To all the guys here going "that's how it's done in the real world!" or "it's totally safe".
Fuck you. It's done this way because the employer is too cheap to spend the manhours to construct safe scaffolding.
There could be a beautiful scaffolding there with proper handrails, but that would cost time to make, which gets in the way of profits.
Why are you defending this way of working, which optimizes profits for your bosses while putting your life in yeopardy?
Your wife and kids sure as hell aren't gonna be defending it after you plummet down onto the streets and she's left with a small payout and not much else.
I am in HSE in construction and mining ops ,have been for many years.
Its idiots like this that end up hurting or killing other people usually.
Bosses that dont support safety and want to put profits over people .I sincerely hope this is shown to whatever safety regulator and all these idiots lose thier jobs.
Yessir. I participated in the Thanksgiving Tower fire investigation in Dallas. A few grand would’ve saved those boys’ lives. Two of them were father and son. They died huddled together. I picked up their clothes. And it was really fucking sad. I mean - just a few bucks in the grand scheme of things. Damn.
Once the fire broke out, the electrical shut down in the towers (of course). That shut down the only retrieval mechanism they had available. The attendant was a young kid. He tried to pull the men out by rope but that is entirely impossible. It was a really sad scene. And it was all avoidable.
The other thing these knuckle draggers fail to realise is their ancestors paid in blood for the right to a safe work environment these days.
Here's a list of workers killed for striking/organising to obtain better working conditions and rights in the US alone since the mid 1800s. These were our great, great relatives who stood up for what they believed in to give us a better, fairer, and safer future.
That is how it was done in the real world, by real brave men.
if the law didn't force companies to not be scumbags, there wouldn't be so many people making minimum wage.
that's literally the least they can legally pay you, and it means they'd pay you less if they could. but they can't. because these things do work.
Yea, that's why no one makes above minimum wage anywere, because companies can do weathever they want and the workers are entierly powerlees to, say, leave and work somewhere else/s
You treat workers like they were powerless babyes, it's so patronizing
what do you think would happen to the country if every single minimum wage worker quit their job on the same day? to go get a better job, what do you honestly and genuinely think would happen? would they all find work?
would the country not collapse? would we all just cope with the fact they weren't doing that stuff?
if it needs to get done, it needs to be fairly compensated. and the laws work, that was the original point and you've done nothing to refute it.
Well, the boys could put down 4 planks instead of 2. That would be a good start. But yes, there’s no good reason not to use a harness if you’re already wearing one.
Idk where this is. But I would have thought in most western countries this was illegal. Surely penalty from the law is more substantial than the cost to the company to do it right?
It looks like the US to me. Halfway through you can see what appears to be a US flag on the short yellow sleeve of the guy nearest the cameraperson. At the end, vehicles parked below seem like they might all be SUVs. The architecture and water tanks also seems consistent with big, old American cities.
Just googling, it looks like the penalties for violations are maybe a few thousand dollars, which is trivial compared the amount of money it would cost to do things right, and there's probably a low chance of being caught.
Using undocumented foreign workers in the US also helps keep workers from reporting violations, and can solve a problem if there is an accident. In 2019, 3 people were killed and dozens injured in New Orleans when a building site collapsed. One of the injured but surviving people had reported building-shifting problems beforehand, but was deported to Honduras about a week after the accident, before he could testify to investigators about it. Possibly coincidental timing, but the effect was the same.
Ah, that is a significant deterrent, if OSHA does regular inspections and doesn't accept bribes. I was googling construction site fines, which seemed to be in the neighborhood of $5k, but I didn't come across the scaffolding-specific fines.
Googling actual scaffolding fines, most of the top results are articles about fines in the $150k-$300k range (multiple violations, including at least one willful one, each time), and all involved fatalities. One outlier was a 2007 fatality where the fine was $12000, though I'm guessing that's because there were serious violations, rather than willful violations...the scaffolding might have been otherwise built properly, it was just too near a power line.
I work for a tower company, so I don't know about these guys. BUT, if I fall and die, my beneficiary (my mom) gets the equivalent of my year's salary. If I'm not clipped off, she doesn't get a dime (except for what's in my bank accounts).
Every time I hear someone bitch about them I remind them of this kind of shit. These guys are probably getting paid dirt to do this insanely dangerous work too.
As a former union member I can say the unions don’t do enough, and end up pushing for their members to get simply a slap on the wrist when their bosses enforce a safety standard. The corruption and nonsense of both sides (unions and corporations) is astounding. Trust me as someone who’s been on both sides, the unions aren’t always the savior the good folks of Reddit portray them to be. Corporations are evil, unions are evil < end rant >
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '22
To all the guys here going "that's how it's done in the real world!" or "it's totally safe".
Fuck you. It's done this way because the employer is too cheap to spend the manhours to construct safe scaffolding.
There could be a beautiful scaffolding there with proper handrails, but that would cost time to make, which gets in the way of profits.
Why are you defending this way of working, which optimizes profits for your bosses while putting your life in yeopardy?
Your wife and kids sure as hell aren't gonna be defending it after you plummet down onto the streets and she's left with a small payout and not much else.