Picturing Protection
It’s not that the photos are out of focus or some other optical malady, as even the cheapest digital camera makes adjustments in a millisecond that used to take up several minutes of a professional shot. It’s not because a photo is poorly composed, either, since editing software can crop and dress up anything taken like a casual Christmas-party snapshot.
Photos aren’t even thrown out for questionable content, since most of it can be removed electronically. And, it’s rare to find someone making an obscene hand gesture in the background, or posting a racy tool calendar somewhere in the backshop.
And nothing comes close to a shot I once received from Sweden when covering another industry, where the side of a machine included a clear, detailed photo of two people in a sexual position that seemed to defy gravity and the natural rotations of several limbs.
No, the photos aren’t sloppy or blurry or obscene. The sins of the rejected can be summed up in another awful word.
Unsafe.
Occasionally, I get a letter or email berating me for a shot I’ve run of someone in a backshop without proper protection for some part of the human anatomy. I’ll read the missive, groan once again, take a close look at the offending photo, and remind myself to take even more care when picking what’s going to run in these pages and on the Web with Stone Business Online
.To date, I’ve thrown out images with visually gripping angles of hand polishing of edges because the power tool lacks a safety guard, or a worker’s unprotected eyes are less than a foot from the whirring diamond tool. Or someone’s at a pendant of a bridge saw, slicing up a slab without safety glasses or any ear protection.
Maybe it’s someone in a shop, dry-cutting away on granite with only a wet bandana covering their mouth. Or, a crew of burly guys are literally tossing around finished pieces while loading something into a truck or carting a top through a jobsite – and a couple of them are wearing cheap running shoes (or, in one case, sandals).
I hate to be a killjoy when it comes to running photos of a fabrication crew. Everybody likes seeing the museum-quality shots of stone in McMansions and cladding an impressive public structure, but I can’t get enough shots of people doing the hard work of taking hunks of granite, marble and other material and creating works of incredible beauty.
Fabricators putting the blades and wheels to the stone don’t get enough credit. But, I can’t encourage unsafe conditions, either.
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh about this. Then again, all I need to think about is my father.
Last month marked two decades since my dad passed away at what I realize, with every passing day of my own life, at the reasonably young age of 72. He didn’t work in the stone trade, but his profession – millwright – put him in the middle of tough, dirty and often-dangerous industrial construction. As a blue-collar, hardhat supervisor, he never sat for a day at a desk.
He began in construction as part of a crew roving around the Midwest and Rocky Mountains, doing large continuous-pour post-war projects like massive grain elevators. He managed to survive a fall off an under-construction dam with “only” a broken back, and spent months in traction during a hot Nebraska summer in a hospital without air conditioning.
In the days before universal unemployment or disability insurance, he didn’t lollygag to go back to work. Family snapshots document a man with the occasional leg cast or sling-held arm still heading out to the job on Monday morning.
I came along after this, when he’d taken a job at a large brewery. He worked for years among the constant whirr of machines, not to mention clinking bottles and cans on the fill lines. His fingers got older-looking and more-crooked with the passing years with the every-so-often pinch of a machine.
One day, he came home with his right foot in a cast, with a co-worker carrying his well-worn steel-toed Red Wing work boots. The right one happened to be in the way of a can-filling machine coming down in the wrong place; the boot’s toe piece was almost mashed flat, but Dad managed to keep his own tootsies.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) came long late in his career; and he didn’t have much use for it. I grew up thinking that, after hearing him refer to it, part of its official title included a rather spicy adjective as a preface.
Arthritis – no doubt aggravated by his body’s tough treatment – forced early retirement. Those oft-broken bones turned his walk into a hobble, and eventually he spent more time in a wheelchair than on his feet. Finally, an ankle with a joint fused some three decades prior to his death managed to create an internal infection that affected his entire body’s health until it ultimately failed. (Granted, a long-time pack-a-day habit of straight Camels didn’t help.)
My dad ended up lame with crippled hands and, not surprisingly for a machine-setter of the day, deaf. I don’t spend a minute blaming him for his own bad condition, because people during his time at work didn’t pay as close attention to industrial health.
We know better today. Most of us won’t be in the position to fall off a dam, but the conditions he faced of loud noises, dust/debris and falling large objects are also the stuff of a stone fabrication shop. It’s a hugely safe workplace today when compared to my father’s heyday, but it always needs to be safer.
The Marble Institute of America recently announced efforts to seek a federal grant to increase workplace safety, with a program designed to “train-the-trainer” and spread the schooling from shop to shop. It’s an excellent idea and deserves full support from the industry.
Meanwhile, do something for me. Keep taking those photos of the shop crew; before sending them in, though, take a good look to make sure that safety glasses, respirators and earplugs/muffs are in place.
Frankly, you’ll be doing everyone a big favor. And even my dad would think it’s a d … well, really good idea.
Emerson Schwartzkopf can be reached at emerson@stonebusiness.net. You can also read his regular blog at Stone Business Online and Tales From the Stone Business Beat. And don’t forget to keep up with Stone Business on Twitter (StoneBizMag) and Facebook (search: Stone Business Magazine).