Protective Clothing

As a safety professional, I am amazed at how many accidents occur because people are unwilling to take proper precautions to protect themselves. The same people who will wear UV protective clothing when they go swimming or spend a lot of time out in the sun will forget entirely to wear safety clothing when they are on the job!

A lot of people think that OSHA clothing is silly. They don't consider that it saves lives. The ironic thing is that newbies are much more likely to wear protective clothes than their more experienced coworkers. Although they are more at risk of accidents than experienced workers, these newcomers are actually less at risk for fatalities or serious injuries because of the protective clothing that they wear!

Once workers get more experience at their jobs, they tend to remove the protective clothes because either they are uncomfortable, or because it is seen as excessive. Sometimes it is just a matter of macho attitude ñ The desire to show off by taking risks. Either way, without the right protective clothing you can easily become a victim of what could otherwise be a harmless mistake.

It is baffling how many places I have seen people leave off protective clothing. Some of the most highly educated professionals I know leave off lab clothes when going into a chemical laboratory. I have seen chemists working with highly dangerous chemicals while refusing to even wear gloves! They will wear some of the most necessary protective clothing such as chemical masks, but when it comes to gloves they will trust in their own dexterity to stop something potentially fatal from spilling on their hands.

This is idiocy as far as I am concerned. Protective clothing is not that expensive, and furthermore it is often supplied by the workplace. Even if clothing protection were only to work in 5% of cases, there would still be a 5% lower risk of accidental death. It seems worth a little discomfort to me!

I have become so fed up that the situation that I have begun to make public service announcements about the importance of industrial clothing. It is so tragic to see, over and over again, good people dying because of a simple lapse of judgment. I feel like if people knew how important protective clothing was and were reminded about it more frequently, they would begin to wear it. All I can do is try to tell them about the facts.