05-14-2020, 02:29 PM
You might think that it'd be easy to convince people to wear a mask for their own safety and that of others but it's not. It also seems from the places I've worked that had unsafe amounts of particulate in the air can't legally force people to wear the masks, they can only mandate one has it on their person. Going into the coke ovens at dofasco they give everyone a new respirator every day (rubber ones with filters, not n95 paper ones) and most people just carry them and don't wear them. I got called names for wearing mine when I was an apprentice.
In the winter I was working at a plant that had one of the highest rates of silicosis in North America and same thing, they mandate everyone have a 30$ respirator on their person but most people didn't wear them, even when it was dusty. I was welding stainless steel inside a kiln so I had mine on but those respirators aren't good for keeping your breath contained; it blows out the front and condensate drips down the mask in the right weather, they are also hard to wear while doing heavy, physical work. I dunno what the availability of those n95 dust masks are like but any decent sized site would be going through hundreds a day if everyone had to wear one all the time... and you're right, I don't see companies paying for it if they can get away without doing it, the margins in construction are pretty slim already and cutting corners on safety is still a major problem, dozens of people die every year in preventable accidents and it's still an uphill battle to get workers and employers to follow existing rules about safety... doing more on top of that is gonna be a fight.
In the winter I was working at a plant that had one of the highest rates of silicosis in North America and same thing, they mandate everyone have a 30$ respirator on their person but most people didn't wear them, even when it was dusty. I was welding stainless steel inside a kiln so I had mine on but those respirators aren't good for keeping your breath contained; it blows out the front and condensate drips down the mask in the right weather, they are also hard to wear while doing heavy, physical work. I dunno what the availability of those n95 dust masks are like but any decent sized site would be going through hundreds a day if everyone had to wear one all the time... and you're right, I don't see companies paying for it if they can get away without doing it, the margins in construction are pretty slim already and cutting corners on safety is still a major problem, dozens of people die every year in preventable accidents and it's still an uphill battle to get workers and employers to follow existing rules about safety... doing more on top of that is gonna be a fight.