A Safe Work Australia report found engineered stone poses an ‘unacceptable risk to workers’ and should be banned.
The ACT government says its prepared to introduce its own ban if a national agreement isn’t reached.
The CFMEU is calling on retailers like Bunnings and IKEA to stop selling engineered stone products.
When engineered stone – a popular material often used for kitchen benches – is cut, it releases a fine silica dust which can harm the lungs if inhaled.
Correct me if I am wrong but isnt the case for like, basically every type of masonry?
What makes this specific material any less of a problem when it comes to inhaling silica dust? Isn’t this already just universally a serious problem for all types of stonemasonry, and its already supposed to be a solved problem by wearing appropriate PPE and having proper equipment setup to keep the stones wet during cutting, exhausting and collecting the dust, etc etc?
Or does something about engineered stone specifically make it way worse than usual compared to all other types of stones?
Engineered stone gets singled out because it has a particularly high silica content (think ~90% silica for engineered stone compared to 30-40% for concrete). It also is commonly used in environments that require benchtop modifcations at install, make wet cutting more difficult than dry cutting when doing said modifications, and have minimal oversight, a combination that leads to people taking shortcuts with dry cutting and incorrect PPE.
I’m all for protecting workers, but doesn’t that mean that they are harmful to themselves if they don’t wear the PPE or the employer is harming them if the PPE is not provided and wearing it is not enforced? I live in the USA and while I understand that guns kill people and should be regulated, they don’t generally do so without a dipshit using it.
It’s not really reasonable to expect workers to be able to make this decision for themselves every time, unfortunately. If there aren’t laws mandating provision of PPE by the employer and use by employees, people will skip it because “oh I usually wear it” or “I’ll just man my way through it” or whatever. Employers may encourage this to save time or money. The only way to ensure everyone gets adequate protection is to mandate it.
Sometimes people have to be protected from themselves. If not for purely altruistic reasons don’t do it for you then at least to prevent a generation of skilled workers to turn into a drain on society later just because their boss unnecessarily encouraged them to use unsafe materials for a quick buck.
doesn’t that mean that they are harmful to themselves if they don’t wear the PPE or the employer is harming them if the PPE is not provided and wearing it is not enforced?
It does, and in an ideal world you wouldn’t need such regulations because people would realise the dangers and act appropriately. The ACT gov recently changed their WHS rules around high silica content material to explicitly require wet cutting for engineered stone and dust management/PPE for stuff like concrete, that should help but actually enforcing it is difficult.
I can see why they’d prefer an outright ban looking at silicosis as the rising public health issue that it’s becoming. You know people are going to be giving themselves a disease that’ll show up in ~10 years and require a lung transplant but it’s difficult to convince people/companies to do everything required to avoid that disease and hard to enforce correct procedures - a blanket ban on the material that’s causing most of the problems is much easier to enforce.
If we banned every material people refused to use ppe when working with to “protect themselves from themselves”, we would have literally zero materials to build anything out of.
I’m all for legally requiring employers to enforce ppe laws, that way if a worker becomes injured due to lack of ppe, the employer is liable for “well why didn’t they have protection?” And the employer will have to demonstrate they require ppe, enforce it, and the employee was being actively stupid even when told not to.
I’ve worked with and met tonnes of contractors, it’s usually really polarizing.
You get half that don’t give a shit and use zero ppe.
And then you get half that go “that shit will fuckin kill you, don’t fuck around with that stuff”
But if the material is safe “at rest” for the consumer and only a problem when cut into, then it seems stupid as fuck to ban it.
Molten glass will burn your skin right off while it’s being blown. Should we ban glass as a material if some idiots do glass blowing without ppe?
Power saws will cut your entire hand off or worse, lathes will turn you into a pretzel, paper mills will turn you into a pancake, welding torches will make you go blind, almost every single material we work with is extremely lethal if people don’t use ppe and safety procedures when working with it.
This isn’t like asbestos where it sheds dangerous particles in the consumers home whenever it gets used and vaguely bumped or bopped.
Think of it like subsidised medication.
If your medication costs $10 a month, and easily accessible at any pharmacy due to being subsidised and controlled by government regulation, it’s unlikely the average person will skip medication, prescribed by a doctor, intended to improve your health and wellbeing. There is a low barrier to compliance.
Now if that medication isn’t subsidised, and costs you $80 a month, or only available at very few pharmacies, there is now a high barrier to compliance. It’s more likely the average person will skip a month’s medication here and there simply because of the cost of complying. People have to exercise high levels of personal responsibility and clear-headed, logical decision making, weighing a tangible immediate loss ($80) that may put other essentials at risk (food, housing, etc) vs an intangible possibility of future health deterioration. Individual health suffers, and national overall health and wellbeing decrease as well.
A mandatory law or regulation banning, or restricting access to a good, (like engineered stone) creates a low barrier of compliance to the individuals exposed to the potential health risk. Customers are not allowed to demand they use the product. The product is not easily available as a cheaper alternative to other products. A boss can’t demand an employee use it. The question and decision making over its use is taken away from the individual.
Whereas if the produ t is legal or unregulated, and you’re a tradie, and a customer demand its use, or it’s significantly cheaper to purchase, and/ or highly available in the supply chain, there’s a high barrier to compliance, since all that decision making is on the individual tradie to resist a tangible, immediate and easily accessed financial benefit, over the intangible potentiality of severe health issues 10-20+ years into the future.
Humans are generally not good at weighing tangible immediate vs intangible future issues against each other, especially when subject to immediate stress or strain from financial, housing, medical, customer service, boss/company expectations etc.
While your argument is well-formed, it is not readily applicable as the regulation requiring PPE instead of outright illegalizing the substance places the onerous on the employer to not be a stingy, cheap bastard, not the tradesman who is doing that job. I understand that my perspective is as someone in the USA, so applicable laws are subject to an Aussie analog. Here we have a law that states that any equipment required to do a job must be provided by the employer free of charge to the employee. When a law mandates that PPE be worn to work with a given substance, that means that the employer is liable to provide it and subject to penalties if they are caught/reported for not. Setting aside the multitude of ways that industry lobbyists have gotten into the laws to get around this fact, it would be an adequate way to raise the entry bar and protect employees from future harm. Especially if there are adequate protections for reporting violations. An alternative is to tax the shit out of the production/sale of the material. In conjunction, it dissuades the use, protects tradesmen, and brings in some extra cash for the local government when they do still decide to use it.
It is done in the customer’s kitchen where no one supervises the workers and they do not wear protection 🤷♂️
Why does that necessitate banning it though?
You should ban that practice and require it gets cut with ppe and procedures, such that it’s illegal to do it the way you described.
Then if people still do it, it’s on them for being a dumbass.
