Other Voices: Giving all workers a voice on National Forklift Safety Day

Editor’s Note: The following column by Marlee Rosen, business analyst at Rosen Associates, is part of Modern’s Other Voices column. The series features ideas, opinions and insights from end-users, analysts, systems integrators and OEMs. Click here to learn about submitting a column for consideration.

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National Forklift Safety Day helps to provide a great platform for politicians, unions, suppliers and enterprises to come together for the good of forklift operators and their safety. Luckily the Industrial Truck Association, through the sponsorship of such industry leaders as Toyota Industrial Equipment, Trelleborg Wheel Systems, and The Raymond Corporation, will hold its annual National Forklift Safety Day on June 8 and 9th.

This event will inspire forklift industry companies and their distributors, OSHA and the Department of Labor to come together in Washington, DC to discuss forklift safety issues. Additionally, it allows the forklift industry an opportunity to present to legislators and increases visibility to attain better practices for forklift safety. It not only educates on safety issues but regulatory and economic ones.

The participants of National Forklift Safety Day will look at what can be done to enhance and encourage the efforts of employers, workers and unions to identify and address workplace hazards. They will address the important emerging or unaddressed health and safety issues in the workplace and what can be done to improve efforts to engage stakeholders in programs and initiatives. The hope is that by strengthening safety initiatives, the industry will see a decrease in OSHA statistics, which reports approximately 34,900 forklift-related serious injuries per year.

National Forklift Safety Day helps to better facilitate the voice of personnel in the workplace, particularly workers who are hard to reach, do not have ready access to information about hazards, or are afraid to exercise their rights. Due to the length and complexity of the current OSHA rulemaking process—and given the need for new standards to be set to protect workers from unaddressed or inadequately addressed safety issues—it will be critical to also look at the policies and procedures to decrease the time to issue final standards. Addressing all of these matters makes National Forklift Safety Day an important one!