Health and safety - not here mate

Whilst Britain seems to be obsessed with health and safety issues, here the attitude is a little more cavalier.

They may put up signs on building sites outlining the safety requirements but the workmen seem to disregard them. You see people using cutting tools without goggles even without gloves. You see them using a crane to transport material to a higher level without hard hats. It is almost unbelievable the risks that they are prepared to take.

We became acutely aware of this when workmen came to remove the defunct electricity pylon at the top of our road. You can see in the picture the guy has no safety harness, he isn't even wearing a hard hat. I used to park my car behind that pylon. Luckily I had parked it down the road that day.

Last week in the town, council workers were pruning the trees on Calle Purisima. Nobody had thought to tell the people to move their cars which were parked directly underneath. The area wasn't cordoned off to avoid branches falling on to passing shoppers. Damn it they were even carrying petrol for the chainsaw in ordinary plastic water bottles. As far as I know nobody was hurt, there were no explosions and no cars were damaged.

There are plenty of accidents though; some of which are fatal. In spite of that these practices continue. Their only excuse is that at least they get the jobs done without too much fuss.

This item from Euro Weekly proves the point.

A stucco plasterer was working on the third floor of an almost- completed building in Elche when he slipped on some wooden boards he had placed between the scaffolding and the building’s front wall, falling 15 metres to his death.
His colleagues called an ambulance from a nearby bar but, by the time it arrived, he was pronounced dead.

Pascual Pascual, of Elche’s CCOO workers’ union, visited the site to establish the circumstances surrounding the accident and immediately registered a complaint that the plasterer was not wearing a safety harness. “The personal safety measures have failed,” he said, at the same time as asking, “Who will be responsible for this, given that many workers are under pressure to meet deadlines? Unfortunately, firms are applying pressure on workers regarding their productivity and penalise them if they fail to meet deadlines, regardless of whether they comply with safety measures or not.”

According to details provided by the ‘Federacion de la Construccion, Madera y Afines de Comisiones Obreras’ (the construction workers’ federation), eight workers lost their lives in work-place accidents in the construction industry throughout 2008. The industry also suffered 285 serious accidents last year.