"in the end nothing could be done to save his life....."

 

The hazards associated the maintenance of moveable equipment is often overlooked by many companies. Here is a recent incident that highlights the hazards associated with maintaining moveable equipment.

A worker has died early this afternoon, around 13.00 hours (one day during the first week of July 2022), in a work accident occurred at (an aluminium company in Southern Europe). As this newspaper has learned, the operator was repairing an excavator when the bucket of the shovel fell on him. The victim belonged to the company (company name omitted), a subcontractor of machinery maintenance. The (medical) helicopter has moved to the plant of (company name removed), a company dedicated to aluminum, to evacuate the worker, although in the end nothing could be done to save his life.

Faced with this new work accident, (union name omitted) has called for next Wednesday a concentration in (major city name removed) and has appealed to the (government agency) to "purge responsibilities with forcefulness, since accidents, on many occasions, are the result of precariousness."

(Union) recalls that both subcontracted companies and the main company "must jointly adopt the appropriate security measures". With today's accident there are already 22 workers who have died in the (region of country) this year.

We offer our sincere condolences to the deceased worker’s family, friends, and coworkers. We acknowledge that the worker was not employed by the aluminium company but by an outside contractor hired to service moveable equipment at the aluminium plant. Regardless, of whom employed the worker. He died at an aluminium plant.

A sad trend we have seen over the years is aluminium companies removing non-employees, outside contractors, etc. from their safety data. For the majority of companies this was done in part due to the high number of incidents that were occurring their workplace(s) with non-employees. Non-employees at our worksites have increased exponentially over the past decade. No longer do aluminium companies perform internally all of the jobs at their workplaces. For example, janitorial staffs are now commonly a task that is contracted to an outside company. If a janitor during the job gets injured some companies will not include that injury in the safety data. We disagree with that practice because it clouds what is actually going on. We noticed in the past a company celebrating a long streak of non-recordable incidents at their workplace. But, that company had 2 fatalities by contractors at their workplace. What companies fail to realize is that their workers feel that management focus of safety is fake. In such how can they celebrate a streak when there was recent blood on the workplace floor. We feel that any individual on the workplace should be counted in a company’s safety data.

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