COTTON
Ginners Marketplace COTTON FARMING IS THE OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE GINNING INDUSTRY.
Keep Gin Safety At The Top Of Your List
plate 3/7/14 3:26 PM Page 1
Safety is always a topic that draws mixed reactions. I’ve written more safety articles and given more safety talks than I care to think about, but it’s something I feel is important. In the past couple of years, gins — along with many other industries — have been required to report their serious accidents directly to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This has led to a significant number of interactions with the agency on many levels. Whenever there’s an incident that requires you to call OSHA, it’s never a fun situation. You’re dealing with the injured worker, sometimes their family, the hospital, workers comp and… sometimes your ginners’ association safety guy. The last thing you want to do is call someone to let him know he may want to come by and go through your business with a fine-tooth comb in the middle of all that AND it’s ginning season. In this case, it’s the law, and fines often increase when accidents are reported late. In the first year of required reporting, there weren’t any fines charged. Now they’re well over $3,000 in most cases. We’ve seen not only larger fines for late reporting but larger fines overall. What used to be a minor infraction now feels like a
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Make Energy Control A Priority If there’s one program or practice that everyone needs to be aware of and learn about, it’s energy control. Agriculture doesn’t have a prescriptive lockout/tagout program, but we are under an obligation to control hazardous energy. This means
Cotton Ginners Marketplace
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Run An Effective Safety Program What can we do about this? Well, the first thing is to do EVERYTHING you can to avoid having to call OSHA in the first place. This means using your resources (associations, insurance folks etc.) to develop and run a safety program. Make sure everyone is following it to the letter. Cotton gins are considered agriculture by the Department of Labor. This means we can be less prescriptive and more creative in developing a program. Consider the injuries you’ve heard about — your association or insurance company can provide you with plenty — and think about how you’d prevent them in your gin. No two gins are exactly alike, so you need to make your program fit your gin.
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major issue. And let’s not even talk about the big infractions.
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MAYMAY 2018 2018 COTTON COTTON FARMING FARMING