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Thread: Gloves at work

  1. #16
    BobL is offline Member: Blue and white apron brigade
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    Quote Originally Posted by jack620 View Post
    I suspect the "never where gloves when doing X" harks back to the days when leather gloves were all that was available. They are very strong and I can well imagine they could do extreme damage to a hand if caught in a machine. .
    I agree, not just leather gloves but loose fitting leather gloves that appear to be designed to catch rotating objects.

    However, there is now a huge range of glove materials available for just about every task. I use Ansell Sensilite gloves in my workshop for everything except the most intricate tasks
    I agree again. Any half decent SOP related to hand protection should have much more in it than "wear gloves" . Gloves are just one part of a wider hand injury prevention strategy that should be employed with Issues such as materials, tasks/process/methods, tool machine guards etc needing to be given consideration.

    Ultimately the gloves absolutely have to suit the task because of things like temperature ratings, chemical resistance, abrasiveness of materials, and likelihood of pinch and catch. Sometimes the appropriate hand covering may very well be 'none" but I'd say in general in most mechanical workshops there are more cases where wearing the right gloves is more appropriate than not ever wearing any gloves.

    I often use tight fitting disposable latex gloves in my shed often for no other reason than to minimising my hands from turning black. This means continuously washing hands and then I end up with painful cracks in my fingers tips, sometimes painful enough to stop me working completely.

    You can be sure companies wouldn't be handing out free gloves to their workers if there wasn't a safety benefit.
    Unfortunately I sometimes wonder if it's as much about covering backsides as safety.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jack620 View Post

    You can be sure companies wouldn't be handing out free gloves to their workers if there wasn't a safety benefit.
    Big companies, especially mining related ones would not care. Some of the stories I have heard about what they can do in the name of "safety" is extraordinary. Cost seemed to be no object. Which wrecks the country as these very wealthy businesses who can throw money around like confetti get held up as beacons of safety and they set the standards that everyone else is supposed to abide by.
    Gold, the colour of choice for the discerning person.

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    Quote Originally Posted by .RC. View Post
    Big companies, especially mining related ones would not care.
    Big companies certainly do care. Large companies these days are totally cost focussed. I've never worked in the mining industry so I can't comment, but if the company I work for can save one cent they will.

    I don't think it wrecks the country either. I'm pretty sure the cost of work-related injury is a bigger impost than providing PPE.
    Chris

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    Quote Originally Posted by jack620 View Post
    Can you back that up with some stats Karl? I highly suspect it's not true.
    No, I cannot lay my hands on statistics that would back me and no one ever will. What do you reckon the chances of any incident report placing blame upon a "safety" item would be? What I can do is look at real world experience where the wearing of inappropriate gloves for inappropriate applications has either caused or worsened the incident. A prime example would be the use of bench grinders, nobody has any business wearing gloves other than perhaps latex gloves (why would you wear latex gloves when grinding?), yet I have seen on multiple occasions people wearing them because they believe it protects their hands. Use of gloves with power tools is another area where gloves can easily lead to a situation where you have less control of the tool. I can see positive benefits however in the use of the mechanics type of close fitting rubber gloves for preventing skin contact with oils etc.
    It pays to remember that all these super dooper new glove types are a somewhat recent invention and therefore gloves of the types commonly available and issued most probably have lead to injury. Getting back to the hierarchy of risk control, I will say again that PPE is on the lowest tier and is therefore the last measure to be employed in order to prevent harm. Blind reliance upon PPE is harming real safety performance and also destroying our manufacturing industries into the bargain as the compliance costs associated with the self perpetuating safety industry are astronomical. Workers managed to come home in good condition on a regular basis by using common sense for many years before we embarked upon this folly and abandoned the middle ground. I worked for a mining company where they killed three men in two separate incidents five weeks apart. We had strict rules about wearing safety glasses at all times and also two of the three men were wearing gloves at the time, all were 0.00 blood alcohol at the time. What killed them? A blase attitude to real safety, poor assessment of the actual working conditions and environment, no common sense and finally chasing the dollar. Procedures were there, PPE available and worn, but as usual, the human factor was what brought them undone.
    I am all for safety and wear PPE appropriate for the task I am performing, I still have the regulation numbers of toes and fingers and I don't need a seeing eye dog just yet )
    Interestingly, the most costly injury in the workplace has changed from back injury or repetitive stress injuries and now psychological injuries cost Australian industry the most. I have yet to see an employer with a really effective program to prevent psychological harm and many employers are the root cause of these injuries.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Karl Robbers View Post
    A prime example would be the use of bench grinders, nobody has any business wearing gloves other than perhaps latex gloves...
    That's your opinion Karl. I wear gloves when using a bench grinder.

    This thread is long on opinion and short on facts. Here's an article that quotes some figures:
    https://www.ishn.com/articles/101332...wearing-gloves
    Chris

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    Quote Originally Posted by jack620 View Post
    I suspect the "never where gloves when doing X" harks back to the days when leather gloves were all that was available. They are very strong and I can well imagine they could do extreme damage to a hand if caught in a machine. However, there is now a huge range of glove materials available for just about every task. I use Ansell Sensilite gloves in my workshop for everything except the most intricate tasks.

    You can be sure companies wouldn't be handing out free gloves to their workers if there wasn't a safety benefit.
    I certainly agree Chris that leather gloves would be far more likely to cause your hand to be dragged into a machine than a thin nitrile style glove, perhaps the thinner glove may be cut or ground away without dragging your hand in but probably not in every case.
    As a rigger and scaffolder in my working life, I wore gloves most of the time, a broken wire in a lifting sling could give you a nasty gash if your hand was unprotected, but if I used a bench grinder I never used gloves, at least not after one of our boilermakers lost half of his thumb in the grinder after having his glove caught between the wheel and the tool rest. The real problem is the compulsion that so many dictatorial types demand, that some order or procedure be followed in every case irrespective of its suitability for the circumstances. We had mechanics on floor creepers working on light vehicles forced to wear safety helmets, where the visors kept bumping against the underside of the vehicles and disturbing the dried mud from the underside and dropping it into their face and eyes, amongst other unforeseen situations when the people without real work experience kept handing down these edicts.
    Lawyers and Insurance Companies force many illogical behaviours from companies, especially if a one size fits all approach is taken by one or both sides.

  7. #22
    BobL is offline Member: Blue and white apron brigade
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    Quote Originally Posted by jack620 View Post
    Big companies certainly do care. Large companies these days are totally cost focussed. I've never worked in the mining industry so I can't comment, but if the company I work for can save one cent they will.

    I don't think it wrecks the country either. I'm pretty sure the cost of work-related injury is a bigger impost than providing PPE.
    When I was still working at Uni we had a major review of some of our Science Departments and the review panel consisted of two academics and and a senior engineer from a major Australian mining company. The mining engineer questioned some of our OHS practices and what we were teaching the students about OHS - at first I thought he was being over the top but on checking with some of our own graduates current working in the private and government sectors he turned out to be dead right - we were behind generally accepted practices at these places. So we made a few changes - not too complicated or onerous and I think it benefitted students making them more workplace ready. Note: this was not driven by ivory tower academics but an industry person. The same thing happened on the Engineering Board of Study for which I was a member of for 10 years whereby the need for appropriate student OHS training was driven by the industry reps on the board.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Karl Robbers View Post
    Have you ever noticed that it is often the same people having the same injuries repeatedly? People have an over reliance on PPE (it is the last step in the hierarchy of risk control) and an under reliance on thought before action.
    Gloves have caused as many injuries as they have prevented and often hard hats are worn for no reason. Yes, procedures help to keep us safe, but only if those procedures are written by people with real life experience as opposed to an academic who has never left their office. When working underground, I often found that procedures were written from the viewpoint of sounding like a good idea, but fell short of addressing the real issues and quite often they made a task more dangerous due to creation of a secondary issue caused by PPE. Quite often gloves created issues around the glove getting caught and dragging the hand in or as happened to me when grouting cable bolts, the prescribed chemical gloves held the cement against my skin causing chemical burns, whereas my preferred choice of fabric Ninja gloves protected my hands from abrasions but were easily flushed with water while working and never burned me.
    While it is not permissable in today's safety culture, natural selection would probably be the best solution for many recalcitrant workers.
    Hi Karl,
    There is no bloody way i will wear gloves when using rotating machinery in my work shop. When i was a fitter and turner i had my left index finger twisted off my hand when wearing gloves.
    Cheers,
    Mark.

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    Reading about those mechanics having to wear helmets made me remember an old mechanic mate of my Dad's who wore a leather skull cap. It fitted snugly to his cranium so protecting him from any gashes from the under side of a vehicle.

    I started work as an Apprentice Carpenter in 1970. I worked on a 12 story office block near Central Station in Sydney. One of my jobs I did was to shoot brick ties onto concrete walls for the Brick Layers. I used a Ramset Gun. I would do this task 3 days a week every week for about 6 months. For a start I was 16 (even then I should have had some form of "licence" and was given no training (apart from "see, this is how you do it" from another Trades man). I was not given ear protection or eye protection. It was just not available

    To use any sort of PPE now, I have to make myself do it rather than it being second nature. Gloves to work in???? I can't stand them. They give you no "soft feel" when you need it. Well I did buy a box of Nitrile Gloves to keep my hands clean, and yes I have been wearing them. I bought some lengths of black steel, the other day and used leather gloves to handle them mainly because the steel was hot and greasy.

    Chainsaw work....I bought a helmet with visor and ear muffs....and I do use it every time I get the chainsaw out. I have to wear spectacles so at least my eyes have reasonable protection for most tasks.
    Just do it!

    Kind regards Rod

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    Quote Originally Posted by Turbine Builder View Post

    When i was a fitter and turner i had my left index finger twisted off my hand when wearing gloves.
    You’ve only told us part of the story Mark. What type of gloves? What was the machine? Would the outcome have been better or worse without gloves?

    Everyone remembers the accidents that gloves contributed to, but nobody remembers the accidents that gloves prevented. Because they didn’t happen.

  11. #26
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    Not overly excited one way or the other about the NEW type of gloves some are made to wear for their employment or their home duties,but when I started work and for probably the next 20 years after the main type of glove was leather ( thick ) and long rubber gauntlet type.

    The rubber for chemicals,grease and oil and the leather for manual handling.

    The use of gloves was a breach of safety for a tradesman around machine tools, you may find a fitters or machinists mate using them when cleaning but that was the only time.

    I would like to know how many of you wear a ring or wrist band or jewellery when doing your machining or manual tasks, banning of this type of attire under an OHS policy I highly support.

  12. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by jack620 View Post
    That's your opinion Karl. I wear gloves when using a bench grinder.
    Not just my opinion at all, it is part of the safe operating procedure for a bench grinder as published by Worksafe Tasmania, Bench Grinder.pdfnot only that, it is the method taught to apprentices by TAFE. It was drummed into us then and is still taught now. A decent grinder will catch your beloved gloves, take them into the 1.5mm gap between the rest and the wheel, then proceed to remove your fingers little by little. Yes it has happened.

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    I agree completely with pipeclay and Karl. We are old school and passed through the trade with safety education from the people on the workshop floor whether they be tradesmen or leading hand or foreman.
    These were the people who worked with the hazards and took appropriate steps to get obvious hazards removed or minimized. As apprentices glove safety was hammered into us by our instructors.

    Nothing beats hands-on practical experience.

    When your safety education is from a book and university lecturer the safety awareness fails badly in some respects. As people on the floor, we can engage a potentially hazardous because a lot of the time we have seen or had experience of specific shop floor hazards. Common sense coupled with experience of my shop floor managers kept me safe.

    Academic certificates of safety officers do not fulfill this requirement completely. Yes, their academic heads are crammed full of codes and regulations but it takes the experience to discern where the rule should be applied and where it should not, ergo the glove fiasco.

    Perhaps some of you have obtained your glove safety info from a YouTube. It is true amateur stuff to see the operator wearing gloves on a bench grinder and the grinder is poorly secured and wobbling all over the bench. The same operators use gloves while operating an angle grinder, but the angle grinder has no safety guard.

    Do that in a well operated Aussie metal fab shop and someone will pull you up, double quick.


    Grahame

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    Quote Originally Posted by pipeclay View Post
    I would like to know how many of you wear a ring or wrist band or jewellery when doing your machining or manual tasks, banning of this type of attire under an OHS policy Ihighly support.
    Haven't worn any jewellery, watch, whatever in decades. Nearly lost a finger once thanks to snagging my wedding ring. Once was enough.

    I do wear rigger's gloves quite a lot around rotating machinery but I'm damn careful what I do with my hands. I usually have the hand not on the control tucked into my back pocket, well out of the way.

    It's pretty hard to snag a glove using an angle grinder for example, but real easy to get burns or worse if you don't. I'm about to chop some sections of 316 angle up in a minute, I'll be wearing gloves (and face shield, ear muffs and safety shoes).

    I already have a lot of stupidity marks AKA scars, I don't need any more.

    PDW

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    Hey PDW don't forget to check the expiry date on the cutting disc before you start and please do make sure you have a handle fitted to the grinder!!

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