Health & safety at work issues are often seen as an annoyance – a cost without a benefit. It is an attitude the Health & Safety Executive want to change because, they say, a safer place to work can be a more profitable place to work.
How often has it been said: “We can’t compete with oversees suppliers because they don’t have the health & safety regulations we do”? The anecdotes of the open flouting of health & safety regulations abroad, even on mainland Europe, are legion.
But are we so compliant in this country? Take a look back over the past few years. Five people in the stone industry have been crushed by falling slabs of stone since the turn of the millennium. Two companies last year were prosecuted for exposing their masons to many times the legal limit of respirable crystalline silica, and one of the masons exposed to the dust over many years has since had a lung transplant. A man’s head has been crushed in a CNC workcentre because a safety device was immobilised. A man’s arm has been torn off because a guard was removed from a conveyor. And almost everyone knows of masons and former masons with white finger, bad backs and hacking coughs. Minor crush, cut and graze injuries regularly pass unrecorded, even though records could identify problems before they turn into tragedies.
Indeed, it often apparently surprises directors to learn that accidents and ill health are even supposed to be recorded and certainly the culture in the construction industry in general of accepting knocks, scrapes and cuts means many incidents go unrecorded. Some injuries are also the direct result of discarding personal protective equipment such as masks, goggles and gloves.
Roy Bush, who deals with the stone industry at the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), says health & safety is not about avoiding the attention of HSE inspectors, it is about protecting employees. “As an inspector, the last thing I want to do is prosecute a company when something has gone wrong. I want them to understand the risk and put it right long before anything goes wrong.”
On site it can be just as bad as in the workshop. In February last year, following a 61% rise in deaths on building repair, maintenance and improvement sites the year before, the HSE visited 1,000 refurbishment projects and found 300 of them so dangerous that they were shut down. There were 395 enforcement notices issued. Yet the incident was apparently so unsurprising it passed almost without comment.
HSE want to change that attitude. They want accidents and illness to be regarded as avoidable and taking action to make sure they are avoided seen as cost effective rather than an expense without benefits.
The HSE point is that a safe workplace is usually also an efficient workplace. If fewer people are getting hurt or ill, probably less product is getting damaged and the workflow is likely to be smoother.
In any case, fewer injuries and health problems mean fewer sick days. In 2007-8, according to HSE figures, 34million work days were lost due to injuries and illness. As most people do not employ more people than they need, work is disrupted when people are not there.
As (presumably) most employers do not really want to harm their workforce, making sure they have the right equipment to carry out a job safely even has benefits in simply less distress, although admittedly that does not necessarily show up on the bottom line – not obviously, anyway, although happier employees may be more productive.
An HSE report last year by Maniv Pathak put some harder figures on the costs to companies of health & safety failures. The figures in the report were from 2005-6 and earlier, but showed that the total cost to industry of workplace injuries and sickness amounted to as much as £3.2billion annually in compensation and insurance, administrative costs, sick pay and the cost of recruiting replacement people. Any lost production time will need to be added to that.
But that figure is dwarfed by the cost to the individual who has suffered the injury or ailment and society in general. The overall cost to the economy is more than 10 times greater than the cost to companies.
Maniv Pathak says in his report: “So long as employers do not bear the full costs of workplace injuries and work-related ill health they will continue to have weaker than optimal incentives to act to reduce workplace risks to health & safety.”
One way HSE have of increasing the cost to companies of health & safety infringements is to prosecute those that perpetrate them. And from this month (January) the potential cost of such infringements has quadrupled as magistrates, who deal with the majority of health & safety infringements, can now impose fines of up to £20,000 per offence. For the first time, those responsible for infringements can also be sent to prison – for up to two years.
And if the magistrates feel their powers are inadequate to deal with a case they can send it to the Crown Court, where there is no limit to the level of fine that can be imposed.
There were 27,976 major injuries to employees in 2007-8, according to HSE figures – a rate of 105 per 100,000 people working. More than a third were caused by slipping or tripping. There were 108,795 other injuries causing absence from work of more than three days, around 40% caused by handling, lifting or carrying, and 25% due to slipping or tripping.
Even more people – more than 2million of them – suffered work-related illnesses. A quarter of them were musculoskeletal, 44% of which were from the sort of back problems often associated with lifting something incorrectly or that is too heavy.
There are a lot of simple, cheap and often quite ingenious devices to help you store, transport and handle stone safely in your workshop and on site. Some of them are featured on these pages.
Such equipment can help avoid the lifting, carrying, slipping and tripping type of accident and injury that accounts for so many of the days taken off each year. And it is the sort of equipment that is snapped up at exhibitions because when people see it they think: ‘What a good idea!’
Stone Federation reissued a warning about the dangers of crush accidents associated with ‘A’ frames last year after a fifth death. Jane Buxey, the Chief Executive of the Federation, says health & safety will be top of Stone Federation’s agenda in 2009. In October the Federation introduced a health & safety hotline to help members make sure they are keeping up-to-date with legislation and to answer their questions on the subject. More help is on the way in the form of a health and safety manual for members later this year.
Harbro’s significant growth as suppliers of tools and consumables to the UK stone industry has been helped in no small measure by their association with major German wholesalers Weha that began in 1996.
Part of the range of products that have become available through Harbro as a result of the association is an extensive array of materials handling devices, many of which Weha manufacture themselves.
Weha have been selling materials handling products for many years because Germany were, with the Scandinavian countries, European leaders in health & safety and also understood the productivity benefits of being able to lift and shift stone slabs and products without damaging yourself or the stone.
The Kitchen Sherpa has proved particularly popular for companies supplying worktops in cities, where they often have to be carried up stairs to apartments that are not on the ground floor. Handles grip the stone and shoulder straps help spread the load and provide extra security. There are rollers on the bottom so the worktop does not have to be carried where the floor is flat.
The suction cup carrying reinforcement bars (pictured above) enable the installers to move the worktop more freely without worrying about breaking it.
The Kaiman slab grab has a thin jaw to make it easier to get it in behind a slab without having to tilt it too far. Tilting stone on ‘A’ frames has led to slabs falling and people being injured and even killed, although companies are now switching from the use of ‘A’ frames to ‘toast rack’ storage that stops slabs falling in either direction.
There are various versions and configurations of slab stands and transport pallets available from Weha as well as mobile workbenches for making kitchen worktops and banker tables that all reduce the amount of rehandling necessary when working a slab or block.
It is a benefit of making many of the products themselves that Weha can use feedback from customers to develop and improve their range. Harbro have played their part in that. It was as a result of feedback from Harbro customers in the UK that the extensions to the Butterfly (pictured below) were added so that the corners of long pieces of stone cannot touch the ground.
It was also at Harbro’s suggestion that solid tyres were replaced with pneumatic tyres on Weha’s buggies and trollies, which is particularly appreciated by memorial masons transporting headstones across grass.
The full range of Weha materials handling products from Harbro can be seen in their catalogue and on their website.
Having introduced the Gisbert range of Spanish stoneworking machinery to the UK, wholesalers D Zambelis are now also offering materials handling products from another Spanish company, Iremar. Zambelis say they chose products made in Europe because they felt confident about them as far as people’s safety was concerned. As well as racks, trollies and lifting equipment, comes the device pictured here for clamping two sections of worktop together. The suction pads are placed either side of a joint after it has been glued and the handle depressed to clamp the two pieces of worktop together to create a tight fit.
National Masonry have had enormous success with their sink hole saver clamp that protects worktops from snapping around the sink cut-out when being moved, but they sell a whole range of materials handling devices for the stone industry, some of which are pictured here.
The Mega-Jaw clamp weighs only 1.18kg, opens up to 66mm and has non-marking, tear resistant rubber gripping pads. If the worktop is particularly heavy, there can be two installers per clamp. The tension in the clamp is adjustable and the clamp holds on to the workpiece (rather than falling off) when you let go. Each pair of clamps can carry 227kg.
The Pro-Cart weighs 21kg and, again, stays attached to the countertop when it is lifted (important for climbing stairs). The 200mm casters allow the cart to be rested on stair treads while the wide wheelbase gives stability, even with large tops. Good ground clearance makes it easy to tip up to climb curbs.
The Pro-Dolly is especially helpful when used in pairs for tall, heavy, or extra large worktops. Each one only weighs 8.6kg yet can carry 340kg (a pair can carry 680kg) slabs up to 68mm thick. The 200mm closed-cell polyurethane tyres cannot get punctures and have excellent shock absorption, although the support rail is lined with durable rubber to give further protection against chipping the edge of the slab. Once on the dolly, the stone is only 133mm off the ground, so most slabs should fit through doors upright.
Andy Bell of National Masonry points out one other benefit of using products like this: it looks so much more professional when you turn up on site with it than two men struggling to get stone out of the back of the van and into the property.
One of the most popular products from the Waters Group is the Asinus transport system (pictured right), which is a cart incorporating an electric lift to take a kitchen worktop from the workbench, lower it for transporting, then raise it again to put into the back of a van. On site it is used for lifting the worktop out of the van, lowering it for safe moving, then lifting it on to the kitchen units.
It is only the lift that is battery operated and for moving, it is pushed, which means the battery can be recharged in a few hours and will do a day’s work on the charge. It can lift up to 380kg and with pneumatic tyres can tackle most terrains. Although at £2,200 it is more expensive than trollies without the lift, it has nevertheless found a ready market in the UK with nearly 50 having been sold by the Waters Group.
Waters have also added the Wedgee (pictured left) to their materials handling range. It is used to separate a slab on an ‘A’ frame from others for lifting while the person using it is standing to one side. If the slab does topple, nobody is in the fall zone.
Waters Group Director Daniel Waters says their materials handling range has grown a lot in recent years as masonry companies have focused more on health & safety issues.
They now also offer the Australian Abeco range of trollies, clamps and lifts and Rightetti vacuum lifts, chosen for the strength of their suction and the speed at which they release.
And Waters now have their own, locally made range of carts and trollies, which are now looking even better value for money as the weakness of the pound increases the price of imports.
Combined Masonry Supplies offer the Aardwolf range of materials handling products such as the carrying clamp and self-locking trolley pictured here. The range is extensive. It is from an Australian company and is made in Vietnam, which keeps the price down.
Combined Masonry Supplies Director Richard Chandler says the Aardwolf materials handling products have become a mainstay of his business, accounting for 10-15% of sales as people become more conscious of health & safety and realise how much easier life can be when lifting and carrying aids are used.
As Richard says, for companies it makes sense not to have people off sick with minor cuts, bruises and sprains due to difficult handling when it can be avoided so easily and inexpensively. And because these products make work easier, more of it gets done. “People are taking it seriously,” he says.
The aids themselves have become easier to use as they have developed over the years. They are not complicated pieces of kit, but there have been improvements to grabbing systems and the tyres and improved protection to the workpiece. “They are coming up with new things all the time,” says Richard.
An example is the self-locking trolley. Its 330mm pneumatic tyres can tackle most terrain and are 450mm apart for stability. The ‘V’ groove that supports the slab means various thicknesses are accommodated without adjustment. It can carry up to 400kg with the supports tightening as the weight increases. Yet spring loading means the supports release their hold as soon as you start to lift the slab off the trolley, so there is no tightening up or unscrewing involved. And all for £225.
Pisani own-brand a wide range of materials handling trollies, alligator lifts and storage and transportation racks. And they are just about to start a special promotion of these products with lower prices.
“The whole aspect of health & safety is a big thing at the moment,” say Glyn Knighton, Sales Manager of Pisani’s Stone Processing Supplies division, “and this is all part and parcel of it.”
In their own depots in London and Derbyshire they use ‘toast rack’ style racking for the slabs of stone that they stock for their wholesale business, and they recommend the same kind of racking for their customers, who they want to see move away from the old ‘A’ frame storage system. They are even using this type of racking, with posts front and back, on their lorries now for transporting stone slabs.