The north-east of England has a strong tradition of getting essential jobs done and of having a workforce that isn’t worried about getting their hands dirty. The history of industrial development and heavy machinery based occupations means that manual labourers have always had a big part to play in the economic infrastructure of the region and that continues to the present day.
Inherent dangers
While there are accepted occupational health risks to jobs in office and retail, these usually come in the form of repetitive strain injuries or occasionally from accidents resulting from a lack of care, attention or training. For manual labour workers there are far more potential injuries and other factors that can affect long term health and these often arise from the very nature of the work itself.
Health and safety
Thankfully even though there may be risks there is no inevitability when it comes to injuries. Part of the essential path to avoiding injury is to identify the main problems because then effective action can be taken to mitigate exposure.
Slips, trips and falls are perhaps the most common cause of injury, as wet surfaces can occur in many manual work settings. Burns are another major cause, as are cuts that are bad enough to need medical attention. Musculoskeletal injuries can cause long term chronic problems such as back pain and this is actually one of the biggest reasons for people to have to take time off sick.
All of these causes can be made far less worrying by using the correct health and safety procedures.
Ill effects
However, even the best trained manual worker who is exceptionally careful about safety can sometimes fall foul of an accident at work. This might simply be something that is unavoidable, it might be a result of someone else’s action or even in some cases due to negligence on the part of an employer.
Many people who are affected by the most common injury seek out the advice of a back injury lawyer to find out whether they might be in line for compensation. This can cover lost earnings, medical bills and in some cases compensation damages too.
Best practice
In any physically demanding line of work it is down to the individual as well as the employer to make such risks are kept to a minimum and that best practice is adhered to at all times. In this modern era safety clothing and equipment has made life much easier for most manual workers and, happily, today the whole sector is a much safer place to work that at any time in the past.
When accidents do happen or there are other causes of injury or illness, legal protection for workers is now far stronger too and this means that it is in the interests of employers to ensure a safe working environment in the first place.