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CROSSHIRE: WRONG IN ANY LANGUAGE Those of you who attended the Hire Show in January will have seen a number of new products, many of them technically complex and, in common with most of our industry’s inventory, all capable of potentially dangerous misuse. Although manufacturers supply excellent handbooks and apply warning and instructional decals to their products, new problems are creeping up on hire companies and their customers. Safety professionals and their political masters have appeared largely to ignore these. Quite simply, more operatives employed by both construction and industrial sites do not have an adequate command of English to understand essential instructions and warnings, let alone read an operating manual. The problem is set to get worse, with more acute shortages of manpower, particularly in the southeast. Some employers facing time penalties are turning a blind eye to the language shortcomings of employees from overseas. I was nearly run down on a site the other day by a dumper being driven recklessly. I admit that I reacted in the manner that I was accustomed to adopt when I first entered the industry. I waited until the machine had stopped, then I pulled the driver off and asked him in earthy Anglo-Saxon what he was doing. He spoke little English, even after I let go of his throat. I escorted him to the site office to complain but the site manager merely said that, if I hadn’t been hurt, he wasn’t interested. There was no point sacking the driver, he added, because he would have to ring the agency for a replacement and they would probably send the same man again with a different name! I raised the issue with a senior manager at the company HQ, but was told “off the record” that, “if the bloody Government want these effing jobs done on time, they will have to put up with more dubious immigrant labour”. An old friend of mine is now an instructor for powered access machines and he tells me of operators who should have failed the written part of the training course because they could not understand English. You can imagine the pressure on instructors to accept lower standards to maintain a pass rate that clients consider acceptable. I have asked customers why they use agencies. Their chief defence is that employees have been vetted and had qualifications checked. This is a load of horse manure. The only way to really test a digger driver, or any other plant operator, is to put him on probation under your own qualified staff, even where your new man has a CTC card - no agency will do this type of appraisal. The most they will do is a cursory look at a driving licence, which is either moth eaten and written in a foreign tongue, or is a mint UK sample bought in the local pub. These issues must not be hidden under some politically correct banner. Otherwise it is only a matter of time before your kit will have been an instrument of injury (or worse) and, because the operator has legged it, those seeking to apportion blame will look your way. Most plant men I have talked to recently agree that the instances of machine damage attributable to abuse or incorrect operation are increasing again. Inability to read and understand instructions is unacceptable in an industry that is striving to improve its safety record. It is time to get this particular taboo out of the cupboard before one of our national contractors finds itself on the end of a high-profile incident and looking towards hirers and manufacturers to throw some dirt. I snatched back a three-tonne mini excavator from a punter last month after it became obvious that the (agency supplied) operator was potentially dangerous to both anything living and my machine. My customer asked if there was any digger that I was willing to supply; so, as his man was a big lad, I sent him two shovels. Executive Hire News › Archives › Feb/March 2006 › Crosshire › Wrong in any language
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