Oakwood Solicitors recently undertook a survey of workers across a wide section of sectors (office, public sector, factory, retail and warehouse) to see how they judged their working conditions – we wanted to know whether they believed that their work environment was a safe or unsafe place to work.
The workforce that felt the safest were office workers, where 80% of respondents said that they felt safe. In contrast, just over a third of factory workers felt that they worked in an unsafe workplace.
Women felt safest in the office and men felt safest in a retail environment.
Across the age groups, the 35-54 age group believed that they worked in the safest environment, but young adults (those less than 18 years old) believed that they had the worst environment to work in.
Commenting on the survey results, Emma Bell, Head of the Employers’ Liability and Public Liability department said, “It is not surprising that more blue-collar workers feel unsafe, compared to white-collar workers, but injuries can occur in any working environment. Our advice to all workers is that if you believe that you are working in unsafe working conditions then you must report the problems to your management.”
“Accidents at work are still common and it is disappointing to find that even the perceived safest environment only scored 80% in our survey. With 39% of factory workers feeling unsafe there is much more that businesses can do to ensure staff welfare at work.”
According to the Health and Safety Executive in 2014/15 there were 142 workers fatally injured and an estimated 611,000 workers sustained a non-fatal injury at work – almost a quarter of these incidents led to absences from work of over 7 days.
Whilst we act on behalf of those injured at work, we’d rather we didn’t have to – a few small changes in the workplace could easily help avoid accidents at work.
