Monday, September 3, 2018
With Labor Day coming up in just a few days, I am reminded of the fights that workers took part in to ensure many things that we take for granted, like safety laws. Over the last century, we have reduced the number of workplace injuries and deaths by an enormous amount. Through our collective bargaining agreements and legislation, standards of safety have now been created.
There are a lot of eyes on us right now. We are seeing several incidents where employees are not wearing rubber gloves, had no PPE or tailboard. We had an incident during a storm where a customer took a picture of a crew working thanking them for their work and when you looked at the picture they were not using PPE. If we work safe, we will be fine; wear everything, we will be fine. We still negotiate safety and it is
very difficult to go to the table in relation to safety if we do not use the proper safety equipment; it's difficult to defend. Remember to work safely.
I also wanted to touch on change. We are going through agreements and have to look at things differently. Who would think that a lot of households would no longer have a land line, smart meters are coming, we have drones delivering packages to your house and cars with no driver in them. I bring these examples up because change is coming and we need to adapt to the changes in order to stay in the game.
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