Thread: Gloves at work

A lot of common sense in that article Richard. Unfortunately while ever governments have the power to make someone else pay for their regulatory systems, I don't see them simplifying the regs anytime soon.

Hi,

I forgot to mention a few things about my work.

We have do have a selection of gloves for different types of work, ie waterproof rubber type gloves, inner gloves (when they are in stock), riggers gloves for the structure guys, and of course the general purpose cut resistant gloves most guys use.

I wear the waterproof gloves and the general purpose gloves. I wear my GP's most of the time including when machining. When I linish a bar I leave the gloves on but when I have to off-grind something (which is pretty rare these days) the gloves come off - which by company rules I shouldn't do but it's a big grinder and I know it'd take the gloves and my hand quick enough.

Last week our site celebrated a 1000 days without any Lost Time Days. They got us pizza and can coolers and stopped production early. The company is serious about site safety and employee safety. Everyone wears a basic PPE when they step outside the office doors (unless everything has been switched off).

I'm definitely not bagging WHS or the WHS guy. He mean's well but sometimes I think he knows more about procedures than actual experience.

I do wonder about the ability of the some of our casual employees though. Some of them (and our permanent guys) do some dumb things.

1000 days without an LTI,that is a fair effort, how many people are on the shop floor at that company?

Originally Posted by Com_VC

1000 days without an LTI,that is a fair effort, how many people are on the shop floor at that company?

Between 20 to 30 on the workshop floor plus a heap of staff in the office, we have a large amount of casuals (who come and go regularly). That's dayshift so not sure about the nightshift (it's smaller because I swear they don't do anything).

You wouldn't believe it but I sliced my finger on some swarf today. Sliced right though the glove (yes I pulled on a bit off swarf with a bit more force than I intended). I was using the drilling function on the milling machine.

I had to sit a 1 hour WHS investigation/report/Q&A for the incident. I will be receiving a email from the company's insurance provider in the next couple of days.

I now get to wear two pair of gloves when machining and I found the paint brush that I usually use to remove to swarf from the machines.

A bit OT but still related to gloves, The other week my boss tells me he got pricked by a thorn from his rose bush while gardening at home. Said he was wearing gloves and it went right through the gloves. His finger swelled up and claimed he needed to go on anibiotics for a week! He lives on a 1000 m2 block with a small garden!

Funny thing is, I live on 1-1/4 acres, never ever wear gloves when gardening, am always getting cuts and abrasions while covered in dirt etc. but never have any problems!

It's funny but I can't stand wearing gloves when gardening. I love the feel of the dirt etc. on my hands. It's liberating.

Simon

Originally Posted by simonl

A bit OT but still related to gloves, The other week my boss tells me he got pricked by a thorn from his rose bush while gardening at home. Said he was wearing gloves and it went right through the gloves. His finger swelled up and claimed he needed to go on anibiotics for a week! He lives on a 1000 m2 block with a small garden!

Funny thing is, I live on 1-1/4 acres, never ever wear gloves when gardening, am always getting cuts and abrasions while covered in dirt etc. but never have any problems!

It's funny but I can't stand wearing gloves when gardening. I love the feel of the dirt etc. on my hands. It's liberating.

Simon

We're on ~600 m^2 and there's not much garden but there are two (we used to have 4!) bougainvilleas growing up and over the shed. During the annual prune I definitely wear long welding gloves as some of the thorns up to 50 mm long and the bigger/harder thorns can go straight though these gloves. I also wear long sleeves and long pants and one of my full face shields when pruning these monsters. A few years ago I did the big prune of all 4 plants and deposited the bits on the verge for the upcoming council pickup. As I sat down on the back veranda and took the face shield from my sweaty head I noticed a couple of long bits of vine had fallen into a side garden. I picked these up and headed down the narrow side of the house out to the front. One of the vines got hooked up in the fence and flicked back and a thorn whacked me fair on the eye. The juice from these buggers burns bad enough but I also felt like I had a big grain of sand in my eye and showing SWMBO she confirmed a "lump" near the outer edge of the iris. It was a Sunday morning but I managed to find a local 24 hour GP who said the I had a 2mm long tear in the sclera (outer coating of the eye) forming the lump. He applied a mild anaesthetic which took the burning and grain of sand effect away and prescribed some antibiotics drop. The doc said I was lucky as he recently had a patient who had lost significant vision in one eye by contact with a plant thorn.

Recently I bought a 36V hedge trimmer with a 600 mm long blade. This thing just minces even 1" thick bougainvillea vines and I now prune it using a layered trimming method whereby I trim about 250 mm thick layers off the outside. This means instead of picking up long whippy vines I can use a garden fork to pick most of the pieces up so there is minimal contact withe the vines.

Crickey, those bougainvilleas sound like a nightmare! Actually. I told a lie, I do wear gloves, long sleeves and long pants and a P2 (probably not the correct type) when I spray weeds with Glyphosate. I don't spray that often but since there have been some findings into long term exposure to that stuff I figured it's not hard to wear better PPC when using it.

Some of the electric power gardening stuff coming out sounds really promising. Unfortunately, I have a small fortune invested in 2 and 4 stroke power equipment and it's all Stihl and Husqvarna and not likely to wear out anytime soon! If I was starting out and looking to purchase a range of power gardening equipment, I would seriously look at the battery stuff first. Bit OT, sorry!

Simon

Originally Posted by simonl

Some of the electric power gardening stuff coming out sounds really promising. Unfortunately, I have a small fortune invested in 2 and 4 stroke power equipment and it's all Stihl and Husqvarna and not likely to wear out anytime soon! If I was starting out and looking to purchase a range of power gardening equipment, I would seriously look at the battery stuff first. Bit OT, sorry!

The Battery hedge trimmer is also a Stihl but my weed whacker is petrol, also Stihl, 4 of my 8 chainsaws are Stihl.

Back to the gloves.

When I was a Uni student in the early 70's I worked for two weeks in a factory that cut and prestressed steel rod for use in concrete construction. This involved picking up 6+M lengths of unstressed steel rod anywhere from 10 to ~50 mm in diameter and locking one end into a large motorised rotatable chuck and locking the other end in a sort of fixed chuck. Standing back and holding down a button for anywhere from 3 to 10 or so seconds which rapidly twisted one end of the rod turning it from a fairly floppy bit of steel into one with a lot more spring. The the rod was then cut to to length with a serious guillotine and bundled up with others for specific orders. The thicker/longer bars required two or three persons to manage them through the process especially as some steel bars were twisted together in pairs or threes etc. Sometimes a rod would break while being twisted and thrash around like a demented snake. Everything was done at a frantic pace and the foreman was a bully pushing everyone to get the F-ING orders onto trucks. The whole place was ripe for a workplace accidents.

It was a filthy, noisy, dangerous job, sharp edges everywhere, overhead gantries constantly moving steel rod around, bits of sharp edged steel rod all over the floor etc. About half the workforce of some 30 blokes were casuals because orders varied from day to day. Not many casuals lasted in the job, while I was working there about a half dozen casual workers lasted no longer than one day and one only for a couple of hours. My mate that started with me lasted for a week and I lasted for a day short of two. At smoko and lunchtimes the permanent workers sat on chairs with their personal names on them at a large table in a small smoko room. They only talked to the casuals to give orders or take the mickey usually in relation to clothing, hair length and possible sexuality. The casuals got to sit on the piles of rebar or on the factory floor. It was pretty clear the permanents were protecting their jobs by this attitude.

No PPE was supplied (not even gloves) so casuals often turned up wearing just sand shoes and shorts etc. On the first day I noticed most permanent workers wearing hardhats, gloves and muffs so next day I turned up wearing one of dad's hard hats and muffs and a pair of mums cotton gardening gloves and wore an old pair of dads boots even though they were a size too small for me. The gardening gloves were well used and nice and dirty but had faintly discernible flower patterns on them so I got called various names for that. Glove use was of questionable value for certain things like the rod twisting operation and I could see a strong likelihood of them getting caught was high so I used to take them off at that point and got called more names for doing that. The garden gloves lasted for a couple of days before they were in tatters so I then bought some riggers gloves and got called some interesting names for turning up with new gloves.

The day I finished I trod on a piece of bar on the floor while carrying a heavy pack of rods and rolled my ankle and got called a shirker plus some more names again for working too slowly. By the end of the day the ankle had blown up like a balloon and mum made go to the docs who said, no work for at least a week. No compo, no nothing, as I was casual. I rang them a couple of times to make sure my name was still on the call list but I was never called again.

The next holidays I got a much better job working at a cement slab and sewer tank factory that employed casuals. Also fithy, dangerous, and blokes that took and dished out a lot of rubbish, but the foreman was a half decent bloke who quickly worked out I could be relied on to work on unsupervised and I kept my head down and stayed on their call list for 18 months. Then I got holiday jobs in high rise construction, again fithy, dangerous and blokes that could be relied on for a bollocking using colourful language, good pay though, and stayed on their call list for 2 years till I graduated.

I had a small hawthorn branch come down on my finger while pruning. The spikes on those things are made of tungsten. The glove didn’t stand a chance. It went through to the bone and needed plastic surgery to remove the tiny fragment that remained.

8 chainsaws? I need to lift my game.

Geez Bob, you have worked in some average jobs. I work in a heavily unionised workforce and I'm a union member myself. Our union has copped some heat in recent years but I tell you what, my working conditions are purely because of the union.

Yea, I got chainsaw envy too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5WO9nulOXc

Simon

Originally Posted by simonl

Geez Bob, you have worked in some average jobs. I work in a heavily unionised workforce and I'm a union member myself. Our union has copped some heat in recent years but I tell you what, my working conditions are purely because of the union.

Talking about shirty jobs.
When I was in junior high school I had a series of part time jobs, including shop assistant/shelf stacker, potato picker, root picker, gardener, car washer, distributing flyers, stock receiver/despatcher assistant for a large shoe store chain, and even stuffing toy koala bears from their rear orifice with polystyrene foam. I was one of 10 kids and Dad had been injured in a work place accident and we were poor as church mice so we needed the money and I took every job that was going. I had very few weekends and no holidays free from when I was 13 onwards.

The shirtiest weekend job I had was over the winter of 1968 when we lived in a south west WA town with a high water table, and near blocked septic tanks would not drain or drained slowly. I was an assistant septic tank cleaner. Not with one of those septic tank trucks with suction hoses and water blasters - we did everything by hand. The boss (Joe) was a beaut old bloke, well he seemed old but he was probably about 60, he had bad knees which is why he hired me, and after we (meaning "i") uncovered the tank we used buckets and a rope to empty the tank, usually somewhere into the rear garden - against all council regs of course. The tank could not be completely emptied because that can't be done using a bucket and a rod plus sewage would rapidly seep back out of th ground into the tanks.Then I had to get into the ankle to knee deep tank and clean out the porous brick sides with a garden hose - meanwhile Joe would keep emptying the tank. We worked mainly for a realestate agent who owned or managed a bunch of houses in low lying areas of the town. The real-estate agent was too cheap to hire a proper septic truck. PPE was a wet hanky used as a sort of bandana and gum boots although the sewage/water often got deep enough to come in over the sides. For this I got paid the princely sum of 50c an hour which was above the award for a 14 year old. It would take us about half a day to completely clean out one tank. Some renters would make up cups of tea and even provide biscuits or cake. I could never get clean enough after doing some of the tanks.

I have lots of other non-kosher work examples - like emptying out an industrial size freezer as big as a house which was full of maggot infested crayfish bait but I will leave that for another time. Many people think because I spent my post uni working life as a white collar worker I have no real life experience. After I tell them about some of these jobs they go all quiet like.

Yea, I got chainsaw envy too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5WO9nulOXc Simon

Yeah, seen that but I like to be able to pick my chainsaws up by myself.