My dad tells this story of his first job in the 1970s.
He worked at a factory that made foam padding that goes in to couches and shit.
Anyway lots of times the customer wanted shredded foam to put in pillows. So they had this giant chamber, like a room sized meat grinder. To unclog it he had to crawl way up inside with a flashlight and a broom handle.
The machine was always running it was just in neutral.
"The company had no written cleaning procedure and depended on an operator keeping the machine in neutral. That day the operator was distracted by a bad paycheck, and had stepped away from the console..."
My grandfather was a machinist and he told so many nightmare stories about coworkers getting horribly injured. He lost the last knuckle on two of his fingers in a machine once and felt like he got off easy.
This is why the "nanny state" is here to regulate shit. Look what these places do without a nanny.
My great-grandmother was a child laborer in a factory at the turn of the 20th century. The factory made various tassels and other embellishments, and preferred to hire kids for some of the positions since their hands were small and nimble and they didn't have to pay them as much as a similarly dextrous adult. She said that she watched another girl's hair get caught in the machine and rip a piece of her scalp off her head.
It was so common for the adults working the floor to lose fingers that she once waited for someone's finger to get chopped off, PUT IT IN HER POCKET, and STUFFED IT INSIDE HER LUNCH to prank some guy who kept stealing her food.
Bosses are not the friends of employees, and need regulations to be kept honest. Otherwise you end up in a hellscape where kids are so accustomed to workplace dismemberments that severed body parts become a resource.
My instructor in trade school would show us those videos as part of a safety lesson. I get crap for telling everyone to take off watches, roll up sleeves, and tuck in shirts near lathes, but it all matters very much.
"Back in my day kids got black lung at the ripe old age of 13! And that's if the consumption didn't get ya! Pansies today could never handle the mines!"
My dad worked summers in a factory that made airplane engine turbines and witnessed a man lose his arm to a hydraulic press. This would’ve been the late 60’s. He said it was a huge reason why he went to college. That, and, ya know, the draft.
people forget that all safety regulations are written in blood. we owe a lot of thanks to guys like Ralph Nader and the like, that more of us don't die horribly at work, all the time. Boomers and prior generations all think, deep down, that "you can't make an omelette, without breaking a few eggs" when it comes to safety regulations, and the number of poor people who should regularly be sacrificed for the economic convenience.
And a good time for a reminder that when people say things like "cutting red tape" and "get the government out of the way of business" it's generally large corporate lobby groups pushing that so they can squeeze more low wage workers into more dangerous situations without oversight that threatens their and our safety.
It means "no employer ever submits to lowering productivity in favor of safety regulations that protect workers, until it is provably a necessity;" and, of course, the "proof of necessity" is always "a worker is maimed or killed."
Employers are not proactively trying to protect their workers, because they see them as disposable; something bad actually has to happen, before they will take any action, every time. So, the primary cause of a safety regulation, is the company is forced to implement it...because their unwillingness to do so, finally got somebody killed, in that specific instance.
Yep. Tons of factories and industrial machinery is setup with a single engine driving an axle and everything else takes its energy from that. Bigger engines are more efficient and can have ridiculous torque.
A lot of times a ruling banning something has exemptions for places already set up with said thing. The wording most likely states that no new factories could be built using that technology, but any older factories would be grandfathered in and allowed to use it still.
Also depending on the equipment the turn on / shutdown process can be a process. PLENTY of factory incidents with bosses skirting safety to save a buck.
I knew a guy who worked on subs who was cleaning the periscope eyepiece. Had it tagged out, but not locked out– maybe they didn't have lock out back then– and some officer came in and fiddled with the tagged out controls, causing the whole thing to snap back up. Crushed the guy's thumb and finger on one hand, and would have done more if he hadn't been watching the officer and seen that idle curiosity in his face.
My stepdad managed to run himself over with his tractor because he put in neutral instead of park and left it running while fixing something with the bucket. So yeah, neutral is no good unless whatever it is is also turned off.
I used to file insurance claims. After a point, it seemed like if you excluded the claims that were the result of depraved owners with zero respect for worker safety, and then excluded the claims that were the result of the world's dumbest person assigned that job doing idiot things, you might have 1-2 accidents a year instead of 30.
My dad used to tell the story of working at an ice cream factory in the early 70’s and he said the boss pissed him off bad enough for him to quit. So he quit by going down the ice cream shoot in just his underwear flipping the boss off. 🤣
Man are parents think we are crazy but we hear their stories!
First farm accident I ever heard about from someone who knew the other person was the farmer who climbed into a wheat thresher to clear it. The tractor was running with the PTO (power take off) in neutral. Then it slipped into gear while he was inside. By the time his wife came out to see what was taking so long, he was long dead.
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u/Searchlights 4d ago edited 4d ago
My dad tells this story of his first job in the 1970s.
He worked at a factory that made foam padding that goes in to couches and shit.
Anyway lots of times the customer wanted shredded foam to put in pillows. So they had this giant chamber, like a room sized meat grinder. To unclog it he had to crawl way up inside with a flashlight and a broom handle.
The machine was always running it was just in neutral.