By Chris Coetzee, OHSS Consulting
When you wake up at 4:30AM on a freezing cold morning, grab your blue overalls and jump into the back of the bakkie, you aren’t thinking about the law. You are thinking about making it to the site, doing your job, getting paid and putting food on the table for your family.
Your family cannot replace you. They don’t just need your wages, they need you! Supplied by IOPSA
We often hear the bosses talking about health and safety rules. They give us long papers to sign and tell us to wear hard hats and heavy boots even when it’s hot. Sometimes it feels like they are just trying to cover their own backs or making our job harder than it already is.
But let’s be honest today. Safety isn’t about keeping the boss out of trouble. It isn’t about pleasing a government inspector. Safety is about you. It is about making sure that the same person who walked onto the site in the morning walks back through their front door at night, with all ten fingers, both eyes, and a working body.
Your hands are your bread and butter
As a plumber, your hands are your most important tools. Without them, a pipe wrench is just a useless piece of iron.
Think about the risks you take every day. When you use an angle grinder without a safety guard because it’s ‘faster’, you are gambling with your fingers. If that blade shatters or kicks back, it happens faster than you can blink. In one second, your ability to work, earn money, and feed your children can be taken away forever.
The same goes for the gloves you don’t want to wear because they make your hands sweat. When you clear a blocked sewage pipe, you aren’t just dealing with dirty water. You are dealing with invisible bugs that can make you terribly sick. If you have a small cut on your hand and it touches that water, you can end up in a hospital bed with an infection that stops you from working for months.
Your hands feed your family. Protect them like the gold that they are.
The trap in the ground and the ceiling
When you are told to climb into a deep trench to fix a broken main pipe, or crawl into a dark ceiling space to hoist a heavy geyser, do you stop to look around first? It is easy to think, ‘I’ve done this a hundred times, nothing will happen’. But a trench doesn’t warn you before the soil caves in. A rotten wooden roof truss doesn’t give you a sign before it breaks under the weight of a 200ℓ water tank.
If you climb down into a deep manhole and you smell ‘rotten eggs’, that is sewer gas. Some workers think they can just hold their breath or move quickly. But that gas can put you to sleep in seconds, and if no one is at the top with a rescue kit to pull you out, you will not wake up.
Taking two minutes to check if a trench is safe, or asking your partner to hold the ladder, isn’t being ‘scared’ or slow. It is being smart. A dead plumber cannot buy bread for his house.
Your family doesn’t care about the money if you don’t come home
Think about who is waiting for you at home tonight. Your wife, your kids, your parents, or your siblings. When you rush a job, skip using your safety harness on a roof, or drive a bakkie with bald tyres because you are in a hurry, you are putting their lives at risk too.
If you get badly hurt because you didn’t want to follow a safety rule, the company will find someone else to replace you by Monday morning. But your family cannot replace you. They don’t just need your wages, they need you. They need a parent who can play soccer with them, a husband or wife who can walk beside their partner, and a provider who is strong and healthy.
You have the right to say ‘no’
In South Africa, the law says you do not have to do a job if it is clearly dangerous to your life. If a boss tells you to jump into a deep hole that looks like it is about to collapse or tells you to wire up a dangerous
.solar geyser without turning off the power, you have the right to stop and say: “Chief, this is not safe. We need to fix this first.”
Speaking up about safety doesn’t make you a troublemaker. It shows you respect your trade, your life and your crew. A real master tradesman looks out for his team. If you see your apprentice doing something dangerous, pull him back. Teach him that the right way to do plumbing is the safe way.
Conclusion: Lock it in your mind
The next time you reach for a tool, climb a ladder or step onto a slippery site, ask yourself one simple question:
“Is what I am about to do worth my life?”
Safety is not a waste of time. It is a shield that keeps you alive in a tough job. Wear your boots, use your safety gear, look out for your working buddy, and don’t take shortcuts.
At the end of the day, the most successful job is not the one that was finished the fastest. It is the one where every single worker packs up their tools, climbs into the bakkie and goes home to their family in one piece.
Stay safe out there, brothers and sisters. Your family is waiting for you.
