marsdenman – you’re mate better hope Darwin was wrong. Otherwise, I suspect his days are numbered 😉

still can’t see the reason

Fair enough, that’s why there is training 🙂

Pushing, the bristles are angled up and you tend to flick it at the end, pulling, the bristles are angled down and there is no flick. It’s probably less strain on your back too. All very dull but most work injuries and illnesses are from dull things like not sitting properly or tripping on the stairs, not from getting squashed by a 100T press.

When i worked in the NHS, we had to go on a visually sighted awareness course, wearing diffeent glasses and finally blindfolds, one of the ladies escorting another lady, forgot to tell the blindfolded one about a set of stairs going down, they both fell down them.

Result the course was cancelled.

The offshore industry has successfully managed to offset the dangers posed by not maintaining facilities and safety equipment by making everyone put a lid on their coffee cup.

Fair enough, that’s why there is training

I was asking cause I was interested* and assumed there would be a proper answer. Sounds reasonable, I certainly pull on precision work, would have though push was better for your back tho, but I’m sat slouching in this chair craning my neck to see the improperly positioned screen so what do I know 🙂

*not like really, really interested just you know, wondered. I don’t have a broom fetish or anything, not a subscriber to sweepers world or owt, honest

There is a big risk of cancer and asthma from kicked up dust particles
still can’t see the reason for pull rather than push technology

Almost there ….

The guidelines now issued by HSE are to AVOID DRY SWEEPING where ever posssible, this can be done either ( among other things ) by wet sweeping – wash the surface and sweep while wet or by vacuuming the area.

If dry sweeping cannot be avoided for any reason then suffecient PPE should be available for the task and be used, this would be some sort of respiratory protection in this case

‘hot water may be dispensed at high temperatures’

stuck above every hot water tap in my employers substantial number of buildings across the uk.

I shit you not.

As others have said, H&S is often used by poor managers/advisers as an excuse to support their own ideas and defend their poor decisions; these are then rich pickings for the tabloids and some STWers.

The truth is, if you work in a potentially dangerous industry like construction, many of these rules and processes however awkward and daft seeming, have prevented injury and health problems. The statistics prove that.

The company “covering their arse” line gets wheeled out a lot as well, and while I don’t doubt that’s many people’s prime motivation; in my case I don’t want to see people I work with hurt or worse.

The situation in the OPs initial post seemed absolutely ridiculous mind…

I have a theory that there is a right wing media conspiracy to discredit health and safety at work so that we can get back to profitable third world/Victorian conditions. After all, why would anyone want to go to work and go home the same day without a life-changing injury or illness?

At our place it’s mandatory to “Hold The Handrail” when going up or down stairs 😯

I’ve seen that on a client’s site, Dibbs. They also require that everyone reverse parks in their car park. Apparently it’s also unethical to let a contractor buy them a drink in the pub. 🙂

I fell over the ‘Caution wet floor’ sign.
Carrying a tray of hot tea too, could have been nasty.

It’s actually a big problem. There is a big risk of cancer and asthma from kicked up dust particles

Could you define ‘big’ as in ‘big risk of cancer’?

We also have the reverse parking only. Apparently I am less lightly to look in my mirror to see if anybody is walking behind me at the end of the day than I am at the beginning.

I know alot of this isn’t set by h&s but we do have h&s advisors on site dreaming up these ideas full time.

The flush on one of our toilets at work was broken called building services as the pot was getting rather full

Told that it would be up to 4 days and that it wasn’t an emergency that there was dirty water & other stuff about to overflow , best bit was they wouldn’t call the plumber as hes not allowed to get his tools wet with dirty water
Ffs – what do plumbers do then ???

Visited a local fire station on Sat, for an open day. Great event, kids obviously loved it. Upstairs they had a table set up for serving tea / coffee & pop, manned by a staff member. So up goes my 4 yr old & casually leans on the table. Now consider how much force a four yr old can exert on a table…you guessed it…two urns of boiling water, cups, the lot, on top of him. Transpires they hadn’t locked the table top in place. Quite how he escaped 20ltrs of boiling water all over him I’ll never know, but it took a personal tour by the station manager to calm him down.

Trying to not think of what could have happened. Nasty.

Which company OP, or shouldn’t you say?

With regard to the reverse parking thing, I actually agree with it. To reverse in, you’ve already passed the parking space slowly, eye’d it up to check there’s nothing in it and will have seen anyone getting out of their car in the next space or pedestrians approaching. You then reverse into a gap, at worst bordered by other stationary vehicles.

When you reverse out, (especially in a van) you rearward vision is impaired and potentially other vehicles or pedestrians have arrived while you get in and faff a bit. You’ll reverse quicker into a road that you would into a gap as well.

Plus your car/van looks better from the front than the back, another good reason to reverse in.

The company is Jacobs. I don’t work for them though, they just supply some h&s people and some management.
I work on national grid sites for a utilities company.
The reverse parking is now second nature, as iv been working for them for almost five years, but it was strange to start with.

Parking in reverse is better (or less bad) environmentally than driving in. You are doing all your manouvering with a warm engine, and then just driving off with a cold one, rather than driving in with a warm one and then manouvering with a cold one.
Drops in the ocean but it all helps.

My main issue with H&S are the idiots who don’t understand what they are doing but make ‘rules’ regardless, or the rules that are created for good reason, but not communicated properly.

I personally hate the over reliance on PPE (which should be the last line of defense and not the first). I work in construction on the Gas and Electricity transmission network where H&S rules are undoubtedly saving lives although there are some idiot managers who are banning things for fun!

Back to the original post my employer also identified that driving is the most dangerous part of our working day and so everyone with a company car spends a couple of hours with an ex-police driving instructor who gives some quite useful tips and a half day on a racetrack / skid pan learning how to control the car properly and safely -if nothing else it’s great fun!

My main issue with H&S are the idiots who don’t understand what they are doing but make ‘rules’ regardless, or the rules that are created for good reason, but not communicated properly.

I would say that your problem is with idiots then, not H & S.

As a safety practioner it never fails to amuse me when i read stuff and hear stuff about excessive regulation and restrictive work practices. Its about 99% bollocks that stems from employer reluctance to take genuine responsibility by addressing the real hazards that face their employees and others. There’s a macho thing going on too, whats really funny is that when you question the realmen ™that reckon its all a load of crap, you’ll nearly always find that either they, or someone they know, has had a serious accident at work that could have been prevented.

I would say that your problem is with idiots then, not H & S

All problems tend to boil down to idiots!

Lots of myths about H&S, when in fact H&S has done great thing for you in your work place. Fancy working with machine and no guards, and so risking your finger/arm/life everytime the machine runs? You still would be without H&S, so think yourselves lucky

Got to agree, about ‘proper’ H&S having worked for a couple of companies that had never (at the time) had a working-time death-free year…, and then we did, and got a bonus 😯

I was delivering to our engineers on project a few years ago. The deliveries should have happened on a daily basis over over a two week period however due to the H&S officer on site constantly stopping the job the project took a shade under four months! The engineers were close to suicide in the end.

As the proud owner of an RTITB reach truck license, this is a classic!!

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo[/video]

The guidelines now issued by HSE are to AVOID DRY BUMMING where ever possible

FTFY (sorry couldn’t resist!)

I once saw a Health and Safety Executive presentation with a piechart breakdown of the most common cause of accidents. About 15% were attributable to “struck by a stationary object”.

I now ignore all health and safety presentations.

Of course if the rules allow more dumb people to survive, eventually were gonna have even more accidents.

The cycle parking at work is in the loading bay under the building, to go down there we have to be escorted by one of the facilities team in hi-viz because of the vehicles that may be manouvering. When I pointed out that if the drivers couldn’t see a cyclist then they had no right to be on the road let alone in out loading bay it didn’t go down well 🙂

Irony is we’re allowed to leave alone we just can’t go in by ourselves!

Having said that our H&S guy is rather accident prone.

maybe they are taught during H&S training to spot potential accidents and highlight how they could cause an accident 😀

Reverse parking – tbh it is a lot safer and is a lot easier with less chance of hitting cars in spaces next to you. The cold engine thing is new to me but makes sense I guess. It is very easy for people to get hit walking behind cars reversing out and it reduces all the agro with peoples cars getting hit so I can see why companies ban it. Stand in a supermarket carpark for 10 minutes and see how many people nearly get hit as they decide to nip across behind a car instead of waiting for 20 seconds or because drivers are busy on the phone or telling the kids off etc etc.

Ladders – also makes sense to have training. Very easy to break your wrists because of a silly accident that could have been avoided.

Yes a lot of it is to prevent the company being sued but it’s also there to make people think. It’s not always the idiot who gets hurt or killed.

The forklift video is an old favourite, we watched it during German class at school 😀

Hmmm…..all good stuff here.

I was recently asked to make a special trip to the main office with all the power supplies/mains leads from my home office. Around a 500 mile trip, plus a night in a hotel, plus the messing around under my desk.

I pointed out that the driving bit was way more dangerous than the risk of an exploding mains lead, and I could get a local man in to do the job for less than the cost of a tank of diesel. To be fair, office H&S person did actually see the sense in this.

Most H&S is to “legislate” for a lack of common sense. I’d get rid of the lot and also take down those “danger of death” signs – if you’re out to prove Darwin right, I think you should be given every oppo.

Isn’t reversing on a site ‘less dangerous’ because when you return to leave you drive forwards with better visibility?

Always thought this was why people are told to reverse into their driveways and how, if this isn’t an urban myth, if you reverse onto a more major road and hit someone then the fault is more leant towards you, and the sentencing is higher. The obvious risk of children/oap’s/disabled being unaware of you reversing and/or being unable to get out of the way fast enough. Visibility through the rear windscreen means shorter people get hidden from a drivers view.

I’ve had two GF’s in the past where I’ve had to ask them, as driver, to gtfo in shopping centres and allow me to reverse their car into a space. Now, this isn’t a sexist thing and I’d assure you I’d do it with any driver I was sat next to, female/male/alien, because I don’t feel right when the driver I am with drives forwards into a space with the intention of, on returning to the car reversing out, without the skills to reverse in, where the danger is a lot higher, so I just move in and take over for safeties sake.

Ironically, driving a fork lift you’re pretty much reversing round everywhere, so I’m willing to bet that any other qualified fork lift drivers here will agree with me that we’re damn good at reversing.

My riding buddy has a Lappie x-control and it says DO NOT IRON on it!!!!