Pile Driving in India
I’ve seen this video a few times now and it has always brought a smile to my face. Of course most of us sanctimonious Safety Professionals have been aghast and admonished their behaviour and procedures as completely unacceptable. But how cool would it be to work in an environment like that?
I am not saying I would feel secure in a building constructed this way but wouldn’t it be wonderfully refreshing to see this sort of teamwork and fun and creativity come back into the workplace? Is this practice really that unsafe or are they well aware of the risks and what they are doing and looking out for each other, getting the job done with the resources they have and without a care or whinging cos of their conditions and lack of resources??
I have worked on on a number building sites in 3rd world countries and yeah the practices are different to what we are used to here and there are loose procedures, physical hazards everywhere, lack of PPE etc. BUT the one thing I did notice was that everyone was well and truly aware of what they were doing, the environment and those around them – call it intuitive???. For whatever reason they are forced to take care of their own safety and think about what they are doing, even accept full responsibility for any injury they sustain without trying to blame it on the company or somebody else – surely there are valuable lessons to be learnt about being too risk averse and how we try to over control people’s thinking and behaviour in our own workplaces and then wonder why they are jack of it and still getting hurt!!!
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below