Can’t we get on the same page when it comes to safety?
Provincial regulators are taking aim at the printing industry despite our low injury rates
The printing business has a good track record with a very low accident rate compared to other manufacturing industries. Partly because printing equipment is sold around the world and has to meet international safety requirements, most equipment is well designed with plenty of safeguards to prevent accidents. Fortunately the few accidents that do happen in this industry are seldom fatal.
Having said that, when an employee is injured and must take time off work it can get expensive. This is an industry of skilled workers who cannot be easily replaced. If an employee is permanently disabled it can be a major crisis for many companies and five, 10 or even 20 years of training can easily go down the drain. Hiring a replacement from another company usually means paying higher wages, which causes a ripple effect throughout the industry. Employers, therefore, have a vested interest in keeping injuries to an absolute minimum.
With everything the industry has at stake and with our good accident record it is rather puzzling that provincial regulators across the country seem to have targeted printing shops on safety enforcement. Complaints of unreasonable enforcements seem to be on the rise across Canada.
The reality of the printing process is that a press has moving parts and workers have to feed paper into it to print. Unfortunately, some/many inspectors know nothing about printing equipment and look at it in the same way as metal stamping or machine tool making. Some of the stories coming out in the industry indicate that caution is being taken to the extreme, such as having to cut power to a press to change plates, or having to enclose the feeder, which results in not being able to feed paper into the press.
One printer from Alberta tells of having to put his letterpress into a separate room and only allowing one person into the room at any one time. On the flip side, some printers I have spoken to report that some inspectors are going crazy about guarding on a paper cutter—which freezes position unless you use both hands—but saying nothing about a hand-feed clam shell diecutter—with no guards—sitting right beside the paper cutter.
The solution to this situation is not to eliminate safety inspectors. Unfortunately there will always be a few lame brains in the industry that will try to cut corners and ignore safety precautions. But the answer might be for a few provincial inspectors to be trained about the ins and outs of printing equipment and how it works. It would be much less wasteful both for the government and the industry. First of all, the inspectors would know what to look for, which equipment poses a possible safety problem and which does not. They could perform their inspections faster. And, most important, they could advise owners about where potential problems may arise because they have seen it before.
One of the objections against this plan is that the government can’t afford to train inspectors for every industry. And for small industries with only a few plants it would be difficult. But the printing industry is not small. There are more than 9,000 printing plants or shops in the country. That’s more facilities than any other form of manufacturing. One out of every 10 manufacturing operation in Canada is a printing facility. It would make more sense to train inspectors about the printing industry than any other manufacturing industry in the country. Isn’t it about time to get the government and the industry on the same page when it comes to workers’ safety?
Alexander Donald is the publisher of Graphic Monthly Canada.