower was built and the peon went to clean the fan so at that time I went and informed the ops manager of how many H&S laws are potentially being broken, he was dismissive at first claiming the supervisor is qualified but when I told him about the peon he said he'd take care of it in a huffy manner.

So he called the supervisor and H&S peon to his office, I don't know what they spoke about but my name was dropped by the ops manager so once they got out of his office they approached me saying I can't go running off and telling. I told the H&S peon I did it because he wouldn't and the supervisor said if he doesn't do anything about it then go see him instead. Then we chatted about it for a few mins about the actual situation and went back to work.

While the chat seemed amicable and there doesn't seem like there will be any tension between us, I wonder if I should have just kept my mouth shut. The peon stayed cleaning the fan and later the tower was dismantled and reassembled in the location it needs to be in for the maintenance work when Monday an outside contractor is coming to use this scaffold.
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You wouldn't use a harness on what I assume is a tower scaffold, you only need pasma cert to construct one and it's a very easy course. If you fell over the edge of one of those you aren't using it how it's meant to be used.
 
adolf hamster said:
people need to stop thinking of it as a culture of ratting people out, and more of a culture of pointing out issues directly when observed, without immediately proportioning blame (especially if it gets dealt with), ratting out is what needs to happen when that culture doesnt exist.
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Exactly. People should be looking out for each other, their employees, their customers and random people walking by in the street outside. Instead, H&S is treated as a nuisance, even when it's perfectly obvious that people are being needlessly put at risk.
 
I have IPAF certificate to use MEWP vehicles on the roads. The "cherry picker" platform I use goes up to 15 meters straight-line. I've been using it on-off mostly for 17 years now. I pretty much never fasten my harness to the bucket just because its just too short for some aspects of the job. Just this morning during the early hours of approx 5:30am there was a truck that drove past my van whilst I was at maximum arm reach up in the air. When I heard that truck getting close to me my immediate thought was to stop everything to (progressively) start moving my hoist arm away from the possibility of the lower arm colliding with the truck as it drove past. This has happened many, MANY times even as long as 17 years I've I've been doing the job. A part of me actually gets a thrill from it (as I've always been a bit of a dare devil particularly in my youth and young adult years).

But this morning that skip truck was extremely close to hitting my lower arm hoist (that partially hangs out across the opposite lane of the road) my harness was not hankered onto the bucket (either way I'd have probably died anyway). Every other aspect of doing the job was spot on perfect. It sounds mad I know but ultimately its all about getting the job done, or done as fast as possible - its human nature. I'm 36 I feel like I'm in the middle of the hard workers generation and the slacker generation. Ultimately by the time I'm an old man our country will probably have none or almost no death incidents. Its like my generation was on the tail end of hard workers. To me the younger generation are the most laziest people I've ever worker with - like by far! its shocking how slack they are using health and safety at every tiny possible anything just to be able to have more sleep during works time, in the name of health and safety.

If I was to die this morning it would not be in the national news. Its just a work place incident. Proof would show it was ultimately my fault that I'd die due to not fastening myself into the bucket - not the truck driver driving too close to my van. I'm single though, no kids (that I know of) so really... it wouldn't make any difference to me if I'd die, the thrill is fun, live life on the edge - literally. Don't get me wrong I'm not suicidal even slightly lol - just the more the better tbh. Better than getting old and living off some crap pension income.
 
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Do you know the supervisor isn't qualified?

Perhaps the 'peon' who was sent up is qualified? Are you again certain that he wasn't?
 
Evosparki said:
But this morning that skip truck was extremely close to hitting my lower arm hoist (that partially hangs out across the opposite lane of the road) my harness was not hankered onto the bucket (either way I'd have probably died anyway). Every other aspect of doing the job was spot on perfect. It sounds mad I know but ultimately its all about getting the job done, or done as fast as possible - its human nature. I'm 36 I feel like I'm in the middle of hard the workers generation and the slacker generation. Ultimately by the time I'm an old man our country will probably have none or almost no death incidents. Its like my generation was on the tail end of hard workers. To me the younger generation are the most laziest people I've ever worker with - like by far! its shocking how slack they are using health and safety at every tiny possible anything just to be able to have more sleep during works time, in the name of health and safety.
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You'd have felt pretty silly if you'd just been knocked out of the bucket and would have been okay if your harness had been connected. That would have been a better outcome than landing on your head. People make mistakes, but I would never get myself killed and put my family through that just because I couldn't be bothered to put some safety gear on.

Last year I was using one of those Stihl chainsaw-on-a-stick pruners quite extensively in the garden to cut back a lot of tree branches, and I didn't want my wife to come home and find me in hospital with a serious head injury (or worse) because I didn't want to look silly and put on something that could save my life and cost all of £4.50. It saved me from quite a few knocks on the head.
 
Steampunk said:
Last year I was using one of those Stihl chainsaw-on-a-stick pruners quite extensively in the garden to cut back a lot of tree branches, and I didn't want my wife to come home and find me in hospital with a serious head injury (or worse) because I didn't want to look silly and put on something that could save my life and cost all of £4.50. It saved me from quite a few knocks on the head.
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Have you been trained to use a Stihl-saw? ;)
 
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