Construction workers do an often difficult and often dangerous job, there is absolutely no doubt about it. Nearly every day that they are on the job, construction workers here in the United States (as well as many other places in the world, at that) must take safety precautions to help to mitigate at least some of those risks. These safety precautions are not always effective, but they very often are, and they can mean the difference between life and death. As there are currently as many as five thousand construction workers who are killed while on the job each and every year (nearly fifteen such construction workers killed each and every day), these safety protocols and precautions are nothing if not essential.
Wearing a reflective safety vest and high visibility clothing is one such important precaution that construction workers can take. The use of a reflective safety vest and high visibility work shorts and the like are particularly important while working on the road, especially in areas where traffic is still moving. Reflective vests can increase the visibility of the typical construction worker, making them easy to see and far less likely to sustain a life threatening or life ending injury as the result of being hit by a car. And though hitting a construction worker who is working on the road comes with incredibly high fines and even jail time, it is all too often nothing but an accident, directly related to the lack of the use of articles of clothing such as the reflective safety vest and other hi vis work shirts and hi vis pants and can often be attributed to poor visibility at the site of the accident as well.
Aside from the liberal use of the reflective safety vest, the right work shoes should also be worn. Part of this is due to the fact that the average construction worker is simply on their feet for quite a bit of the day. Ten thousand steps is a typical number of steps to take if you are an average person who does not work in the field of construction. For construction workers, however, this number is much higher and it is not unlikely or unprecedented that the typical construction worker will take as many as thirty thousand steps in the time span of a single day – if not even more than that. The shoes that construction workers use must therefore provide quite a bit of support, as well as protection from any dangers that might be encountered at the typical construction site. In total, more than fifty dollars (just around seventy dollars, to be more exact) can expect to be spent on protective footwear alone for just one construction worker throughout the course of a year.
On top of the need for protective footwear and the wearing of a reflective safety vest, protecting your hearing is also important if you are a construction worker working in the United States. Hearing loss becomes possible and even probable when you are exposed to decibels that reach above eighty five decibels. Fortunately, wearing high quality ear plugs can reduce the decibels that you are exposed to by as much as fifteen to thirty decibels when all is said and done. For the construction worker who is working with power tools that are likely to cause permanent damage to their hearing, wearing these ear plugs or even noise cancelling headphones will be absolutely instrumental for protecting their hearing from damage that is likely to be sustained in the future, if the exposure to such high decibels is likely to continue (as, for the typical construction worker, it will).
From the use of the reflective safety vest and high vis pants to the wearing of steel toed work boots and ear phones whenever it is likely that they will be exposed to high amounts of decibels for extended periods of time, there are many ways that construction workers can begin to mitigate the risks that they face.
