Thanks to an innovative forklift truck industry, forklifts are much safer than they used to be and it is difficult to see if there is much more scope to improve the products’ safety. These improvements range from technical issues like truck stability, as evinced by Toyota’s remarkable SAS trucks, to speed limiters, reverse bleepers, vehicle monitoring systems and a host of ergonomic improvements to cut fatigue and so improve safety. Yet forklifts remain one of the UK’s largest single causes of workplace fatalities, with the potential to cause over 1,100 injuries per year, according to the HSE. This figure, however, could be a serious underestimate because it remains a fact that many accidents, including near misses, go unreported either to the relevant enforcing authority or, indeed, within companies themselves, despite the legal requirements. This can only mean that despite all the lip service paid to forklift health and safety issues it is operational methods that are sadly lacking in a culture that does not encourage employees to speak out when safety issues are compromised.
The business environment and seasonality can be useful markers for exposing danger areas – the need to make do and temptations to cut corners. When an economy recovers tentatively there is, for example, a reluctance by management to expand their teams or invest in new skills because confidence tends to lag behind the recovery indicators. “For workers that means longer hours, at higher intensity under more pressure until, inevitably, they start to make mistakes,” explains Stuart Taylor, from Mentor Training. A recovery, therefore, can easily cause an accident spike.
Seasonality can reveal riskier periods. For many businesses the run up to Christmas and the Summer holidays will see a rise in accidents, and it is not just about higher pressure to move goods through the warehouse faster. Between April (usually an accident low point) and December it would not be unusual to see a doubling in the accident rate. Part of this can be ascribed to hiring of temporary agency staff to replace staff on summer holidays and to cope with the higher Christmas trade. Despite the legal requirements to use only properly trained truck drivers, with a need for refresher courses, there is cause for concern over agency staff.
One of Britain’s leading forklift hire companies found from their internal accident investigations covering 14,000 trucks on hire, that between 10% and 15% of all accidents they recorded were a direct result of trucks driven by untrained drivers. An untrained driver means not only an operator without any formal training but also a driver who has at some time received training but has never had any refresher/update training. The company found that half of all accidents involving untrained operatives related to temporary agency staff. This raises the question of how many companies check the credentials of temporary staff or, indeed, how many require their recruitment agency to guarantee trained labour. Do companies research into how the agency assesses staff competence or verify training records of staff on their books?
Forklift safety is not just about drivers, of course. It is also related to non-forklift staff and here again temporary staff, in particular, seem to lack knowledge of site management regulations. Around 46% of accidents involve pedestrians struck by moving trucks and here is where poor site management figures prominently in the four broad categories of accident causes. The highest of these four groups is unsafe working practices, implicated in about 40% of all accidents.
Over the last 10 years or so forklift accidents have been falling but the figures remain too high. Only when businesses encourage communication between employees on the floor and management to discuss safety concerns outside of an intimidatory climate can one expect to see more significant improvements in the safety record. It is encouraging to see that Briggs is taking a major initiative in this field. One deep-seated hazard, however, may never be excised. This is the pressure to take short cuts to meet pressing schedules during busy periods. If that temptation could be removed the world of forklifts would become much safer.
Comments are closed.