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I got an email 2 weeks ago from the company my employer subcontracts to asking for me to come for a OH&S meeting, so I figure I would go and see what the go is with new legislation that came in january. Well it seems after paying $500 for training and licensing 5 years ago that licensing is no longer valid, I can still use my license to verify my competency but I need to go do more training and spend another $500 so I can get a peice of paper that verifies my competency, there is nothing new in the training...

What a joke.....

I have 2 extra wallets just for training certifications and inductions. Some of them require renewal every year, particularly Rio-Tinto stuff. Pain in the *** but at least my boss has to pay for them!
Only have to pay for my electrical, comms, security, MR truck licences.

Yea i'm a digger driver for me the holes in the ground stay the same there is nothing special, becarefull of services, walking traffic, vehicles and power lines. I find it very frustrating at the oh&s meeting we had a guy from qld wphs there he was tryin to explain how it's going to weed out the cowboys, The whole company does general hire and anyone thats in construction knows cowboy operators get kicked off sites pretty quick, its just something else I have to pay for that is a waste of my time and money.

I just came off a building site for Rio. I usually work on building sites in the city. I told the boss he can find someone else to do the next Rio job or i'll go and work for someone else.

What is the point in filling out a safe work method statement if it does not matter that you can do the job safely without ppe but they then tell you that it is manditory anyway. Why do i need a hard hat, long sleaves/pants, glasses, gloves to work indoors with a ceiling above me terminating cables for a cctv system.

Lets turn this into a dont you hate rio thread as well!
I went to one of their sites in a crane, they told me I needed a seat belt in the top cab.
I asked why, you cant drive up there.
They told me the safest place to be in the event of a rollover was in the cab and the seat belt will stop me jumping out.
I told them they were wrong, if my crane rolled over the safest place to be was about 55m away from the crane where the nothing can land on you.

So I trek down to the workshop where they realise that the top cab seats arent made for seatbelts and have no hard points... so they let me off...

I quiet often find that safety goes out the window in my job as soon as there is a service such as fibreoptic in the way benching rules are out the window and its either cut the trench outside the rules or go home.

I have all the saftey gear aswell in regards to the hardhat I've never had anything close to falling on my head nothing ever lifted over my head and my old man had a little chuckle yesterday when I called it my poxie hat and if anything of substance fell on me it wouldn't make a difference, but apparently its a couple hundred bucks not to look like a tool on a jobsite thesedays

I have seen hard hats save many peoples lives, including mine once, and have never had a problem wearing them really and dont care how I look on a site, its not a fashion parade.
I was on a site once where a wall tile fell off some scaffolding and landed on someones hard hat. It embedded itself in the hat and he could feel it touching his head. If not for the hard hat, the tile would have been embedded in his brain and he wouldnt have felt anything...
When I first started in construction I thought they were stupid too, especially seen as I worked around tilt panels etc, but a 20kg object falls more often than a 2000kg object, and thats what they are designed to save you from.

I agree that the licensing is a poorly masked attempt to get more money, but basic PPE is there for a reason.

+1 Im not there to look good. If i never need it then thats good but knowing Murphy the day i dont have it is the day i will need it.

Sometimes it feels like im working just to pay for my licences and tools so I can work....vicious circle.

Im all for oh&s and ppe. Payed by the hour so who cares,and when qouteing you just allow for it.no biggie.

Did get my ear chewed out at bhp the other day. Apprantly you cant walk and talk on your mobile. For fear of bumping into someone. Some of the stuff I just have a chuckle about.

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Yea I agree but some people need to wear ppe for the job that they do but for what I do its not necessary

Was listening to the radio about 12 months ago and a driller rang in with one of the most stupid ones i have heard. They had to wear hard hats out in the open off site because eagles use rocks as part of their nest building and could drop a rock on their head. Had a good laugh at that one.

Three or four years ago I was working at a Gold mine, I was employed directly by the company, not a contractor, and the company employees had regular OHS meetings, far more often than the contractors, I think someone in the OHS department was trying to justify their existence. We had that many meetings that they ran out of site safety issues to lecture us on... so one 2hr meeting was about safety on our R&R and around the home???

ie: If cleaning out the gutters at home while using a step ladder, you must wear fall arrest equipment, gloves, long sleeved shirt, safety glasses, and secure you ladder every time you move it, etc.

...or, if cleaning solar panels or repairing tiles on your roof etc, you must wear fall arrest equipment secured to anchor points that meet Australian standards, gloves, long sleeved shirt, sunscreen, hat etc.

...or, when having a barbeque at home, the correct procedure for opening the gas bottle and lighting the bbq, safety around the barbeque, the correct procedure for shutting down the bbq and gas bottle.

...or, if gardening, pruning, digging etc... all the ppe required, pre-job site safety assessment, bending at the knees, don't twist while shovelling, don't leave a nail rake pointy side up, etc...

It was simply ridiculous... If wanna fall off my own roof on my R&R... I damn well will... and it's got bugger all to do with them!

...but they let us walk around a gold process plant with caustic, cyanide, hypersaline water etc pumping around everywhere, with leaks all over the place, even over walkways… patched up with fast tape… “Just until the next scheduled shutdown!”

...but if we drove out to the tailings dam to inspect the outlets, we had to put our hard hats on as soon as we got out of the vehicle... about 3km from the nearest overhead structures/objects... must've been because of the eagles!

The specs and safety for electrical work are getting insane as well these days. They want you to wear all sorts of PPE like a darth vader suit just to open a panel and check voltage. I can understand taht for changing out powered parts and such but just to check voltage across a contactor? FFFFFFFFFFFffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuu. After that was started the company I worked for didn't want to spend the duckets on the suit right away so they sub out to a non union shop that had some non english speaking romanians come in wearing non of this PPE and somehow now the panel is really complex and they bypass a bunch of stuff making it where you have to manually operate stuff with switches. Freaking LULZ.

I like safety glasses and long sleeves around some things short sleeves around rotating equipment and common sense stuff but some of it it out of control.

Now I have a little job at a friends shop where he was trying to add the new cook county tax rate into the computer and the computer would not accept it and thought the new rate was an error as it was 133% tax,yep 133%. That was an extra tax just for the county. (cook county) IL gets 18% plus a few more % in sales tax, cook county gets 2.40 per 15 dollar product then 133% on the 15 plus some more sales tax. My friend is going to go out of business I think.

aww damn, I missed when this thread was active

Rule number 2 of the forum, thou shalt not keep bringing up old threads in an attempt to reignite political causes or rants.....