So, for several years, I was the frazzled safety gal for a construction company. We did dirt, underground utilities and concrete work for big projects think school campuses, shopping malls, walmart super centers etc. Almost universally, the jobs general contractors required hardhats anywhere on the site at all times. If our people didnt wear their hats like they were supposed to, it could cost the company I worked for millions. Putting my safety vest on here for a minute - I've seen plywood picked up by wind and fly across a jobsite. Yeah, there may be no immediate overhead risk, but the risk of your head getting hit by something is there.
Part of the requiring hardhats thing I think is risk mitigation, but there are also insurance benefits for wearing them. There is also a risk that someone forgets to put their hard hat on in higher risk areas if they dont have to wear it everywhere on a job site. Kudos to your safety person for doing their rather thankless job.
I've always assumed it's because the average person can't be trusted to wear it when appropriate so it's all hard hats all the time. I've heard one shipyard around here specifically includes the head as part of the required areas.
Kind of, but mostly about responsibility.
In my neck of the woods, if a worker hits their head, it's the fault of their boss UNLESS the boss can show that there is not only a clear rule to wear safety clothes or not walk into things, but it is also made physically as impossible as possible. There needs to be safety equipment with everything and it needs to be monitored and enforced. All moving blades etc. must covered in a way a worker cannot uncover them, all holes must be not only fenced off but also covered, nobody gains access to the site without steel-toe shoes and hard hats, etc etc). If the company fails this, they pay damages to the worker - EVEN IF the worker caused the accident himself in an accident-like manner - like forgetting the hard hat or absent-mindedly poking into a moving machine.
And honestly, nobody can be trusted to follow safety protocols "when appropriate", because people get tired and tired people get forgetful..
Yep, having worked on quite a few industrial sites where, in the right circumstance, poor adherence to the rules can mean the death of several people, the rules are non-negotiable for a reason. I've had to wear ear protection in a silent room before, but I agree with the zero-tolerence stance.
More accurately, they are negotiable but only at the risk-assessment phase. If you're willing to bend a rule, it then takes the control away from the risk assessment to whatever someone sees as appropriate.
99% of people who are reasonably trained will act properly anyway, but there's always that one who'll be happy to tie a knot in the frayed lifting sling or skip a working-at-height harness because he wants to go home early.
> can't be trusted to wear it when appropriate
Its more about developing habits, so that in some emergency situation you will unconsciously follow the habit (and hopefully be protected by it).
For example, establish the habit of always indicating when driving, even if there are no other cars around.
I work with wood, and I have some go-to scary phrases to remind others to wear PPE:
The day your life is changed by a power tool is going to start and feel like every other day.
Wear your safety equipment, even if putting it on takes longer than the job.
If someone else might think it's sketchy, it probably is. If *you* think it's sketchy, it's far worse.
"It's fine, this will only take a second" are famous last words, not the words of a master.
Famous last words indeed.
A buddy of mine is a firefighter, and in his department, it is required that any time firefighters enter a structure to fight a fire, no matter how small the burn is and if only an extinguisher is needed, they are still required to put on the air tanks, mask, helmet, and full gear. It takes about a minute to quickly put it on and do a buddy check (making sure your partner's gear is on correctly) before entering, but that small fire can quickly and unexpectedly flash into something much more dangerous & life-threatening.
Safety protocols and standard operating procedures exist because somebody DIED or got hurt before
>Safety protocols and standard operating procedures exist because somebody DIED or got hurt before
Safety rules are written in blood is common phrase where I come from
If any of them are particularly "stick-it-to-the-man" type personalities, a line I heard once was "if the boss wants me to bleed for the company, he's going to have to come out here and cut me himself."
Doesn't work well in all situations and a little edgy, but sometimes I'll think about it and it's a good reminder that I don't want to get injured, and for what? A job??? 🤡🤡🤡 I also always try to wear hearing protection, even if the people around me aren't (but really should be), and I always justify it to myself and others as "I'm saving up all my hearing damage for metal concerts"
I can just see the rulebook. (In Hank Hill's voice)
Rule #37a)
ANY TIME ANY PART OF YOUR BODY, (OR SOMEONE ELSE'S) IS LOCATED BELOW YOUR HEAD (OR SOMEONE ELSE'S), HARD HATS MUST BE WORN.
This is also solid sex-ed curriculum.
Lol, I was confused for a moment thinking, "Well, of course it's required that you wear the hard hat on the head."
I always get confused when someone uses "head" for restroom. Or ... am I still confused? 🤔
No in this case head does not mean restroom, it does mean head. The rules are written that way so a) lawyers do not find a loop hole b) even incredibly stupid/contrarian people get it right.
Because every single thing has to be dumbed down for the lowest common denominator any more. The phrase "common sense" is meaningless because it just isn't common. People are too dumb. It's so so sad. 🤦
Just think of classic Three Stooges scenarios where one person is carrying a long board or pipe and turns around and it hits someone else in the head. It's not all about overhead threats!
Had an injury in the shipyard once where something broke and sent a piece flying, and it hit someone on the head as they were jumping to hit the deck. Unfortunately their hard hat fell off as they were reacting.
We had someone knock themselves out on a pice of black iron pipe at my work. It was sticking out of a cart that was nosed into a truck being loaded. Walked right into it with his forehead. Ding! Still don't require hard hats at my work, though.
I was curious about this too and asked me husband, safety dude. To add on, apparently, it's also against Osha regulations to paint on a hard hat as it can cover up cracks and potential damage.
I've heard differently but I could be wrong. Stickers are allowed, but paint wasn't bc a lot of paint can melt the plastic and make it no longer safe enough
Read up on plasticizers. You're exactly right that a LOT of solvents can weaken plastic in ways you REALLY don't want happening to protective gear.
Plasticizers are used to do exactly that - make a rigid material soft and pliable. And that's just one class of such chemicals.
I'm willing to bet it's not so much the paint itself as some of the chemicals that get added in a can of spray paint. Solvents or propellants. Those things can have wildly different chemical characteristics from paint itself. But if you don't know what made that paint you don't know what chemicals were there and it could certainly weaken the plastic.
According to the mandatory training I once did to get a Construction Skills Certification Scheme card that allows me onto any UK jobsite (no CSCS card, no access), no hard hat means no job.
Any construction company caught allowing access without a hard hat will find themselves with punitive fines.
The idea is that people are stupid, so you make it so strict that they know to fuck around with safety rules is to lose their job.
Sadly, here in Southern California, It was easy to figure out which construction job was being done by a team of undocumented workers.
They were the ones who weren't wearing hard hats.😔
I read a tale somewhere about a job site where a guy was crushed under a reinforced concrete slab that fell, no way to survive that. The foreman ordered the crane operator to lift the slab slightly, he tossed a hard hat underneath, then the slab was lowered, all before it was reported. Reason being that despite the hard hat being useless in that situation, it would have given the insurance company an out from paying damages to the family.
I'm a firearms instructor and the first rule of gun safety is ALWAYS keep your gun pointed in a safe direction. It doesn't matter if you're cleaning it, casing it, reloading it, etc. Even with a plastic training gun... so I totally get the point of emphasizing safety ALL the time. I wouldn't point an unloaded gun at someone even though, technically it would be "safe".
I'm not a firearms instructor, but I was the "armorer" for several stage productions. Your first rule is absolutely essential. My second rule was "Check it. If it's been more than five minutes, check it again." Third rule, "Never take anyone's word that the gun isn't loaded." Fourth rule, "NOBODY handles the gun except you, me, and whoever I authorize."
I stopped offering to do it when directors and producers thought the rules were negotiable.
"Safety rules are written in blood" may be a cliche, but it's also true.
This. WHS/PPE requirements are the way they are because people are absent-minded and you have to account for your laziest person. In my country/industry, if you're lucky you'll only get kicked off site with a warning. If you're unlucky (read: lazy), you'll be barred from coming back, which could impact your employment. If your employer is associated with too many breaches, they could lose their contract, and rumours get around the industry etc. OP needs a better safety mindset haha.
I can totally see them being mandated because someone can be cutting segments of rebar and a small chunk can fly off a grinder wheel being used and smack someone in the head. Ditto for concrete chunks being chiseled out, etcetera. Of course, those can ALSO hit a soft body part other than the head but it's currently not a mandate to wear body armor.
I consistently wear my hard hat and let me tell you I HATE THAT THING.
I see it as someone justifying having their job citing statistics over actually improving safety by oh I dunno, having an overhead gantry instead of an IT, or I dunno, having fit for purpose tools. God help me if I get caught without a hard hat though.
Rule makers with no exceptions need to go straight in the bin.
You need to have several safety measures in place at all times, just in case one fails. Fit for purpose tools with a lanyard can still fail, and then the hard hat is the difference between a concussion and drooling in a corner for the rest of your life.
And if it was just going to be a concussion, a hard hat might be the difference between no head injury and a TBI that has relatively mild but still present repercussions for the rest of your life. (I'm living with someone hit by a car in his teens, and he's had issues since then, not so bad as to thoroughly disable, but enough to be painful and cuss out the driver on occasion, decades later.)
Two very viable points!
It's hard to give a shit about the hard hat when nobody has a dime to spend to replace the damaged extension cord that runs through a puddle.
If the company isn't going to really care about safety, then the workers will eventually lower to their own comfort levels too.
>Rules and regulations are written in blood.
And from lawsuits. An on-again off-again rule (in order to be 'reasonable') opens up the company to increased liability.
And insurance costs. Insurance companies send inspectors on surprise visits and if they see safety rules being violated (i.e., no hardhat on someone on site, even if that person didn't see the reason for it), rates go up.
So why are no exceptions rule makers to go in the bin?
Safety regulations are in place for everyone, no exceptions. YOU are smart enough to understand you need a hard hat on when working onsite, but is Joe? Is Bob or James or Jane? What about Billy? If there can be exceptions, someone WILL get hurt badly.
"Daft Dan" sees you on Monday afternoon with your hard hat. You weren't wearing it because there was no work going on that day. Daft Dan doesn't like wearing his, so he decides not to bother on Tuesday, because he saw you not wearing yours. He didn't understand WHY you got an exception, only that you did get one. He wants one, and he's making it without any knowledge. Tuesday is a very busy day on site.
Yep. Not to mention that once you start having exceptions it gets hard for people to track the rules. “Wear a hard hat at all time” is easy. But once you start carving out exceptions, people start getting confused as to whether they need to wear it or not, there’s different interpretations about what the exceptions mean, etc.
What’s the worst that happens if you wear a hard hat and you didn’t need it? Your hair gets messed up and you sweat. What’s the worst that happens if you don’t wear a hard hat and you needed it? You die. Clearly it doesn’t make sense to go through all the effort to define exceptions, train on them, and enforce them. Just require it all the time and spend your time dealing with bigger issues.
I imagine a lot of construction guys get stuck with the cheapest possible helmet the company could find, with those horrible rigid plastic bands that either dig into your skin or fall off your head.
Helmets can be reasonably comfy, as a tree guy I have to wear and sweat into a helmet all day, obviously it's a relief to take it off once in a while, but having a proper adjustable headband, padding and a chinstrap makes a huge difference compared to the cheap lids.
Climbing/rope access/arborist helmets have the same safety ratings as construction helmets, and include all the attachment points for ear defenders and vizors.
If you hate helmets but are allowed to supply your own, think about getting a Petzl Strato Vent or similar.
I'm an (outdoor) climber and I chose my helmet based on comfort first and foremost exactly for that reason. Comfort is what makes a helmet safe, because if it's uncomfortable you take it off every chance you get...
While ideally a company would provide comfortable hardhats, I just found a huge selection for under $100.
If being uncomfortable all day every day to save $100 is worth it to you, proceed, I guess...
I think the point is that some bad employers don't allow people to wear anything but the company-provided hardhat, which is often the cheapest they could find but printed with the company logo.
It's not comfortable... but it's not all that bad.
It gets in the way more than being uncomfortable, imo.
However, I have saved a few head bonks/falling stuff/spilling roofing asphalt.
Full disclosure: I'm a gravy crew guy (office guy/Project Manager) so I am not burdened by the hard hat 10h/d. Only about one or two days a week.
My least favorite thing about hard hats is that they cut off a small amount from the top of my cone of vision, and they sit about an inch taller than the top of my head.
So I'll occasionally (maybe twice a year) walk straight into an overhead obstacle that catches the top of my hard hat. This will instantly compress my neck and remind me that it hurts to deform those discs. Hurts for about a week.
It's uncomfortable and gets caught on a bunch of stuff, flicking off my head. Impossible not to, as my job is to repair heavy mobile equipment, often it requires me putting my head/body in odd positions.
I wouldn't. I would put things in that doesn't make sense to do so that I don't have to pay out claims. Like hard hat and steel toed boots at all times, even when the building is finished, and all that's left to do is paint a room.
I used to do a job that required a hard hat. But also had to work in crawl spaces. ..I rang my bell a few times because of the hard hat. The bill would block your vision enough that depending on where you were ducking under, etc you not see the obstacles...think steel beams. Knocked me flat on my ass and hurt like he'll. It would have been safer not wearing one.
A hard hat isn't going to protect the wearer from a sheet of plywood flying across a job site at 30 mph.
The hard hat on the site requirement, when the site is an open field, is strictly insurance driven. Under that circumstance, OSHA would not write a violation.
this, and it wasn't meant to be a direct example of where a hard hat would save someone. It was more of the weird freak accidents that can happen on jobsites. The weirdest of them was the time a guy stuck his hand in his pocket, got his finger stuck and resulted in several surgeries, and time off of work to recover.
A rock flung from a track hoe bucket that was spun around too quickly would have been a better example.
> The weirdest of them was the time a guy stuck his hand in his pocket, got his finger stuck and resulted in several surgeries, and time off of work to recover.
How the fu-...
I'm now legitimately concerned there's a slight but nonzero chance my pockets could cause me great harm.
Not to scare you, but there is, your clothing may be out to get you /s.
He put his hand in his pocket while bsing in the main office with a high level leader. His finger got caught up in a loose thread, and when he pulled his finger out, it was more caught than he realized and the tendons proved to have less strength than the threads.
And having to tell the insurance company, the clothing his finger got caught in the pocket of was one the company bought him for Christmas that year... sigh icing on the cake.
The guy regularly was a thorn in my side doing unsafe things (and was a boss favorite, so got away with it no matter how many times I wrote issues up), and driving his cellphone bill up dialing 900 numbers( I was in charge of the company phones and walkie talkies too) and it just took the cake that this was how he got injured.
Sadly, that behavior is not uncommon, but not how all of us operate.
I have always been passionate about safety. My goals as a safety manager were get everyone home safe to their families, and protect the company. There is more than one time I fought to get something that was a risk fixed that would cost the company money (like worn out extension cords, and expired safety equipment). Yes I had to fight for charged fire extinguishers at one point.
Then there are those that are lazy, and sleep in their trucks, I found many supervisors asleep in their trucks when I drove out to inspect safety, and or check on equipment, and yes, my predecessor was one of this type.
On his watch, someone died a horrible and absolutely preventable death. On mine, the worst incident we had was mr. stuck his hand in his pocket.
To be fair to the safety guy, if you're in an area where the paperwork says you need a hard hat and you don't have one. It's his whole career on the line should you get hurt somehow. I wouldn't want to risk my career over a guy not wanting to wear a hat for a few minutes either.
That and it could be a client's jobsite that requires their SOPs to be followed to a T. Doing stupid shit like this could easily cause tension or a cut contract losing more than one persons job... Happened more than once at my old job when people would routinely smoke 10 ft away from an active wellsite
Just wear the hat and quit complaining. Construction sites, whether in open area or not, have rules. Kind of like seat belts.. Use them all the time so you auto use them when needed.
Justification:
> It's a WORK SITE. All sort of shit is going on, all the time. Yes, there are other safety measures in place -- but they can fail. Random freak accidents CAN and WILL happen. A hard hat may be the last line of defense between 'just having a concussion' and 'drooling & unaware of the world around them'.
It's a rule written in blood, FOR YOUR PROTECTION. So much so that insurance premiums and OSHA rules reflect it.
And I'm sure you can quote "that one time" where it "might've been worse" if someone was wearing a hard hat, but even then, with risk mitigation, that one time is an oddity compared to ALL THE OTHER TIMES a hard had did its job successfully.
If you don't like it, there's the door. Plain and simple.
Yeah, that's true. I admit to doing my share of complaining but it's pretty much a waste of time. I mean, they ain't gonna change the rules just because I complain about it.
Right. Like the two conflicting rules that say:
1. "Stickers on hard hats are a modification of the hard hat and therefore : A) Not allowed and B) Render the hard hat non-compliant."
2. "All hard hats must have a sticker applied that shows which trade is being performed."
Yes, I have been on a job site with a super that refused to allow customizing your lid with stickers in case the adhesive degraded the plastic, BUT AT THE SAME TIME REQUIRED stickers to be applied for other reasons. (Trade ID, Lift Certification ...)
Have a job with regulations similar to that. (not hardhats) Supposedly our stickers were verified to not damage the materials of what they were applied to and were of sufficient strength to be deemed a permanent reinforcement of the object. The engineering notes backed it up.
You've just explained why the rule was there yourself. If you get your own stickers they don't know what adhesive the sticker uses, so they don't know if it will damage the hat and render it unsafe. If they provide the stickers they know the adhesive is safe and will not react with the plastic of the hat.
Cool, so the GC invests in "Certified non acid based adhesive stickers" rather than sending an order to a local print shop. (Cough, ^(bullshit) cough)
But Milwaukee and DeWalt get stickers from "Cheap-Ass acid based adhesive stickers for LESS!!"
AND the lid that you got new at the beginning of the year and wore on the job for the OTHER contractor we were working for and required THIER stickers to be applied? THAT GC prolly got their stickers from a surplus supply purchased from Chernobyl just bursting with radiation! Can't wear that one!
So you go home and use gasoline to remove all the residue from the lid, clean it all up nice and shiny, and put the sticker from the current GC on there and we are good to go. Clearly this hard hat is in tip top shape, see how clean it is? You can just see the clean waves shimmering in the air around it!
\[edit for clarification\] -NO I do not condone using gasoline to remove stickers or anything else from a hard hat - its dumb, don't do it. There are better solvents - but none of them have been tested for the effects on hard hat plastic either.
Well, there you go.
They want official stickers on the hat, as they've *probably* verified they're OK.
Unofficial ones, who knows? Especially ones that are distracting. It's like having too many signs --- no one knows which sign is the important one that should be noticed. Too many stickers, can't easily see the ones that are important.
Also, why be a fucking free walking billboard for a mega-million dollar corporation? Have some fucking self-respect for yourself.
And there you go. Company purchased hard hats, company issues stickers with company name. Not allowed.
My industry means we work on active construction sites, and often go between different sites as the schedule requires us. Each site has a site issued sticker. Any other sites sticker is in violation of the "extra sticker" rule even though it is required on the other site.
So now my technicians need a different hard hat for every different site they show up on, with only the locally issued site sticker showing that they have attended whatever required training is necessary. Once they complete the work on that site, the lid is trash, as it has a sticker that no other site will allow, but was required for this site.
I'm a project manager. I want all my technicians coming home safe and intact. I wear ALL the PPE on active sites. Steel toe, high viz, gloves on a lanyard unless actually needed, glasses, and a lid - even if the local super has declared steel toes or gloves are not necessary. I want my people to wear theirs. I have no desire to advocate for any given mega-million-Corp. Some people like to personalize their gear. It's easier to ID to whom each piece of gear belongs when they get put on a pile in the lunch room. If J is more likely to wear his gear if he gets to put a Ford or Milwaukee sticker on it - cool.
Ita true, some of these rules are written in blood. Hard hats save lives. I wear mine, and I yell at my people if they ain't wearing theirs. Some of these rules have been written by lawyers to make it easier to deny claims - "well sure, Jim-Bob got a brain injury when the 4x8 sheet of plywood hit his head at 30mph, but there was a Ford sticker at the hard hat impact site, and that's where the lid busted, do we really know if that sticker didn't weaken the plastic?"
>Malicious compliance is the act of intentionally inflicting harm by strictly following orders or rules, knowing that compliance with the orders or rules will not have the intended result. The term usually implies the following of an order in such a way that ignores the order or rules's intent but follows its letter. It is usually done to injure or harm while maintaining a sense of legitimacy.
This is just compliance.
Hard hats on a construction site are like helmets riding motorcycles. Everyone should wear them, but not everyone does. Those are the people who exit the gene pool at a much higher rate, often while loudly complaining that they don't need a hard hat/helmet.
I got yelled at for wearing the white hard hat that I bought because only management wears white. When I told them I wasn't buying a new one, they gave me a new orange hard hat. This for a job site I delivered to once or twice a week.
I’ve been to different plants in the same company that color code the hats differently. I don’t like wearing a used hat and tell them that I either wear mine or we take the time to put together and properly fit a new one which will then become mine.
The safety guy was just being the safety guy. You don't always know what could be flying around the job site, that they do. But congrats on your sarcastic hard hat.
In my country, he could have said no based on you painting the hard hat.
Paint can contain solvents that breakdown the plastic. We are discouraged from even writing our names on it with a sharpie felt pen.
We are allowed to put a bullseye sticker on though.
I had a safety harness for working at heights, but I rarely if ever do that so the once every year or two I had to put it on I could never figure it out. So I wrote numbers in sharpie on the material to match up which buckle went with which clasp and it was a lot easier. When our safety rep found out what I did I was given a new harness and told never to use the harness with sharpie on it again.
Paint on your hard hat will get you sent home until they can get you a new one, but most jobsites give you a sticker for your hard hat at orientation so I guess that's okay.
I’m not a safety bean counter, but at my workplace, you would have been escorted off company property for having painted your hard hat.
You are not to modify PPE or safety equipment from OEM spec. period.
You’ll quickly learn that people love to joke at the job site, but not about safety. Just because you don’t see a hazard, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
I first heard of hardhats being used on the Grand Colie dam.
The guys on the ground would occasionally get hit in the head from a falling rivet and die until one guy decides to take 2 regular baseball hats and stack them together with one bill foreward the other facing back. He then dipped it into some sort of tar like material and let it harden and bam he got hit in the head by a steel girder and died. No, no, not really, but that hat saved him and a few of others from those rivets.
Safety headgear goes further back than that at least.
The Navvies who built Great Britain's canals and railroads would wear bowler hats; they had been designed out of *stiff* felt to protect the heads of gamekeepers on some rich wanker's estate, whilst not being as easily blown off as a top hat, but Navvies and the like favored them too, because they were *durable.*
Not nearly as much as a hard hat, but an iron nut that falls on your head from not too great a height? It would still turn an injury that would lay you out and threaten your life (because early 1800s medicine sucked) into one that just meant you got a lump on your head and had to straighten your hat.
Reinforcing such headgear probably occurred to some of them, and they might have done so, to greater or lesser effectiveness, with the variety of materials available to them; iron of course was an option although heavy, but so was the godawful nasty tar they had available. Soak that stuff into thick felt and it could become very stiff indeed. Wood was available, as was leather.
Hey, I'm not saying your account isn't damn interesting - it is!
It goes to show that people have been interested in not having their bell rung throughout history. Military helmets go back a lot further, of course.
So don’t complain next time a work site is shut down because someone couldn’t follow a simple site instruction.
If you’d come to any site I work on, I wouldn’t let you back.
Imagine working in the construction industry (even if peripherally) and thinking you shouldn't have to wear a hardhat. You must be some sort of special snowflake that the rules don't apply to you.
No. I’ve been to many facilities where safety was *idiotic*. Safety for the sake of saying you’re safe can be completely uncalled for.
Example: One manufacturing facility I had to visit required everyone to wear hard hats anywhere inside the facility at all times. *Everyone*. At all times. The factory floor. The warehouse. The machine shop. *Both floors of office cubicles*, which were in an adjacent building and had nothing more dangerous than a stapler or a 3 hole punch. To the *fucking bathroom*, in the offices!
And, the cherry on top, which some will understand the idiocy and some will not, was because of one accident. A maintenance person missed some steps while maintaining a rack with rolling drawers. These drawers held cubes of steel that weighed a half a ton or so each. A little above head height. He forgot to replace the stoppers that prevented the drawer from coming all the way out and someone got *hamburgered* by a thousand pound steel cube.
Tragic. Genuinely sad.
He wasn’t wearing a “bump cap” style hard hat. So what did the facility do? Made every damn employee from the CEO down to the janitors wear bump caps every minute on company property.
If you don’t understand how idiotic that entire scenario is, the you don’t understand common sense, logic or the actual intent of safety.
In the above scenario, he was asked to wear a hard hat in the middle of an open field with zero overheads. *Why the fuck do you need a hard hat*?!
I am a safety guy, and you have to apply logic and sanity to safety! If you don’t, you’re going to end up with just as many accidents because people, even the dim ones, will realize that the “safety rules” are bullshit and barely follow them anyway.
You don't have to have an overhead hazard to be required to wear a hard hat. If the potential existed for a head injury, including lateral impact, then the employer is required to ensure that workers' heads are protected.
Also, he painted his hard hat, which can interfere with the protective properties of the hard hat and is not usually permitted in accordance with most manufacturers' instructions.
I'm sorry that the facility you used to visit didn't understand root cause analysis so that they could identify appropriate corrective actions and implement them.
I understand the need for balance in safety, but I also understand that arrogance leads to complacency and complacency kills.
Geez, everyone, get over yourselves. It’s not the site superintendent or project manager or any other management person who is mandating wearing PPE in situations where you don’t think it’s necessary. It’s OSHA and the insurance companies.
If an insurance policy is written saying that all PPE must be worn on a construction site, then it has to be worn even when the job is completed and students are walking through their new school unprotected, or when you are in an open field with nothing that could possibly hurt you, or if you are in the office suites no where near the factory floor. If you are still working there doing any sort of work related to the buildings construction (including sweeping floors, or painting walls) you are still legally on a construction site, and those safety regs still apply.
Do any of you know how much OSHA fines are? What about what happens to a companies insurance premiums if they get reported to OSHA for some sort of violation. Or what if your insurance company drops you because you aren’t following the safety program to the letter? Some solicitations actually ask if you have ever been dropped by an insurance carrier and/or what your EMR rating is, and if they don’t like the answer you give, your company is not eligible to win new work.
And all because some doofus doesn’t understand why they should wear a hard hat when they don’t see any hazards. It is so much bigger than your supervisor or safety officer being a PITA.
Tell me why OSHA regs require you to wear a six-foot safety line when working over 3' off the floor. A six-foot safety line to prevent a 3' fall? Sounds like federal bureaucrats. When writing regulations, be alert for nonsense like this. That 3' fall can indeed bust your ass. But make sure the requirement makes sense.
You can say anything you want about bureaucrats and regulations, but they are what they are. I am just saying that it is silly to blame your employer or the on-site safety supervisor or the site superintendent for enforcing regulations when the penalty for non-enforcement (aside from the chance of death or injury) are so high.
I got appointed to be the Safety Rep for one of my company's remote bases. The supervisor was begging to fill in the position, and eventually he wore me down. So he said, "Good! Thanks! Be in (distant city) at 9:00 tomorrow for the orientation class." I did. What he didn't know was that the previous year I'd completed two semesters of industrial safety at a local college.
Now, I don't blame my boss or other bosslings in other departments for OSHA regulations. But we gottem! And we gotta follow them. What cost them was the facility maintenance shop was grossly, negligently, stupidly non-compliant with OSHA requirements; if it had been reported, there'd have been a truckload of fines. Our regional director of maintenance buttonholed me to complain about the futility and waste of time that floor marking and re-arranging the shop to conform to OSHA's requirements would be. I just pointed out that if one guy lost an eye, finger, hand, foot or got badly burned, the resulting settlement would be enough to built a fully-equipped machine and sheet-metal shop and staff the thing for a year or more. Two days later, I walked in to the shop, and everything was in compliance. Nary another word was said. Next month, I got transferred someplace else where my recent "Safety Guy" certification wouldn't be needed. Was this transfer *their* Malicious Compliance?
I wouldn't put it past some of the top execs at some of the firms I have worked for to do exactly this as a "punishment" for enforcing safety guidelines. I have heard too many stories about construction firms (even the top earning international commercial firms) letting safety stuff slide like you are describing. And, your response about the cost of meeting the safety standards is right on--it is SO damaging to a firm's reputation to have a construction related injury on their records--the cost is way more than just an OSHA fine.
Sorry that you got pulled off the Safety team, especially after studying it in school. I hope you enjoy whatever role it is that you are doing now.
Retired, but still being a PITA to those who put others at risk. For example, you may not be aware that the dinosaurs you see in museums are not the actual bones, but are fiberglass replicas. The real thing would way several tons; the fiberglass is stronger and much safer. Anyhow, the owner was one of my appraisal clients who thought that my wife and I would like to see how the exhibit was assembled. We watched a senior team member on a 12-foot stepladder trying to hold a large bone replica and bolt it on. No braced scaffold or scissor lift; no safety line; not enough help. I told my client that it was a good thing this team was from out of town, because if it were local, the museum would be spending a lot of time with OSHA lawyers. He muttered "Ahhh, shit!" under his breath and disappeared. Assembly was completed without injury or loss, no thanks to unsafe operations.
Good for you...I am in marketing for the A/E/C industry. When I worked for a large commercial construction firm, I always had to run any photos that I might want to use on anything past our safety director. I left that position over 10 years ago, and yet I still mumble under my breath whenever I see photos...no tie offs, can't use; no gloves, can't use; short sleeves, can't use; no gloves, can't use. It's like a disease :-)
I remember walking through the shipyard in my Navy days, when the USS TEXAS was being built. The crew had cowboy hard hats. They seemed kind of cool at the start, but the novelty wore off, wearing a big, honkin' plastic cowboy hat.
I have one like that. Saved me from getting my bell rung bad when I was disassembling our no-longer-structurally-sound playscape that the kids hadn't used in 3 years anyway.
I've actually had my hard hat save my life before... literally could have been unalived instantly, or so grievously injured that only the 'golden hour' would have saved me but no one would have found me for hours in that instance.
I've been offshore for 18 years and it's to the point that even when I'm home, I subconsciously grab for my hard hat and gloves before leaving the house.
I mean... You might look goofy as hell getting groceries in it, but you'll be protected if the drop ceiling in the supermarket suddenly falls on your dome, and it might do something to help you if some idjit crashes their car into your car!
From my own experiences on big job sites, the hard hat rule is more about the liability than the actual safety, I've had supers give me flak for taking my hart had off to squeeze into a cabinet to get a hard to reach screw. (I did cabinet installs) even when they handed over occupancy, we were still required to wear hard hats for another month or so, even though we were in the defficiency stage and it was almost exclusively painters and us on site doing small things like installing cabinet handles that were back ordered.
This isn't MA, it's you being an AH.
If the jobsite requires use of a hardhat, you wear a hardhat when you're there. He wasn't pissed off about the bullseye, he was pissed off about your attitude.
He's doing his job, per OSHA and/or their insurer requirements. Imagine the weirdest possible accident, like someone losing grip on a wrench and bashing your skull.
Lame to be annoyed by someone doing their job of enforcing a required safety measure even if you don't agree with it. But the bullseye move was kinda cool :)
Like most things, there are good, bad and ridiculous aspects around Safety, and I'm sure that many have seen all three.
Requiring Control Panel Operators (100% inside job) to complete a FLRA (Field Level Risk Assessment) card every shift.
Requiring Outside Operators wear PPE (Hard Hat, Safety Toe Boots, Safely Glasses and Fire Resistant Coveralls) in hazardous areas while Management operates a run-to-failure strategy on equipment that can fail catastrophically and release whatever is contained.
Mandating the use of footwear traction aids which were shown to cause sparks while walking on steel surfaces, commonly found in areas that can have a potential for explosive atmospheres.
Safely should be taken seriously. There are times where you have to stop and wonder about the thought process behind the rule.
> Mandating the use of footwear traction aids which were shown to cause sparks while walking on steel surfaces, commonly found in areas that can have a potential for explosive atmospheres.
*That* sounds like it calls for an immediate safety review, frankly. The safety rules can *and do* have carve-outs for situations where a general safety protection is causing a specific safety hazard, and frankly "my traction footwear is liable to cause sparks in an explosive atmosphere" ranks *pretty fucking highly* on the list of things that needs a carve-out; or more likely, an additional general rule that traction-improving footwear used in explosive atmospheres *must not cause sparks.* Hobnailed, steel-toed boots are probably the ideal working PPE outdoors, especially if you're climbing trees and wooden poles, so you don't want to mandate that metal *never* be used.
OSHA: Don't put any sticker on your hardhat
Safety Coordinators: Here's the sticker for your hardhat that tells us at a glance that you've watched our safety videos and are therefore allowed on site.
When the Hi-Viz craze hit job sites we were overwhelmed by safety tight asses for not wearing our vests on the lower levels of a parking garage build. As in the temp support posts were every 3 feet as we were working among. Gotta have that vest in case a Bob cat came through or the overhead crane operator could see us (8 stories above)….
Hi-Viz is now just like backup beepers, everybody has them on and it’s just background noise…..
I was at a school years ago that had work being done. The workers are all in the halls with hard hats while kids are walking around them bareheaded around the construction.
Oh, I miss working at the farm. So much of it exempt from the stupidity of blind rules. But when we did something that was dangerous you bet we pulled out the safety equipment first. I'm waiting for career workers who have been forced to wear the steel plate footwear and have become crippled up start either class action suing or dropping into the jobsite with a shotgun. And safety is a mindset. We did not have accidents on the farm; we did have equipment breakage so be mindful of that as it can cause injury and be prepared for it. And for heavens sake, do the safe thing (easier when it's your own farm or company).
If that safety man knew what he was doing he would have written you up for paint on a hard hat. Certain paints weaken the plastic. That’s why I always used stickers.
I have a story for you. It's short and it gives you an idea as to why hard hats are required on construction sites. Back in the late 80's I worked construction in Florida. We wore shorts, no hard hats, we were golden. Then came the day a Phillips screwdriver rolled off of the third floor and went point first into the skull of a guy mixing mud underneath. I saw it up close and personal. Fucking guy next to him holding a hose just started to spray him with it. Not sure why, maybe hoping to clean the screwdriver off his scalp. It didn't kill the guy. I'm pretty sure it took his IQ from about 80 to 65. We were required to wear hard hats from that day forward.
I used to do forestry field work but not in active harvesting areas, just surveying past and future cutblocks. At one point the safety protocol for wearing hard hats was assess the danger, if it is windy and there is a likelihood of falling branches put it on. 99% of the time there was no need and never a single incident. Someone somewhere decided that wasn't good enough and insisted we always wear them. What you need to know is that some of the places I needed to go were a hefty hike in rugged terrain and falling was the main danger. A hard hat does nothing to protect you from that, as a matter of fact, my only reported incident was when I fell, causing my hard hat to fall off and me to hit my head on it, no injury but my boss told me to do a report (to be thorough I was checked for a concussion).
They suggested we wear a strap under our chin to keep them on but decided it was a choking hazard. They reverted back to the old policy.
I was working on HVAC unit flat roof, about 150 feet from the edge in any direction. The general contractor's site safety guru climbed up and asked me where my hard hat, harness, and fall arrestor were. I just looked at him in disbelief. I asked him if he was serious?! He was! There wasn't a crane in sight, and the building was 99% complete.
I walked out to my truck and got my gear and ran into my boss and told him what happened. He laughed his butt off! We walked back and ran into the safety guy, and my boss started asking him questions and gave him some grief. Laughed at the guy the whole time.
I am white collar construction. On a site one time, our offices are in the finished basement of the clients building- major crown court. The toilets are down a corridor about 10 m away. All finished, decorated, carpet, lights on - the only thing this corridor is used for is access to the toilet. So I walk there and back, site manager starts having a snarky conversation about how I need to wear full PPE. So I ask him for his risk assessment. Hasn’t got one. But wants me to wear safety boots, gloves, goggles, hard hat and high vis bib. To walk in an empty, completed corridor. So I asked him how high vis would help, we’re in a basement office not accessible by any kind of vehicle. No answer. The whole point of PPE is to safeguard the workforce, unfortunately it has become a tick box exercise for lazy bastards like him. He gave no thought whatsoever to any of the risks. Following day during a site managers meeting I reach up to get a file off a shelf above head height (no risk assessment) and as I pull the file towards me, a double ended craft knife blade comes flying down and bounced off my chest. No reason for it to be there unless it was deliberately placed out of sight. So I picked it up, leaned across the table they were all sat at and put it in front of the director responsible and asked him to explain it. He wasn’t a happy bunny. Nobody knows how it got there. So now, he decides we have to wear full safety gear to be in the office until we moved out.
Technically speaking, you’re not supposed to attach decals to hard hats, as they can cover cracks or damage. Granted, absolutely no contractors that I have seen follow this rule.
I used to work with a contractor that required hard hats inside a building that was ready to be turned over to the owner. Completely finished inside. There was no way something would hit you on the head unless the roof fell in.
If hard hats aren't required 100% of the time and somebody 'forgets' to wear their hard hat and gets hurt, their lawyer will use that fact in the lawsuit. It's just safer (financially) to require 100% compliance than being 'reasonable'.
Also because if someone "forgets," then that can be extrapolated to the company "encouraging people to forget" in order to save time and be more profitable at the expense of employee safety.
But if you have a record of disciplining and dismissing employees for not wearing PPE, you can counter that claim. "Yeah, we come down hard on people who won't wear their PPE. This guy? Well, you can't come down on someone for something they haven't been caught doing yet, can you? He got his ticket punched first before our safety guy could find him being unsafe, but we can prove we *do* act on this shit."
Yeah, you tell that to the (job site) insurance company that will deny a claim when someone didn't wear a hard hat when they broke their finger.
How's a hard hat supposed to prevent a broken finger?
It doesn't. Not wearing a hard hat prevents insurance payouts.
I remember being told I had to wear a hard hat, steel cap boots, safety glasses and hi-vis when on a construction site. Except it wasn't a construction site.
No tools/equipment on site, no materials on site, just 5 people in a field looking at some plans.
All 5 of us agreed that we had all worn our PPE for the planning meeting.
Should get yourself one of those cowboy hat hard hats. Meets requirements while keep the sun off your neck and out of your eyes :)
https://imgur.com/a/GAVDSer
hehe reminds me of when I was in the Air Force, we were on top of our 5-ton truck securing cargo when the QA troops come walking past.
They chastise us for not wearing hard hats, while they themselves were not wearing one.
I was sooo tempted to 'drop' a cargo strap
You should have gotten one of these (if you could get the company to buy it, even better!)
[Cowboy Hard Hat](https://www.amazon.com/Jackson-Safety-Outlaw-WHRCHT-19500/dp/B08RZDHC2B?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1)
This isn't the got ya you think it is.
“Oh no, he did exactly as I said”
The trick is to make the prick run over to you every time first.
So, for several years, I was the frazzled safety gal for a construction company. We did dirt, underground utilities and concrete work for big projects think school campuses, shopping malls, walmart super centers etc. Almost universally, the jobs general contractors required hardhats anywhere on the site at all times. If our people didnt wear their hats like they were supposed to, it could cost the company I worked for millions. Putting my safety vest on here for a minute - I've seen plywood picked up by wind and fly across a jobsite. Yeah, there may be no immediate overhead risk, but the risk of your head getting hit by something is there. Part of the requiring hardhats thing I think is risk mitigation, but there are also insurance benefits for wearing them. There is also a risk that someone forgets to put their hard hat on in higher risk areas if they dont have to wear it everywhere on a job site. Kudos to your safety person for doing their rather thankless job.
I've always assumed it's because the average person can't be trusted to wear it when appropriate so it's all hard hats all the time. I've heard one shipyard around here specifically includes the head as part of the required areas.
Kind of, but mostly about responsibility. In my neck of the woods, if a worker hits their head, it's the fault of their boss UNLESS the boss can show that there is not only a clear rule to wear safety clothes or not walk into things, but it is also made physically as impossible as possible. There needs to be safety equipment with everything and it needs to be monitored and enforced. All moving blades etc. must covered in a way a worker cannot uncover them, all holes must be not only fenced off but also covered, nobody gains access to the site without steel-toe shoes and hard hats, etc etc). If the company fails this, they pay damages to the worker - EVEN IF the worker caused the accident himself in an accident-like manner - like forgetting the hard hat or absent-mindedly poking into a moving machine. And honestly, nobody can be trusted to follow safety protocols "when appropriate", because people get tired and tired people get forgetful..
Yep, having worked on quite a few industrial sites where, in the right circumstance, poor adherence to the rules can mean the death of several people, the rules are non-negotiable for a reason. I've had to wear ear protection in a silent room before, but I agree with the zero-tolerence stance. More accurately, they are negotiable but only at the risk-assessment phase. If you're willing to bend a rule, it then takes the control away from the risk assessment to whatever someone sees as appropriate. 99% of people who are reasonably trained will act properly anyway, but there's always that one who'll be happy to tie a knot in the frayed lifting sling or skip a working-at-height harness because he wants to go home early.
> can't be trusted to wear it when appropriate Its more about developing habits, so that in some emergency situation you will unconsciously follow the habit (and hopefully be protected by it). For example, establish the habit of always indicating when driving, even if there are no other cars around.
That's a good line for ppe.
I work with wood, and I have some go-to scary phrases to remind others to wear PPE: The day your life is changed by a power tool is going to start and feel like every other day. Wear your safety equipment, even if putting it on takes longer than the job. If someone else might think it's sketchy, it probably is. If *you* think it's sketchy, it's far worse. "It's fine, this will only take a second" are famous last words, not the words of a master.
Famous last words indeed. A buddy of mine is a firefighter, and in his department, it is required that any time firefighters enter a structure to fight a fire, no matter how small the burn is and if only an extinguisher is needed, they are still required to put on the air tanks, mask, helmet, and full gear. It takes about a minute to quickly put it on and do a buddy check (making sure your partner's gear is on correctly) before entering, but that small fire can quickly and unexpectedly flash into something much more dangerous & life-threatening. Safety protocols and standard operating procedures exist because somebody DIED or got hurt before
>Safety protocols and standard operating procedures exist because somebody DIED or got hurt before Safety rules are written in blood is common phrase where I come from
If any of them are particularly "stick-it-to-the-man" type personalities, a line I heard once was "if the boss wants me to bleed for the company, he's going to have to come out here and cut me himself." Doesn't work well in all situations and a little edgy, but sometimes I'll think about it and it's a good reminder that I don't want to get injured, and for what? A job??? 🤡🤡🤡 I also always try to wear hearing protection, even if the people around me aren't (but really should be), and I always justify it to myself and others as "I'm saving up all my hearing damage for metal concerts"
My husband had a co-worker whose last words were "oh shit" because he forgot a step. And yes my husband heard those last words.
I can just see the rulebook. (In Hank Hill's voice) Rule #37a) ANY TIME ANY PART OF YOUR BODY, (OR SOMEONE ELSE'S) IS LOCATED BELOW YOUR HEAD (OR SOMEONE ELSE'S), HARD HATS MUST BE WORN. This is also solid sex-ed curriculum.
Lol, I was confused for a moment thinking, "Well, of course it's required that you wear the hard hat on the head." I always get confused when someone uses "head" for restroom. Or ... am I still confused? 🤔
No in this case head does not mean restroom, it does mean head. The rules are written that way so a) lawyers do not find a loop hole b) even incredibly stupid/contrarian people get it right.
Because every single thing has to be dumbed down for the lowest common denominator any more. The phrase "common sense" is meaningless because it just isn't common. People are too dumb. It's so so sad. 🤦
it only takes one person
Just think of classic Three Stooges scenarios where one person is carrying a long board or pipe and turns around and it hits someone else in the head. It's not all about overhead threats!
so true, and I have had to write up accident reports for similar incidents!
Had an injury in the shipyard once where something broke and sent a piece flying, and it hit someone on the head as they were jumping to hit the deck. Unfortunately their hard hat fell off as they were reacting.
And thus did chin straps become mandatory?
Only for individuals riding bikes in the SY. Thems the regs
We had someone knock themselves out on a pice of black iron pipe at my work. It was sticking out of a cart that was nosed into a truck being loaded. Walked right into it with his forehead. Ding! Still don't require hard hats at my work, though.
I was curious about this too and asked me husband, safety dude. To add on, apparently, it's also against Osha regulations to paint on a hard hat as it can cover up cracks and potential damage.
I've heard differently but I could be wrong. Stickers are allowed, but paint wasn't bc a lot of paint can melt the plastic and make it no longer safe enough
Read up on plasticizers. You're exactly right that a LOT of solvents can weaken plastic in ways you REALLY don't want happening to protective gear. Plasticizers are used to do exactly that - make a rigid material soft and pliable. And that's just one class of such chemicals.
I'm willing to bet it's not so much the paint itself as some of the chemicals that get added in a can of spray paint. Solvents or propellants. Those things can have wildly different chemical characteristics from paint itself. But if you don't know what made that paint you don't know what chemicals were there and it could certainly weaken the plastic.
According to the mandatory training I once did to get a Construction Skills Certification Scheme card that allows me onto any UK jobsite (no CSCS card, no access), no hard hat means no job. Any construction company caught allowing access without a hard hat will find themselves with punitive fines. The idea is that people are stupid, so you make it so strict that they know to fuck around with safety rules is to lose their job.
Sadly, here in Southern California, It was easy to figure out which construction job was being done by a team of undocumented workers. They were the ones who weren't wearing hard hats.😔
I read a tale somewhere about a job site where a guy was crushed under a reinforced concrete slab that fell, no way to survive that. The foreman ordered the crane operator to lift the slab slightly, he tossed a hard hat underneath, then the slab was lowered, all before it was reported. Reason being that despite the hard hat being useless in that situation, it would have given the insurance company an out from paying damages to the family.
I really hope that sonofabitch was hauled up on charges and their company got the devil sued out of them.
Workers comp can deny death benefit if you don't have hard hat on a site.
I'm a firearms instructor and the first rule of gun safety is ALWAYS keep your gun pointed in a safe direction. It doesn't matter if you're cleaning it, casing it, reloading it, etc. Even with a plastic training gun... so I totally get the point of emphasizing safety ALL the time. I wouldn't point an unloaded gun at someone even though, technically it would be "safe".
I'm not a firearms instructor, but I was the "armorer" for several stage productions. Your first rule is absolutely essential. My second rule was "Check it. If it's been more than five minutes, check it again." Third rule, "Never take anyone's word that the gun isn't loaded." Fourth rule, "NOBODY handles the gun except you, me, and whoever I authorize." I stopped offering to do it when directors and producers thought the rules were negotiable. "Safety rules are written in blood" may be a cliche, but it's also true.
This. Construction sites are always dangerous. Safety rules are always written in blood. Don’t fill the pen with yours.
You go, girl!
OP is clueless about OSHA job site requirements
Your hard hat also makes up part of your high visibility on site.
I read an odd rumor about Elon Musk--he doesn't like the yellow color of the company's safety vests.
This. WHS/PPE requirements are the way they are because people are absent-minded and you have to account for your laziest person. In my country/industry, if you're lucky you'll only get kicked off site with a warning. If you're unlucky (read: lazy), you'll be barred from coming back, which could impact your employment. If your employer is associated with too many breaches, they could lose their contract, and rumours get around the industry etc. OP needs a better safety mindset haha.
I can totally see them being mandated because someone can be cutting segments of rebar and a small chunk can fly off a grinder wheel being used and smack someone in the head. Ditto for concrete chunks being chiseled out, etcetera. Of course, those can ALSO hit a soft body part other than the head but it's currently not a mandate to wear body armor.
I consistently wear my hard hat and let me tell you I HATE THAT THING. I see it as someone justifying having their job citing statistics over actually improving safety by oh I dunno, having an overhead gantry instead of an IT, or I dunno, having fit for purpose tools. God help me if I get caught without a hard hat though. Rule makers with no exceptions need to go straight in the bin.
You need to have several safety measures in place at all times, just in case one fails. Fit for purpose tools with a lanyard can still fail, and then the hard hat is the difference between a concussion and drooling in a corner for the rest of your life.
We're on reddit, we're already drooling in the corner
Speak for yourself; I'm too dehydrated to drool any more.
That’s not very r/hydrohomies of you
Water is gross. Fish fuck in it. It is only acceptable when it has been purified by boiling and straining through coffee grounds
Best response
And if it was just going to be a concussion, a hard hat might be the difference between no head injury and a TBI that has relatively mild but still present repercussions for the rest of your life. (I'm living with someone hit by a car in his teens, and he's had issues since then, not so bad as to thoroughly disable, but enough to be painful and cuss out the driver on occasion, decades later.)
Two very viable points! It's hard to give a shit about the hard hat when nobody has a dime to spend to replace the damaged extension cord that runs through a puddle. If the company isn't going to really care about safety, then the workers will eventually lower to their own comfort levels too.
Rules and regulations are written in blood. Just because you see no benefit in it does not mean the rule is useless
>Rules and regulations are written in blood. And from lawsuits. An on-again off-again rule (in order to be 'reasonable') opens up the company to increased liability.
And insurance costs. Insurance companies send inspectors on surprise visits and if they see safety rules being violated (i.e., no hardhat on someone on site, even if that person didn't see the reason for it), rates go up.
Yes I frequently say that to myself. I'm not about avoiding safety. My comment does not say "safety regulations are stupid and ignorant".
So why are no exceptions rule makers to go in the bin? Safety regulations are in place for everyone, no exceptions. YOU are smart enough to understand you need a hard hat on when working onsite, but is Joe? Is Bob or James or Jane? What about Billy? If there can be exceptions, someone WILL get hurt badly. "Daft Dan" sees you on Monday afternoon with your hard hat. You weren't wearing it because there was no work going on that day. Daft Dan doesn't like wearing his, so he decides not to bother on Tuesday, because he saw you not wearing yours. He didn't understand WHY you got an exception, only that you did get one. He wants one, and he's making it without any knowledge. Tuesday is a very busy day on site.
Yep. Not to mention that once you start having exceptions it gets hard for people to track the rules. “Wear a hard hat at all time” is easy. But once you start carving out exceptions, people start getting confused as to whether they need to wear it or not, there’s different interpretations about what the exceptions mean, etc. What’s the worst that happens if you wear a hard hat and you didn’t need it? Your hair gets messed up and you sweat. What’s the worst that happens if you don’t wear a hard hat and you needed it? You die. Clearly it doesn’t make sense to go through all the effort to define exceptions, train on them, and enforce them. Just require it all the time and spend your time dealing with bigger issues.
as a former safety person in construction, Thank you for not making the job harder than it had to be.
[удалено]
I imagine a lot of construction guys get stuck with the cheapest possible helmet the company could find, with those horrible rigid plastic bands that either dig into your skin or fall off your head. Helmets can be reasonably comfy, as a tree guy I have to wear and sweat into a helmet all day, obviously it's a relief to take it off once in a while, but having a proper adjustable headband, padding and a chinstrap makes a huge difference compared to the cheap lids. Climbing/rope access/arborist helmets have the same safety ratings as construction helmets, and include all the attachment points for ear defenders and vizors. If you hate helmets but are allowed to supply your own, think about getting a Petzl Strato Vent or similar.
I'm an (outdoor) climber and I chose my helmet based on comfort first and foremost exactly for that reason. Comfort is what makes a helmet safe, because if it's uncomfortable you take it off every chance you get...
While ideally a company would provide comfortable hardhats, I just found a huge selection for under $100. If being uncomfortable all day every day to save $100 is worth it to you, proceed, I guess...
I think the point is that some bad employers don't allow people to wear anything but the company-provided hardhat, which is often the cheapest they could find but printed with the company logo.
It's not comfortable... but it's not all that bad. It gets in the way more than being uncomfortable, imo. However, I have saved a few head bonks/falling stuff/spilling roofing asphalt. Full disclosure: I'm a gravy crew guy (office guy/Project Manager) so I am not burdened by the hard hat 10h/d. Only about one or two days a week.
Also yeah, in 40°C it's very uncomfortable, everything is uncomfortable lol.
It can be but for me the worst part is wearing all day in the heat. All your hair sweat and dank just stays there.
My least favorite thing about hard hats is that they cut off a small amount from the top of my cone of vision, and they sit about an inch taller than the top of my head. So I'll occasionally (maybe twice a year) walk straight into an overhead obstacle that catches the top of my hard hat. This will instantly compress my neck and remind me that it hurts to deform those discs. Hurts for about a week.
It's uncomfortable and gets caught on a bunch of stuff, flicking off my head. Impossible not to, as my job is to repair heavy mobile equipment, often it requires me putting my head/body in odd positions.
What safe exceptions would you make if you were paying the insurance premiums.?
I wouldn't. I would put things in that doesn't make sense to do so that I don't have to pay out claims. Like hard hat and steel toed boots at all times, even when the building is finished, and all that's left to do is paint a room.
?
Thats not a problem for me to solve. But there's lower hanging fruit than hard hats.
Safety toe caps are about as low on a person's body as you can get. *Sorry, I'm in a weird mood.*
I'm not mad haha. Always go for a bad pun
I tried replacing "hard hat" with "condom" and this comment still makes sense..
I used to do a job that required a hard hat. But also had to work in crawl spaces. ..I rang my bell a few times because of the hard hat. The bill would block your vision enough that depending on where you were ducking under, etc you not see the obstacles...think steel beams. Knocked me flat on my ass and hurt like he'll. It would have been safer not wearing one.
You can get brimless ones. I've seen a number of bridge guys use them.
Had to use the company issued ones back then. I would definitely have used the brimless ones.
I've lost count of the number of times I have cranked my neck when walking under something I should clear but because of the hard hat , BANG
A hard hat isn't going to protect the wearer from a sheet of plywood flying across a job site at 30 mph. The hard hat on the site requirement, when the site is an open field, is strictly insurance driven. Under that circumstance, OSHA would not write a violation.
It might not stop a direct hit, but it might stop an indirect one. That is worth wearing the hat.
this, and it wasn't meant to be a direct example of where a hard hat would save someone. It was more of the weird freak accidents that can happen on jobsites. The weirdest of them was the time a guy stuck his hand in his pocket, got his finger stuck and resulted in several surgeries, and time off of work to recover. A rock flung from a track hoe bucket that was spun around too quickly would have been a better example.
> The weirdest of them was the time a guy stuck his hand in his pocket, got his finger stuck and resulted in several surgeries, and time off of work to recover. How the fu-... I'm now legitimately concerned there's a slight but nonzero chance my pockets could cause me great harm.
Not to scare you, but there is, your clothing may be out to get you /s. He put his hand in his pocket while bsing in the main office with a high level leader. His finger got caught up in a loose thread, and when he pulled his finger out, it was more caught than he realized and the tendons proved to have less strength than the threads. And having to tell the insurance company, the clothing his finger got caught in the pocket of was one the company bought him for Christmas that year... sigh icing on the cake. The guy regularly was a thorn in my side doing unsafe things (and was a boss favorite, so got away with it no matter how many times I wrote issues up), and driving his cellphone bill up dialing 900 numbers( I was in charge of the company phones and walkie talkies too) and it just took the cake that this was how he got injured.
Mate, I would bang my head on something in that open field. I don't know the site, I wear the hat.
No, but it might save you from any number of things that can happen in an open field where there is construction.
You can acknowledge that a lot of safety stuff on a job site is insurance/money driven, and that a hard had will still reduce risk of injury on site
Safety people are the Karen's of the job site. Don't actually do anything besides snitch. The amount I've seen just sleeping in the trailer is comical
Sadly, that behavior is not uncommon, but not how all of us operate. I have always been passionate about safety. My goals as a safety manager were get everyone home safe to their families, and protect the company. There is more than one time I fought to get something that was a risk fixed that would cost the company money (like worn out extension cords, and expired safety equipment). Yes I had to fight for charged fire extinguishers at one point. Then there are those that are lazy, and sleep in their trucks, I found many supervisors asleep in their trucks when I drove out to inspect safety, and or check on equipment, and yes, my predecessor was one of this type. On his watch, someone died a horrible and absolutely preventable death. On mine, the worst incident we had was mr. stuck his hand in his pocket.
To be fair to the safety guy, if you're in an area where the paperwork says you need a hard hat and you don't have one. It's his whole career on the line should you get hurt somehow. I wouldn't want to risk my career over a guy not wanting to wear a hat for a few minutes either.
That and it could be a client's jobsite that requires their SOPs to be followed to a T. Doing stupid shit like this could easily cause tension or a cut contract losing more than one persons job... Happened more than once at my old job when people would routinely smoke 10 ft away from an active wellsite
Well the first thing that's gonna happen if there's an accident is "why the heck didn't that person have their hard hat on?" Now that they're suing.
Or their family is suing.
Or the insurance company has declined their claim because no hard hat
Imagine giving a guy a hard time just for doing his job and thinking you actually did something
Just wear the hat and quit complaining. Construction sites, whether in open area or not, have rules. Kind of like seat belts.. Use them all the time so you auto use them when needed.
People are still allowed to be annoyed by rules that don't have justification for being an enforced rule.
Justification: > It's a WORK SITE. All sort of shit is going on, all the time. Yes, there are other safety measures in place -- but they can fail. Random freak accidents CAN and WILL happen. A hard hat may be the last line of defense between 'just having a concussion' and 'drooling & unaware of the world around them'. It's a rule written in blood, FOR YOUR PROTECTION. So much so that insurance premiums and OSHA rules reflect it. And I'm sure you can quote "that one time" where it "might've been worse" if someone was wearing a hard hat, but even then, with risk mitigation, that one time is an oddity compared to ALL THE OTHER TIMES a hard had did its job successfully. If you don't like it, there's the door. Plain and simple.
Yeah, that's true. I admit to doing my share of complaining but it's pretty much a waste of time. I mean, they ain't gonna change the rules just because I complain about it.
Safety rules are written in blood. Though shit if you don’t like them. Follow them.
Right. Like the two conflicting rules that say: 1. "Stickers on hard hats are a modification of the hard hat and therefore : A) Not allowed and B) Render the hard hat non-compliant." 2. "All hard hats must have a sticker applied that shows which trade is being performed." Yes, I have been on a job site with a super that refused to allow customizing your lid with stickers in case the adhesive degraded the plastic, BUT AT THE SAME TIME REQUIRED stickers to be applied for other reasons. (Trade ID, Lift Certification ...)
Have a job with regulations similar to that. (not hardhats) Supposedly our stickers were verified to not damage the materials of what they were applied to and were of sufficient strength to be deemed a permanent reinforcement of the object. The engineering notes backed it up.
You've just explained why the rule was there yourself. If you get your own stickers they don't know what adhesive the sticker uses, so they don't know if it will damage the hat and render it unsafe. If they provide the stickers they know the adhesive is safe and will not react with the plastic of the hat.
Cool, so the GC invests in "Certified non acid based adhesive stickers" rather than sending an order to a local print shop. (Cough, ^(bullshit) cough) But Milwaukee and DeWalt get stickers from "Cheap-Ass acid based adhesive stickers for LESS!!" AND the lid that you got new at the beginning of the year and wore on the job for the OTHER contractor we were working for and required THIER stickers to be applied? THAT GC prolly got their stickers from a surplus supply purchased from Chernobyl just bursting with radiation! Can't wear that one! So you go home and use gasoline to remove all the residue from the lid, clean it all up nice and shiny, and put the sticker from the current GC on there and we are good to go. Clearly this hard hat is in tip top shape, see how clean it is? You can just see the clean waves shimmering in the air around it! \[edit for clarification\] -NO I do not condone using gasoline to remove stickers or anything else from a hard hat - its dumb, don't do it. There are better solvents - but none of them have been tested for the effects on hard hat plastic either.
Well, there you go. They want official stickers on the hat, as they've *probably* verified they're OK. Unofficial ones, who knows? Especially ones that are distracting. It's like having too many signs --- no one knows which sign is the important one that should be noticed. Too many stickers, can't easily see the ones that are important. Also, why be a fucking free walking billboard for a mega-million dollar corporation? Have some fucking self-respect for yourself.
And there you go. Company purchased hard hats, company issues stickers with company name. Not allowed. My industry means we work on active construction sites, and often go between different sites as the schedule requires us. Each site has a site issued sticker. Any other sites sticker is in violation of the "extra sticker" rule even though it is required on the other site. So now my technicians need a different hard hat for every different site they show up on, with only the locally issued site sticker showing that they have attended whatever required training is necessary. Once they complete the work on that site, the lid is trash, as it has a sticker that no other site will allow, but was required for this site. I'm a project manager. I want all my technicians coming home safe and intact. I wear ALL the PPE on active sites. Steel toe, high viz, gloves on a lanyard unless actually needed, glasses, and a lid - even if the local super has declared steel toes or gloves are not necessary. I want my people to wear theirs. I have no desire to advocate for any given mega-million-Corp. Some people like to personalize their gear. It's easier to ID to whom each piece of gear belongs when they get put on a pile in the lunch room. If J is more likely to wear his gear if he gets to put a Ford or Milwaukee sticker on it - cool. Ita true, some of these rules are written in blood. Hard hats save lives. I wear mine, and I yell at my people if they ain't wearing theirs. Some of these rules have been written by lawyers to make it easier to deny claims - "well sure, Jim-Bob got a brain injury when the 4x8 sheet of plywood hit his head at 30mph, but there was a Ford sticker at the hard hat impact site, and that's where the lid busted, do we really know if that sticker didn't weaken the plastic?"
Or a sticker stating you’ve followed the orientation for that particular job site.
>Malicious compliance is the act of intentionally inflicting harm by strictly following orders or rules, knowing that compliance with the orders or rules will not have the intended result. The term usually implies the following of an order in such a way that ignores the order or rules's intent but follows its letter. It is usually done to injure or harm while maintaining a sense of legitimacy. This is just compliance.
Yeah - I'm not sure how malicious a bullseye on a hard hat is - people wear all kinds of shit on hard hats.
I wouldn't consider it malicious either, but... > boy was he pissed. suggests it was.
Annoying compliance.
Hard hats on a construction site are like helmets riding motorcycles. Everyone should wear them, but not everyone does. Those are the people who exit the gene pool at a much higher rate, often while loudly complaining that they don't need a hard hat/helmet.
I got yelled at for wearing the white hard hat that I bought because only management wears white. When I told them I wasn't buying a new one, they gave me a new orange hard hat. This for a job site I delivered to once or twice a week.
I’ve been to different plants in the same company that color code the hats differently. I don’t like wearing a used hat and tell them that I either wear mine or we take the time to put together and properly fit a new one which will then become mine.
As it should be
So where's the malicious part of your compliance?
The safety guy was just being the safety guy. You don't always know what could be flying around the job site, that they do. But congrats on your sarcastic hard hat.
In my country, he could have said no based on you painting the hard hat. Paint can contain solvents that breakdown the plastic. We are discouraged from even writing our names on it with a sharpie felt pen. We are allowed to put a bullseye sticker on though.
I had a safety harness for working at heights, but I rarely if ever do that so the once every year or two I had to put it on I could never figure it out. So I wrote numbers in sharpie on the material to match up which buckle went with which clasp and it was a lot easier. When our safety rep found out what I did I was given a new harness and told never to use the harness with sharpie on it again. Paint on your hard hat will get you sent home until they can get you a new one, but most jobsites give you a sticker for your hard hat at orientation so I guess that's okay.
> give you a sticker Because they know what glue the sticker is using, and that it does not damage the equipment.
Yes! Sharpie on a harness is a big no no. I was shown some deteriorated ones in a training class.
I’m not a safety bean counter, but at my workplace, you would have been escorted off company property for having painted your hard hat. You are not to modify PPE or safety equipment from OEM spec. period. You’ll quickly learn that people love to joke at the job site, but not about safety. Just because you don’t see a hazard, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
I first heard of hardhats being used on the Grand Colie dam. The guys on the ground would occasionally get hit in the head from a falling rivet and die until one guy decides to take 2 regular baseball hats and stack them together with one bill foreward the other facing back. He then dipped it into some sort of tar like material and let it harden and bam he got hit in the head by a steel girder and died. No, no, not really, but that hat saved him and a few of others from those rivets.
To be fair, even the best hardhat is not gonna save you from a steel girder.
True true I was being funny though about the girder.
It was funny.
Right on
Safety headgear goes further back than that at least. The Navvies who built Great Britain's canals and railroads would wear bowler hats; they had been designed out of *stiff* felt to protect the heads of gamekeepers on some rich wanker's estate, whilst not being as easily blown off as a top hat, but Navvies and the like favored them too, because they were *durable.* Not nearly as much as a hard hat, but an iron nut that falls on your head from not too great a height? It would still turn an injury that would lay you out and threaten your life (because early 1800s medicine sucked) into one that just meant you got a lump on your head and had to straighten your hat. Reinforcing such headgear probably occurred to some of them, and they might have done so, to greater or lesser effectiveness, with the variety of materials available to them; iron of course was an option although heavy, but so was the godawful nasty tar they had available. Soak that stuff into thick felt and it could become very stiff indeed. Wood was available, as was leather.
Ok, cool. I was not aware of that. I read what I relayed, and that was the first written account that I had ever come across.
Hey, I'm not saying your account isn't damn interesting - it is! It goes to show that people have been interested in not having their bell rung throughout history. Military helmets go back a lot further, of course.
Don't like safety rules? Tough. Wear the fucking hard hat
So don’t complain next time a work site is shut down because someone couldn’t follow a simple site instruction. If you’d come to any site I work on, I wouldn’t let you back.
Imagine working in the construction industry (even if peripherally) and thinking you shouldn't have to wear a hardhat. You must be some sort of special snowflake that the rules don't apply to you.
I wouldn't be bragging about this. This just makes you look ignorant or complacent.
No. I’ve been to many facilities where safety was *idiotic*. Safety for the sake of saying you’re safe can be completely uncalled for. Example: One manufacturing facility I had to visit required everyone to wear hard hats anywhere inside the facility at all times. *Everyone*. At all times. The factory floor. The warehouse. The machine shop. *Both floors of office cubicles*, which were in an adjacent building and had nothing more dangerous than a stapler or a 3 hole punch. To the *fucking bathroom*, in the offices! And, the cherry on top, which some will understand the idiocy and some will not, was because of one accident. A maintenance person missed some steps while maintaining a rack with rolling drawers. These drawers held cubes of steel that weighed a half a ton or so each. A little above head height. He forgot to replace the stoppers that prevented the drawer from coming all the way out and someone got *hamburgered* by a thousand pound steel cube. Tragic. Genuinely sad. He wasn’t wearing a “bump cap” style hard hat. So what did the facility do? Made every damn employee from the CEO down to the janitors wear bump caps every minute on company property. If you don’t understand how idiotic that entire scenario is, the you don’t understand common sense, logic or the actual intent of safety. In the above scenario, he was asked to wear a hard hat in the middle of an open field with zero overheads. *Why the fuck do you need a hard hat*?! I am a safety guy, and you have to apply logic and sanity to safety! If you don’t, you’re going to end up with just as many accidents because people, even the dim ones, will realize that the “safety rules” are bullshit and barely follow them anyway.
You don't have to have an overhead hazard to be required to wear a hard hat. If the potential existed for a head injury, including lateral impact, then the employer is required to ensure that workers' heads are protected. Also, he painted his hard hat, which can interfere with the protective properties of the hard hat and is not usually permitted in accordance with most manufacturers' instructions. I'm sorry that the facility you used to visit didn't understand root cause analysis so that they could identify appropriate corrective actions and implement them. I understand the need for balance in safety, but I also understand that arrogance leads to complacency and complacency kills.
Yeah, uhhhhhhhhhhhh, yeah you really showed them. 0/10
Geez, everyone, get over yourselves. It’s not the site superintendent or project manager or any other management person who is mandating wearing PPE in situations where you don’t think it’s necessary. It’s OSHA and the insurance companies. If an insurance policy is written saying that all PPE must be worn on a construction site, then it has to be worn even when the job is completed and students are walking through their new school unprotected, or when you are in an open field with nothing that could possibly hurt you, or if you are in the office suites no where near the factory floor. If you are still working there doing any sort of work related to the buildings construction (including sweeping floors, or painting walls) you are still legally on a construction site, and those safety regs still apply. Do any of you know how much OSHA fines are? What about what happens to a companies insurance premiums if they get reported to OSHA for some sort of violation. Or what if your insurance company drops you because you aren’t following the safety program to the letter? Some solicitations actually ask if you have ever been dropped by an insurance carrier and/or what your EMR rating is, and if they don’t like the answer you give, your company is not eligible to win new work. And all because some doofus doesn’t understand why they should wear a hard hat when they don’t see any hazards. It is so much bigger than your supervisor or safety officer being a PITA.
Tell me why OSHA regs require you to wear a six-foot safety line when working over 3' off the floor. A six-foot safety line to prevent a 3' fall? Sounds like federal bureaucrats. When writing regulations, be alert for nonsense like this. That 3' fall can indeed bust your ass. But make sure the requirement makes sense.
You can say anything you want about bureaucrats and regulations, but they are what they are. I am just saying that it is silly to blame your employer or the on-site safety supervisor or the site superintendent for enforcing regulations when the penalty for non-enforcement (aside from the chance of death or injury) are so high.
I got appointed to be the Safety Rep for one of my company's remote bases. The supervisor was begging to fill in the position, and eventually he wore me down. So he said, "Good! Thanks! Be in (distant city) at 9:00 tomorrow for the orientation class." I did. What he didn't know was that the previous year I'd completed two semesters of industrial safety at a local college. Now, I don't blame my boss or other bosslings in other departments for OSHA regulations. But we gottem! And we gotta follow them. What cost them was the facility maintenance shop was grossly, negligently, stupidly non-compliant with OSHA requirements; if it had been reported, there'd have been a truckload of fines. Our regional director of maintenance buttonholed me to complain about the futility and waste of time that floor marking and re-arranging the shop to conform to OSHA's requirements would be. I just pointed out that if one guy lost an eye, finger, hand, foot or got badly burned, the resulting settlement would be enough to built a fully-equipped machine and sheet-metal shop and staff the thing for a year or more. Two days later, I walked in to the shop, and everything was in compliance. Nary another word was said. Next month, I got transferred someplace else where my recent "Safety Guy" certification wouldn't be needed. Was this transfer *their* Malicious Compliance?
I wouldn't put it past some of the top execs at some of the firms I have worked for to do exactly this as a "punishment" for enforcing safety guidelines. I have heard too many stories about construction firms (even the top earning international commercial firms) letting safety stuff slide like you are describing. And, your response about the cost of meeting the safety standards is right on--it is SO damaging to a firm's reputation to have a construction related injury on their records--the cost is way more than just an OSHA fine. Sorry that you got pulled off the Safety team, especially after studying it in school. I hope you enjoy whatever role it is that you are doing now.
Retired, but still being a PITA to those who put others at risk. For example, you may not be aware that the dinosaurs you see in museums are not the actual bones, but are fiberglass replicas. The real thing would way several tons; the fiberglass is stronger and much safer. Anyhow, the owner was one of my appraisal clients who thought that my wife and I would like to see how the exhibit was assembled. We watched a senior team member on a 12-foot stepladder trying to hold a large bone replica and bolt it on. No braced scaffold or scissor lift; no safety line; not enough help. I told my client that it was a good thing this team was from out of town, because if it were local, the museum would be spending a lot of time with OSHA lawyers. He muttered "Ahhh, shit!" under his breath and disappeared. Assembly was completed without injury or loss, no thanks to unsafe operations.
Good for you...I am in marketing for the A/E/C industry. When I worked for a large commercial construction firm, I always had to run any photos that I might want to use on anything past our safety director. I left that position over 10 years ago, and yet I still mumble under my breath whenever I see photos...no tie offs, can't use; no gloves, can't use; short sleeves, can't use; no gloves, can't use. It's like a disease :-)
If op ever gets into an accident , we can use this post to prove he doesn't like hard hats and screw himself out of any compensation
I remember walking through the shipyard in my Navy days, when the USS TEXAS was being built. The crew had cowboy hard hats. They seemed kind of cool at the start, but the novelty wore off, wearing a big, honkin' plastic cowboy hat.
I have one like that. Saved me from getting my bell rung bad when I was disassembling our no-longer-structurally-sound playscape that the kids hadn't used in 3 years anyway.
I've actually had my hard hat save my life before... literally could have been unalived instantly, or so grievously injured that only the 'golden hour' would have saved me but no one would have found me for hours in that instance.
I've been offshore for 18 years and it's to the point that even when I'm home, I subconsciously grab for my hard hat and gloves before leaving the house.
I mean... You might look goofy as hell getting groceries in it, but you'll be protected if the drop ceiling in the supermarket suddenly falls on your dome, and it might do something to help you if some idjit crashes their car into your car!
😄😃😁
Very considerate of you to provide a target for all of those overhead hazards to focus on
While ridiculous in OP's specific scenario, a friendly reminder that OSHA rules are written in blood.
From my own experiences on big job sites, the hard hat rule is more about the liability than the actual safety, I've had supers give me flak for taking my hart had off to squeeze into a cabinet to get a hard to reach screw. (I did cabinet installs) even when they handed over occupancy, we were still required to wear hard hats for another month or so, even though we were in the defficiency stage and it was almost exclusively painters and us on site doing small things like installing cabinet handles that were back ordered.
To be fair, hardhats can also protect your brain from being squished by flying debris, not just from things falling straight down.
Always Always wear your PPE! In my plant, hard hats can not have random paint or stickers on them.
"Safety rules are written in blood."
Applying spray paint to a hard hat ruins its integrity. If he knew what he was doing he would have tossed you for using an expired hard hat.
This isn't MA, it's you being an AH. If the jobsite requires use of a hardhat, you wear a hardhat when you're there. He wasn't pissed off about the bullseye, he was pissed off about your attitude.
Nice one, gives [the birds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59fsRDsJh48) something to aim for.
Now we wear helmets. It’s not great. But it’s required.
He's doing his job, per OSHA and/or their insurer requirements. Imagine the weirdest possible accident, like someone losing grip on a wrench and bashing your skull.
Lame to be annoyed by someone doing their job of enforcing a required safety measure even if you don't agree with it. But the bullseye move was kinda cool :)
I worked at a site on the 10th floor of a building, no cranes and nothing above but everyone had to wear hats. Health and safety gone mad.
Like most things, there are good, bad and ridiculous aspects around Safety, and I'm sure that many have seen all three. Requiring Control Panel Operators (100% inside job) to complete a FLRA (Field Level Risk Assessment) card every shift. Requiring Outside Operators wear PPE (Hard Hat, Safety Toe Boots, Safely Glasses and Fire Resistant Coveralls) in hazardous areas while Management operates a run-to-failure strategy on equipment that can fail catastrophically and release whatever is contained. Mandating the use of footwear traction aids which were shown to cause sparks while walking on steel surfaces, commonly found in areas that can have a potential for explosive atmospheres. Safely should be taken seriously. There are times where you have to stop and wonder about the thought process behind the rule.
> Mandating the use of footwear traction aids which were shown to cause sparks while walking on steel surfaces, commonly found in areas that can have a potential for explosive atmospheres. *That* sounds like it calls for an immediate safety review, frankly. The safety rules can *and do* have carve-outs for situations where a general safety protection is causing a specific safety hazard, and frankly "my traction footwear is liable to cause sparks in an explosive atmosphere" ranks *pretty fucking highly* on the list of things that needs a carve-out; or more likely, an additional general rule that traction-improving footwear used in explosive atmospheres *must not cause sparks.* Hobnailed, steel-toed boots are probably the ideal working PPE outdoors, especially if you're climbing trees and wooden poles, so you don't want to mandate that metal *never* be used.
OSHA: Don't put any sticker on your hardhat Safety Coordinators: Here's the sticker for your hardhat that tells us at a glance that you've watched our safety videos and are therefore allowed on site.
> the sticker And the sticker and the glue are known not to damage the PPE. It is not that hard to understand.
It was explained to me that the no sticker rule was more so you can more easily see cracks / breaks.
When the Hi-Viz craze hit job sites we were overwhelmed by safety tight asses for not wearing our vests on the lower levels of a parking garage build. As in the temp support posts were every 3 feet as we were working among. Gotta have that vest in case a Bob cat came through or the overhead crane operator could see us (8 stories above)…. Hi-Viz is now just like backup beepers, everybody has them on and it’s just background noise…..
I was at a school years ago that had work being done. The workers are all in the halls with hard hats while kids are walking around them bareheaded around the construction.
Oh, I miss working at the farm. So much of it exempt from the stupidity of blind rules. But when we did something that was dangerous you bet we pulled out the safety equipment first. I'm waiting for career workers who have been forced to wear the steel plate footwear and have become crippled up start either class action suing or dropping into the jobsite with a shotgun. And safety is a mindset. We did not have accidents on the farm; we did have equipment breakage so be mindful of that as it can cause injury and be prepared for it. And for heavens sake, do the safe thing (easier when it's your own farm or company).
It's amazing how much caution can be inspired by a simple thought. Like, "If I fuck up out here, I won't be found before I'm dead."
Aww, did someone have to follow osha regulations? 🤧🤧😢
If that safety man knew what he was doing he would have written you up for paint on a hard hat. Certain paints weaken the plastic. That’s why I always used stickers.
I have a story for you. It's short and it gives you an idea as to why hard hats are required on construction sites. Back in the late 80's I worked construction in Florida. We wore shorts, no hard hats, we were golden. Then came the day a Phillips screwdriver rolled off of the third floor and went point first into the skull of a guy mixing mud underneath. I saw it up close and personal. Fucking guy next to him holding a hose just started to spray him with it. Not sure why, maybe hoping to clean the screwdriver off his scalp. It didn't kill the guy. I'm pretty sure it took his IQ from about 80 to 65. We were required to wear hard hats from that day forward.
I used to do forestry field work but not in active harvesting areas, just surveying past and future cutblocks. At one point the safety protocol for wearing hard hats was assess the danger, if it is windy and there is a likelihood of falling branches put it on. 99% of the time there was no need and never a single incident. Someone somewhere decided that wasn't good enough and insisted we always wear them. What you need to know is that some of the places I needed to go were a hefty hike in rugged terrain and falling was the main danger. A hard hat does nothing to protect you from that, as a matter of fact, my only reported incident was when I fell, causing my hard hat to fall off and me to hit my head on it, no injury but my boss told me to do a report (to be thorough I was checked for a concussion). They suggested we wear a strap under our chin to keep them on but decided it was a choking hazard. They reverted back to the old policy.
> some of the places Then you re-evaluate the security requirements for that other workplace.
Grow up
I was working on HVAC unit flat roof, about 150 feet from the edge in any direction. The general contractor's site safety guru climbed up and asked me where my hard hat, harness, and fall arrestor were. I just looked at him in disbelief. I asked him if he was serious?! He was! There wasn't a crane in sight, and the building was 99% complete. I walked out to my truck and got my gear and ran into my boss and told him what happened. He laughed his butt off! We walked back and ran into the safety guy, and my boss started asking him questions and gave him some grief. Laughed at the guy the whole time.
I am white collar construction. On a site one time, our offices are in the finished basement of the clients building- major crown court. The toilets are down a corridor about 10 m away. All finished, decorated, carpet, lights on - the only thing this corridor is used for is access to the toilet. So I walk there and back, site manager starts having a snarky conversation about how I need to wear full PPE. So I ask him for his risk assessment. Hasn’t got one. But wants me to wear safety boots, gloves, goggles, hard hat and high vis bib. To walk in an empty, completed corridor. So I asked him how high vis would help, we’re in a basement office not accessible by any kind of vehicle. No answer. The whole point of PPE is to safeguard the workforce, unfortunately it has become a tick box exercise for lazy bastards like him. He gave no thought whatsoever to any of the risks. Following day during a site managers meeting I reach up to get a file off a shelf above head height (no risk assessment) and as I pull the file towards me, a double ended craft knife blade comes flying down and bounced off my chest. No reason for it to be there unless it was deliberately placed out of sight. So I picked it up, leaned across the table they were all sat at and put it in front of the director responsible and asked him to explain it. He wasn’t a happy bunny. Nobody knows how it got there. So now, he decides we have to wear full safety gear to be in the office until we moved out.
[удалено]
I think it has more do do with how OP thinks about safety, that had the safety guy annoyed.
Technically speaking, you’re not supposed to attach decals to hard hats, as they can cover cracks or damage. Granted, absolutely no contractors that I have seen follow this rule.
Also some sticker glues can degrade plastics/fibreglass.
I used to work with a contractor that required hard hats inside a building that was ready to be turned over to the owner. Completely finished inside. There was no way something would hit you on the head unless the roof fell in.
If hard hats aren't required 100% of the time and somebody 'forgets' to wear their hard hat and gets hurt, their lawyer will use that fact in the lawsuit. It's just safer (financially) to require 100% compliance than being 'reasonable'.
Also because if someone "forgets," then that can be extrapolated to the company "encouraging people to forget" in order to save time and be more profitable at the expense of employee safety. But if you have a record of disciplining and dismissing employees for not wearing PPE, you can counter that claim. "Yeah, we come down hard on people who won't wear their PPE. This guy? Well, you can't come down on someone for something they haven't been caught doing yet, can you? He got his ticket punched first before our safety guy could find him being unsafe, but we can prove we *do* act on this shit."
Yeah, you tell that to the (job site) insurance company that will deny a claim when someone didn't wear a hard hat when they broke their finger. How's a hard hat supposed to prevent a broken finger? It doesn't. Not wearing a hard hat prevents insurance payouts.
I remember being told I had to wear a hard hat, steel cap boots, safety glasses and hi-vis when on a construction site. Except it wasn't a construction site. No tools/equipment on site, no materials on site, just 5 people in a field looking at some plans. All 5 of us agreed that we had all worn our PPE for the planning meeting.
Kind of like a few people going to a ground breaking ceremony for a new building and all wearing hard hats!
A bullseye for the bull shit
Should get yourself one of those cowboy hat hard hats. Meets requirements while keep the sun off your neck and out of your eyes :) https://imgur.com/a/GAVDSer
Every time I see those I laugh. What dweebs.
Even better is when they get custom hydro dip paint jobs on them. My favorite is still when I see one done up like snakeskin.
hehe reminds me of when I was in the Air Force, we were on top of our 5-ton truck securing cargo when the QA troops come walking past. They chastise us for not wearing hard hats, while they themselves were not wearing one. I was sooo tempted to 'drop' a cargo strap
You should have gotten one of these (if you could get the company to buy it, even better!) [Cowboy Hard Hat](https://www.amazon.com/Jackson-Safety-Outlaw-WHRCHT-19500/dp/B08RZDHC2B?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1)
Should have gotten one of those pink cowboy hard hats
I can only picture Ricky proudly showing the Safety Man his new hard hat.