Safety: It's your choice
By Chris Thompson
Editor at large
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Chris
Thompson
Editor at large
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You work in an
industry that is rife with danger. One misstep, one lapse in concentration
could easily mean death.
It's the nature
of the job. You work with heavy equipment that doesn't know the difference
between a construction worker and a pile of rocks. You climb down
into incredibly deep holes and scale extraordinary heights, and you
know that ultimately it's up to you to make sure you go home alive
at the end of the day.
You don't work
in offices all day where the biggest injury risk is carpal tunnel
syndrome. You, however, are the people who handle the intricate and
lethal electrical connections that give those offices power.
It's a choice
you've made, and it's a good choice. All we ask is that you keep choosing
wisely every minute of every day. There are people everywhere whose
job it is to help you choose safety over ease, but ultimately, when
it comes time to decide if you need to strap on a lanyard or shore
up the plywood, no one will be there to tell you what to do.
There are safety
rules and regulations that tell you what you should do, and people
from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration -- such as
the area directors who are profiled within this magazine -- who will
fine your company when you fail. But OSHA can't be everywhere at once,
and foremen can't watch every worker on every site.
Your unions and
associations are constantly working to improve your safety chances
on the job. There are always new safety programs -- as Ellen Hickok-Wall
and Hilary Ruesch discovered in this issue -- and OSHA is constantly
unearthing new dangers and ways to curb them -- such as a new hearing-loss
prevention proposal that Candace Doyle explains in the following pages.
But it all comes
down to you. What are you going to do when OSHA is nowhere to be seen
and the safety rulebook is sitting in a drawer somewhere? What will
you do when your safety director is at another site and your foreman
is on the phone? What choices will you make when everything you've
learned is balanced against a quick fix and an "it'll never happen
to me" mentality?
No one can force
you to make the safe decisions, but -- for your sake -- we hope you
make them anyway.
