Newspapers / Amco News (High Point, … / June 1, 1966, edition 1 / Page 6
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CLEAR THE FLOOR When I looked up the facts, I was surprised to find that year in and year out falls are the second commonest source of injuries in plants. Handling materials comes first, and falls fol low. Most of the injuries resulting from falls aren't caused by falls from over head, as you might think. They're from falls at floor level where we walk and work. Of course, if a fellow falls from overhead, he's more likely to be hurt badly. But we get out of most floor falls without damaging anything but our dignity. Yet, the total number of in juries from them is so big that it looks almost as though we were falling all over the place most of the time. That's putting it on a bit thick, but we do have a lot of falls. They're un necessary, and they're preventable. So, why do we have so many ? Chiefly, I think, because we don't take them seriously. We don't keep an eye out for setups that might give us a tumble and avoid them. And, espe cially, we leave things lying around on the floor. Perhaps this attitude of indifference is natural. After all, we start taking our tumbles when we start walking. We soon learn not to take them seriously. Then, as we grow older and play games of all sorts, we have a lot of falls. They're part of growing up. Football, for instance, is mostly falls, good hard ones. But, when we're grown and go to work, we should change our attitude. Falls have no place on the job. Kids can take them pretty well. So can athletes in good condition. But falls are bad on the job--not only because they cause a lot of injuries, but also because they interfere with the work. Every tumble a person takes slows the work up or interferes with it in some way. Now and then one is costly. For instance, a fellow was carrying a tray of television tubes into the test ing lab when he stepped on something on the floor and fell. As you can well imagine, the tubes didn't pass the test. Another fall was much more ex pensive. A messenger hurrying to take some orders to a foreman tripped and fell full length in front of a fork truck which was taking a load of sub- assemblies to stock. The truck op erator swerved his truck to avoid hitting the messenger and smashed into an expensive machine, partly wrecking it and damaging a lot of the suba s s e mblie s. How can we change our attitude about falls? It's really a matter of habit, and the people who have studied habits tell us that about the only way to break one habit is to develop another to take its place and drive the old one out. We don't change our habits just because someone asks us to or tells us we ought to. It isn't that easy. We really have to put our minds to it and work at it. Every time anyone drops some thing on the floor, he should see it as an accident waiting for a chance to happen, maybe to him. If he did look at it that way, he'd pick up the object right then and there so that accident couldn't happen to anybody. And he'd put the thing in some safe place. He'd really practice the idea of "a place for everything and everything in its place. " If every time we saw some object on the floor it looked to us like a mean little toughie crouching there ready to stick a foot out at just the right mo ment to trip someone, we'd really want to do something about it. We'd haul that little devil off by the scruff of the neck and put him away. And we'd look around to see if there were any more like him. If we watched those little devils work a while, we'd find that some are - 6 -
Amco News (High Point, N.C.)
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June 1, 1966, edition 1
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