"FOR YOUR SAFETY!" Is safety just a new religion?

[Yourbaker]

We have all been introduced to the people who know better and have safety gear and rules for every task known.

As a journeyman in my profession with over 30 years experience I have torn off devices attached to my machinery that seems more like child proofing. Where did these people come from and how do we get rid of them?

Today because of their fears we can't have public gatherings. What began as a good idea to prevent little Timmy from falling down the well has turned into a society clenching menace.

imho.

 

[ions]

It’s forced religion to keep it up

 

[Gloomp]

Ya, to hell with federal car, house and machinery safety regulations that saves lives every day. How do you get rid of them? Go fucking live in Sudan.

 

[Yourbaker]

I think Sudan probably has even more stupid laws for my safety.

Do you travel below the speed limit on all your roads?

Most people don't really understand my job, safety people believe they do. They also don't. But somehow these overpaid monkeys with lack of knowledge of real trade skills have authority to put crap in my way in the regular tasks of my job. How did people without understanding get themselves installed in positions of authority?

Safety doesn't save lives but it slows down the work force to a crawl. Real safety is understanding your work place, you can gain a few insights by taking safety courses but we have failed as a species in trying far too hard to save others. I have yet to meet anyone in the safety trade that has a clue. I have met hundreds of trades people who work safe due to experience and knowledge. Like me, most remove the child proofing from tools that we had to pay extra to have installed.

 

[Gloomp]

Safety doesn't save lives

can someone please take care of this guy

 

[Yourbaker]

Understanding saves lives, safety is how to child proof the work place so experts are impeded, it does not save lives and in many cases from personal experience safety procedures that are poorly understood are an endangerment in the work place.

Today you can go on you tube and see how to correctly use gloves and masks. In my line of work 80% of the workforce has food safe certification yet 75% have no understanding of how to put in gloves and how to take off gloves. I've sat through countless safety meetings where basic understanding of the policies being implemented is completely lacking. I've listened to medical "safety experts" tell my staff they don't care how they take gloves out of a box just how they remove the soiled glove from their hand. Suddenly I'm having to ask everyone to stay back and undo the damaging mis-information.

There is a set of safe practices that are developed in work places that are good, communicating these practices between work sites is also good. Supporting a whole new teir of worksite gurus who don't actually work but do take a healthy pay cheque while enforcing some useful and some useless rules and not accomplishing anything.

Brains to dumb to save themselves can be stories of terror for the coming workers and our population will slowly shrink. It's win win.

 

[alasdairm]

^ i'd love to understand how this oppressive, society-clenching menace impacts you negatively day to day?

you gave the example of removing (presumably state or federally-mandated?) 'safety' equipment from tools you use. are the tools unusable with the equipment in place?

it sounds very pervasive - perhaps you could give a few more examples?

thanks.

alasdair

 

[Yourbaker]

For clarity sake I'll stick to a single safety issue that most of you would and do accept.

FOOD SAFE CERTIFICATION.

I can only speak from a Canadian perspective and laws vary from province to territory. Most practices are taught identically and most core structure in Canada is identical. While all training is single day classroom initially the certification is renewed for a fee online every 5 years. The cost is absorbed by the worker in most of the industry and government requirements are a single worker on a worksite have a current certificate.

Take a moment to consider how few people making your food have really had any training. In Canada this means a minimum of 1 person working in the restaurant you are eating at has had a single day of training in a classroom (mostly watching videos). This may have happened within the last 5 years or they may simply have answered an online multiple answer quiz and paid the $150 fee. I consider it a working bribe to appease the people who hand out certification. Because the food service industry is rarely a life career goal these tests are pretty basic and most people would be surprised how well they might do on them with no studying.

When you have large enough groups of employees to train at once government certified trainers will come to your classroom and teach level 1 food safe to your staff. It seems like a great system until you again realize anyone can pass the test and there is no understanding taught at all. Yesterday's logger can be tomorrow's sushi chef, get certified food safe and you're good.

I worked in a HACCP plant. It is certification we needed to get so we could include Costco as a client. The cost of glove use in a HACCP alone increases the labour cost by 10% under near optimal circumstances. I'll explain below.

The cost of acquiring certification and the labour cost increases are all passed onto the consumer.

Acquiring HACCP certification didn't improve the outcome of our product. As a gluten free, anti allergen plant we already had practices and procedures in place that produced the required results. We added extra hand drying and sanitizing stations to accommodate more rapid glove changes. With one sanitizing and drying station per 9 workers we found there were no lineups. While some line workers ran past 30 minutes on a single pair of gloves, most workers changed gloves an average of 18 times in an 8 hour shift. It takes 3 minutes to wash dry and sanitize your hands and put on a new pair of gloves correctly.

Overall we saw a 10% drop in productivity which was offset by increasing labour and increasing costs passed onto consumers. After we were certified we experienced a food recall. A master case of products had a tip of a glove in it. Although the product wasn't touched, all products from that batch code were destroyed.

Safety measures that are by no means out of the ordinary increase the cost to the consumer. Globalizing rules to standardization so idiots can make your food is not a safe approach. Paying workers a wage worth spending their time in a profession and becoming competent safe workers not only saves lives but it will improve the quality of your food.

I believe in safe practices but only because you understand the result and the path to get there not because some monkey in a white coat has a rule.

 

[Yourbaker]

I see the discussion has taken a turn where more then a sharp whit might be necessary to write a real response.

 

[Branggen]

Being safe is better than safety procedures but in an organization with enough people someones gonna fuck up so I guess they need them, for the lawsuits at least

 

[Yourbaker]

Safety is the term we use to refer to people who are comfortable and knowledgeable about their surroundings.

When we feel safe we know it can stem from being fully aware of what is currently happening and being able to predict the short term future in our environment.

Following a set of rules laid out by someone else doesn't make us safe but listening to them to see what things we haven't considered may be of value. No one can become more aware of my work environment then I can, unless they work beside me. I will happily listen to and often ignore the advice of people who don't work but claim expertise in my field.

I'm not an asshole I'm just tired of having people who don't know believe they do and somehow because they can convince the herd they have authority over the people who do know.

Because I'm a contract worker who works in perhaps 20 kitchens or food production plants a year I see a real problem happening to the food. People have been lied to about just about everything in the name of profit. Your food producers don't care what you eat, they only care about profit. In my generation humanity has turned a dark corner from being driven to achieve to being driven to win regardless of outcome.

In the tiny part of the newly minted safety religion, food safe, started as Kosher or Halal and now it's more generic but still you are paying a group of non working people in special clothing to interrupt and slow down the food industry with a manuscript of hazards and fears many of which don't exist. I've watched hundreds of thousands of dollars of food be destroyed because of paperwork mistakes.

Most pointedly for me though was an event while I was working at a field kitchen during a flood in the fruit district of BC. The sandbag crews were made up of mostly firefighters and they were saving people's homes and livelihoods. One of the orchard owners gave the crew cases of apples to take back to the kitchen crew as a way of thanks. Food safe rules prohibited the use of the apples as they had not come through the food chain. I used them anyway and happily announced to the crew they were taking their lives in their hands by eating the apple pies.

We've grown our rules outpast sense into senselessness.

 

[Shady's Fox]

So what exactly is this thread about? Professional activities? What exactly, I cannot seem to gasp. Sounds interesting though.

 

[Yourbaker]

It's an opinionated rant by an old man who has clear understanding in his field of expertise. In areas where I'm an expert I'm watching the rule makers fail and install messy and difficult sets of rules based on no clear understanding.

I'm willing to predict it is identical in almost every field or profession. The rules being enforced have little, or nothing, to do with either safety or improved work conditions in any way for the actual workers or the consumer. Almost all fields of work are short lived and few workers really attain a high degree of skill before changing fields or career paths. Our economy does not promote skilled labour but rather a flexible workforce with limited knowledge adapting to the low bar of being a warm body filling a spot.

 

[Foreigner]

Michael Foucault wrote an interesting treatise on Bio-Power where he talks about this phenomenon. He essentially describes a society that becomes so concerned with the preservation of life, that a new rule is made every time a person (or small number of people) dies. As a result, the society becomes safe and human numbers begin to climb, yet people don't get to risk harm in order to enjoy freedom. This phenomenon is the result of highly valuing life, to the point that the value of life is placed above the value of freedom. The problem is that it eventually errs on the side of the state controlling people's bodies because individuals can't be trusted to make choices that won't harm themselves. And so the development of nanny state oversight happens.

I think a lot of it comes from the tort system in the courts too. People don't want to get sued so they implement things that will increase safety.

On the other hand, I don't really enjoy your comparison of safety madness with people being scared to gather in public right now. The pandemic we're in is another story and I think the safety procedures are mostly necessary.

 

[thujone]

The problem is that it eventually errs on the side of the state controlling people's bodies because individuals can't be trusted to make choices that won't harm themselves.

And why can't individuals be trusted? Because they're kept ignorant by a state-mandated education system that prioritizes indoctrination over actual education. Because the modern state has no need for a self-reliant public. A self-reliant public would not be concerned with what we can do to improve the GDP and that would mean less money for the state.

So as a result all of the developed world has shifted left towards Communism, because in a Communist society the low-GDP nuclear family has been dissolved and replaced by an efficient, homogenized workforce.

Unfortunately men and women are not machinery and as a result, Communism remains an inherently dysfunctional way to manage society, something which Marx himself must have understood given his literal advocacy for slavery in the Communist Manifesto.

 

[Foreigner]

And why can't individuals be trusted? Because they're kept ignorant by a state-mandated education system that prioritizes indoctrination over actual education. Because the modern state has no need for a self-reliant public. A self-reliant public would not be concerned with what we can do to improve the GDP and that would mean less money for the state.

So as a result all of the developed world has shifted left towards Communism, because in a Communist society the low-GDP nuclear family has been dissolved and replaced by an efficient, homogenized workforce.

Unfortunately men and women are not machinery and as a result, Communism remains an inherently dysfunctional way to manage society, something which Marx himself must have understood given his literal advocacy for slavery in the Communist Manifesto.

The answer of why is complicated but it has to do with the evolution of governance in the west, in particular. We had monarchies that were naturally distrustful of the People, and created social walls between themselves and them through Lordships. Then when plague hit Europe, the social order collapsed and the Serfs gained all the power through shortage of labour. Then monarchies transitioned to functioning as political and social management, with more power distribution to the people. Then when monarchy collapsed, the culture of subjugation of monarchy persisted under the new governments. Even the United States that claimed to be disavowing monarchy could not eliminate this attitude from its own culture. The U.S. Constitution itself was created to ensure that the monarchy mindset could never control the People, even though it's coming full circle now.

There are still many places in the world where the government does not affect the day to day living of the People. India is a good example. The government is more of an administrator than a dictator or social order. Here in the west, the government intrudes on every facet of our day to day lives. In the U.S. this is reaching critical mass. In the U.S. the problem is corporate personhood. The State did not interfere quite this much into people's lives in the past. Now every facet of life is politicized into right vs. left, a symptom of the Bio-Power problem. I agree it has to do with viewing humans as a resource. My experience of living in eastern countries was that I had much more freedom there than here. Here, the government is part and parcel with the social order.

Look at how fast the government has rolled out info on covid19. Terms like "social distancing", "flattening the curve" and "self-isolation" became common parlance within weeks. In other countries where the connection between government and the People is weaker, people are still going about their day to day lives without this language change.

This is the reason why the western governmental institutions are in a state of decay. It'll be refreshed eventually, as it always is, usually through violence, but sometimes through nature (i.e. plagues). Right now plague is shifting things around.

 

[Gormur]

Michael Foucault wrote an interesting treatise on Bio-Power where he talks about this phenomenon. He essentially describes a society that becomes so concerned with the preservation of life, that a new rule is made every time a person (or small number of people) dies. As a result, the society becomes safe and human numbers begin to climb, yet people don't get to risk harm in order to enjoy freedom. This phenomenon is the result of highly valuing life, to the point that the value of life is placed above the value of freedom. The problem is that it eventually errs on the side of the state controlling people's bodies because individuals can't be trusted to make choices that won't harm themselves. And so the development of nanny state oversight happens.

I think a lot of it comes from the tort system in the courts too. People don't want to get sued so they implement things that will increase safety.

On the other hand, I don't really enjoy your comparison of safety madness with people being scared to gather in public right now. The pandemic we're in is another story and I think the safety procedures are mostly necessary.

See I go so far as to not even see freedom as a real life construct. I mean, to me it's abstract. It doesn't exist, or I've failed to see it in practice

Am I missing something here? Maybe this has something to do with my mind being free from oppression, but freedom is an oxymoron or simply a poetic turn of phrase

 

[Yourbaker]

Because I've not lived outside of Canada for any real length of time my perspective on other governments is not as good as most of you. I've worked in The U.S. but it's not drastically different from Canada. Western government is very invasive and I avoid it at great expense sometimes.

Perhaps the best way to explain is that the perspective of expertise is no longer actually from experts in their fields. In my field of expertise I'm watching consumers be duped into overpaying for products that have been made following a format but not for the benefit of the consumer. Society have created an entire sub industry of safety and the workers filling this industry don't really work anymore they are an additional layer of supervision.

In my original posts I made reference to our current lockdown due to fear and how it is not being done by understanding but by rule. I don't believe we are doing the right things. I'm not an expert in this situation but the same people who show up as experts in my field of health related issues are once again showing up here. They are enforcing rules without understanding and we will suffer worse from our actions in an attempt to prevent harm. Safety will not save us.

This issue is slightly clouded for me as my father is in a care home and I will not see him again before he dies due to the rules being enforced. The concern over his potential health is so high he will die without seeing his family to keep him safe. He had perhaps 2 months to live, now he can do it in solitary. I may be bitter and my view of this particular issue may be clouded.

 

[sekio]

I think it's important to differentiate "security theater" from actual safety measures/devices. A dead man's switch on a lawnmower could concievably save life or limb. A dull rubber blade that moves at 5 RPM (so as to not harm anyone stupid enough to put their paws in the whirly blade) on the other hand, makes your lawnmower an expensive Fischer-Price Corn Popper.

This is the reason why the western governmental institutions are in a state of decay. It'll be refreshed eventually, as it always is, usually through violence,

We can only hope. "Armed revolution in the USA before 2050" is one of my longstanding mottoes. Overthrow the plutocracy, take back the means of production! Legalize drugs! Fuck the draft!

This issue is slightly clouded for me as my father is in a care home and I will not see him again before he dies due to the rules being enforced. The concern over his potential health is so high he will die without seeing his family to keep him safe. He had perhaps 2 months to live, now he can do it in solitary. I may be bitter and my view of this particular issue may be clouded.

All the more reason to try to utilize the gift of connectivity the Internet provides. Can you phone your father? Talk with him over Skype or something? Could you knock on his window and talk to him through the glass? Even going so far as to show up in the parking lot, waving a poster board with happy words on it, can provide social contact to those who are most vulnerable. The postal system is also an option - who bothers to send letters or cards any more? I know if I was an elderly person I'd appreciate a paper missive.

 

[Yourbaker]

Those are nice thoughts and they are nearly identical to the nice words from the local health authority.

My father is in a bed asleep most of the time. When he does wake up he will see a room with a random number of machines depending on his current condition. As he deteriorates to death over the next 60 or so days his tiny hope to wake to see family will fade. If I can bribe an overworked health care provider to pay special attention for me they can give him a more personalized touch, at the possible expensive of someone else. My father has dementia and really won't ever know we never came to say goodbye, we will tell ourselves it was for his safety. Wonder how the funeral will be on social media?