Safety in the workplace is a big issue, and one that needs to be addressed urgently.

For some time, I had been meaning to put up a sign saying ‘Please shut the gate‘ on the front entrance of my home. It’s one of those safety things I had kept overlooking. Then one day I nearly paid too high a price for my neglect.

Wilson, an important member of the Switzer ‘pack’ had somehow taken himself on a walk over to Centennial Park [Sydney] and nearly didn’t make it back. Thankfully, caring neighbours heard his yelping after the car that hit him drove off without stopping and we got him to the vet in time. Battered and bruised though he was, the story had a happy ending.

While on matters of safety, over recent years, trade associations, employer groups, government bodies and insurers have made moves to educate employers about workplace safety, which has serious implications for employees and customers.

I had another personal and painful experience many years back of an unsafe practice that could have cost the owner plenty.

It was mid-football season when I dashed up to the hardware store on a Saturday morning. Ordering some gear for a domestic building project that was having difficulty finishing in time for the Olympics, I was told to drive around to the back to pick up some heavy stuff in the loading dock.

After backing in, I got out of the car with my back to the dock and turned to enter the store — but that’s as far as I went. It was all down from here — to the ground, that is.

To cut a long and bloody story short, I copped some three quarter inch copper pipe right to the forehead, missing my eye by a couple of centimeters!

The four meters of wobbling and flexing pipe was being carried by a plumber who ‘in all his years had never done this before!’, though as I lay in the casualty room, one employee admitted he’d nearly been a casualty only moments before.

Putting aside the plumber’s self-defensive attitude, the big questions were for the hardware store. The bottom line is this business had unsafe practices. Business owners must talk to staff and contractors about safety.

Dr. Ki Douglas, from the Department of Employment and Industrial Safety at Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, says sensible business owners should have a documented system outlining safety procedures to be taken if there is say spilt water in a walkway traversed by customers and employees.

She mentions a court case where a female customer slipped over in a well-known department store. “A very thorough documented system of the work completed, along with the signs used helped them in court,” Douglas recalls.

While small business doesn’t have many fatalities, Douglas says they still shouldn’t be complacent and be adequately insured. Though most third party and workers comp policies protect a business, she pinpoints two concerns business owners should have lest they get involved in a serious breach of safety issue.

Firstly, there can be bad publicity and a real loss of reputation. This could involve expensive remedies including enormous capital outlays to enhance safety features to expensive ad campaigns to win back customers.

In some cases, workers comp premiums could rise steeply. She advises home-based businesses to review business practices with respect to safety. It’s important for every business owner to evaluate just how safe they are.

If I’d lost an eye or wound up being tagged as ‘Scarface Switzer’, the hardware store in question would’ve lost a lot of money and copped a reputation losing bucketing in the media. That didn’t happen. But they did lose a customer, because I didn’t risk going back there to buy the sign for the gate.

By Peter Switzer

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