Health and Safety
Author: Isaac MIddlemiss
When the timber industry began in NZ, between 1840 and 1920, there weren’t many safety precautions, and employers had no legal obligation to protect their employees. There was very little in the way of safety equipment when felling the trees, and an injured “bushman” (teams or gangs of bushmen would work to fell trees deep in the NZ bush) faced a long and painful journey to reach medical help, and even a slow death if they failed to get to help in time [1].
At the sawmills, where the timber was cut into planks and beams, there were great risks to health; early machinery from around 1840 to 1890 lacked safety guards and sawyers faced gruesome injury if they made a mistake or were careless. It was extremely dangerous work, and fatalities were common. Other dangers included lacerations, amputations, blindness and skin and respiratory diseases [2] Later, sawmill and timber workers’ unions helped to improve working conditions[1]; today, modern machinery has many safeguards built in to reduce risks, such as blade guards and locking mechanisms to shut the equipment down immediately.
In 1992, the Health and Safety in Employment Act was implemented, followed by the Health and Safety in Employment Regulations in 1995 and general Codes of Practice[3]. These placed an obligation on employers to provide workers with a working environment as safe as possible, requiring them to identify all possible hazards on worksites and take steps to minimize or eliminate each one. This extends even to small things such as providing safe walkways around areas that could be hazardous, such as conveyor belts. Today, the amount of rules reflects the danger of the job, and what was once an extremely high-risk environment has been made safe to the point where a fatality makes the news.
Forestry injuries now make up a tiny fraction of workplace injuries worldwide [4]
