There are so many pitfalls that the unsuspecting business owner can find himself dealing with. It just takes one careless movement or someone not put some equipment away after use and all hell can be let loose. There are always cases cited in the news reports of chaps (mostly chaps anyway) who have been seriously injured or sadly, killed in accidents at work. One recently involved a young father who was on overtime and rushing to get a job finished – his fork lift truck seems to have struck something hitherto unseen above, it wobbled and the movement was severe enough to topple the truck, the driver falling off and being very seriously injured. There have to be sets of rules in every working environment – whether a boss likes it or not. So often employees will feel obliged to cut corners if it means they get out quicker, or the boss just doesn’t make safety a priority.
In the case of an industrial accident as cited above, the Health & Safety executive have to be notified and usually there will have to be a full scale enquiry that leads to someone being brought to court. Companies will be fined massive amounts for failing to ensure their employees complied with strict safety rules and of course, if the firm was remiss and did not ensure the employee was provided with relevant safety gear, whether that led directly to any incident, this will bring an even bigger punishment.
So serious is the issue of workplace safety that consultancies that concentrate on the employers’ side of the table will have specialist who deal only with that – Health & Safety. They may have separate departments but it will certainly now get much greater billing than it used to decades ago. This topic now ranks as highly as just HR itself. Any accident at work, however minor, has to be written up in an accident book. This will be held by a site manager’s department or the admin section of HR. Any follow up from a site accident will go back to that original entry in the accident book so everything has to be recorded and photographed if at all possible. There are legal companies who specialise in work place accidents and so big is the business now, they can be seen advertising – usually offering a no win, no fee basis. These are often thought of as ambulance chasers and tend to have that seedy side of law that no one wants to talk about, but certainly will when someone falls off that fork lift truck.
Photo by Swello
