Denise Dodd is a Vancouver musician who told me about a very noisy job she had long ago. It wasn’t playing music that gave her a headache every night – it was selling flowers on a bar circuit in Edmonton back in the 90s.
Category: Personal stories
Sharon Barbour met with hundreds of young people when she worked for the BC Federation of Labour’s Young Workers program a few years ago. She was always very clear about the worker’s right to refuse unsafe work, but many were already concerned that speaking up would mean losing their jobs.
In the middle of the night, two men struggled to change the tire of a huge transport vehicle stranded near Dorval Airport. The boss was under the rear axle, half-way through the lift, when the vehicle began to shake. Luckily his apprentice was paying attention.
A 41-year-old man in England was seriously injured – but thankfully survived – after he was pulled into the rotating parts of a machine that was not locked out, and from which the built-in guard had been removed.
Abby is a self-employed doula and part of what is known as the “grey fleet”: workers who drive a vehicle during the course of their work but not as their work. Self-employed workers face the same road safety issues as other people who drive while working for employers, so they have to know the risks and take the necessary precautions.
Tires can explode with deadly force – as you will see in these videos. A guy at my local coffee shop told me about his experience with an exploding tire when he was a mobile mechanic for broken-down trucks in Ontario and Quebec. A driver destroyed his own tire by driving more than 500 kilometres with a locked brake – and this led to a big explosion during the attempted repair. At first the mechanic didn’t realize how much the tire was damaged, and it exploded and flew six feet when he was inflating it to see where the leak was.
A reader helped his boss change a light bulb in an awkward spot, two stories up on the underside of a catwalk. Two workers lowered the boss in a harness, using a rope, a D-ring, and human muscle. This was their solution to having no ladder, no scaffolding, and no lift high enough to change the bulb.
“I almost killed a guy,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous. “I tipped a 500-lb motor off the top of the rack with the forklift and it landed about a foot away from my coworker.”
This eight-minute drama made me so nervous as I watched the young dad cutting down trees in a dangerous part of the logging block. See what happens when safety is sacrificed.
Chefs at Mongolie Grill in Whistler, BC, Canada are wearing non-slip shoes you might not expect. All kitchen staff have been wearing the same kind of non-slip shoes for nearly a year: the Crocs Bistro Kitchen Chef Work Shoe – designed for folks in the restaurant, food service, hospitality, and health care industries.
