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CONSTRUCTION RANKED AS THE UK'S MOST DANGEROUS JOB

Posted: Monday, April 24th, 2017

Nope, it’s not the snake handlers, stunt men or even our country’s firemen. Lads, it’s the builders, carpenters and bricklayers who are actually risking their life on an everyday basis. Because, according to a recent survey, working in construction is the UK’s most dangerous job.

Now, apart from giving you something to boast about down the pub and making you feel a little more like James Bond than usual, what does this actually mean? It means you need to be bloody careful, because some of these statistics are no joke.

According to the Health and Safety Executive (not the sexiest sounding body we have to admit) there has been around 1.94 deaths per 100,000 workers. This is well over four times the average of the overall working population. And for those of you who aren’t maths wizards , (us neither), that works out at around 94 deaths per year. And as if that wasn’t enough, 1.3 million workers are currently dealing with work related illnesses – which we guess is unsurprising giving the potential problems that exist in virtually every building site.

It seems that most incidents are due to falling, but other causes include forklift accidents, burns, dangerous tools, heavy materials, trench collapses as well as pollutants. Basically, all those precautions that your site manager mentions time and time again. Well….we hate to say it, but he probably does have a point,  - in this case the rules are really not meant to be broken. On a building site it’s better to be safe than sorry!

But, there is a little bit of silver lining in this damning report. Firstly, the statistics are actually better than last year – construction injuries are down 0.9%.  Secondly, we are doing better than other countries. So well done British builders - we are on the up and upand whilst the situation is bad, it could be worse. Well, we guess that’s something, but we really need to be doing more work to protect our men (and women) in construction.

Now, there is a health and safety poll doing the rounds that interviewed 1,000 people working in the construction industry. And the results were not good, not good at all. The main problem, it seems, is that 52% of construction workers don’t know basic health and safety rules. But, the most worrying stat from the survey was that a huge 43% of workers didn’t know there were any health and safety rules in the first place. We wonder how this is even possible. Meanwhile, a high number simply got their signs crossed with many thinking a symbol for flammable meant a naked flame. Fellas it’s time to hit the books we think – and really get to grips with the health and safety rules.

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