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It's one thing to take your safety into your own hands when it's your backyard. It's another thing to decline to implement procedures and safety measures that put someone else's life at risk. The romantic notion of the old man and his sons wringing out an existence on the family 40 is rapidly disappearing. Most of the grain production in the US is from massive farming corporations with tens of thousands of acres. At that kind of farm, there's a company mission statement that you hope has "Safety First" somewhere. There's someone in an office looking at hazards their workers encounter and ensuring they're OSHA-compliant, and doing risk analyses to find the most effective way to reduce risk and maintain productivity. A few miles away, there's a farm hand considering climbing into the company grain bin not because he'll personally benefit from shipping a harvest, he's at a $10.25 hourly rate regardless of the content of the bin, but he needs this paycheck to avoid his house being foreclosed upon and there are no non-farming jobs within 40 miles. It's the office worker who is responsible for dozens of grain bins, each containing a quarter million dollars worth of grain, who is deciding whether to risk someone else's life or buy equipment instead. I'm not in farming (though I have family who is), I'm in manufacturing automation, and the same safety guidelines apply. The risks I'm willing to take with my Sawzall in my backyard are not the same as what I can ask some minimum-wage line operator to stand in front of. That person doesn't really have a choice in the risks they're exposed to. I get to choose those risks, and I have a moral, ethical, and legal responsibility to minimize them. If there's a maintenance task that puts workers in a potentially dangerous area of the workcell, I'm not sending them in unprepared. I'm probably going to spend thousands on floor scanners, safety controllers, lockout/tagout energy shutoffs, and other risk mitigations to make it as safe as reasonably possible, and if I can skip those requirements and have a machine do the task instead that's an easy calculation to make. |