Poor sleep + work in construction and industrial fields = danger

Industrial and construction sites are some of the most safety-aware workplaces, but sleep deprivation among workers is still hard to address and leads to dangerous explosions, costly accidents, hazardous spills, and casualties at work among even the most skilled workforces.

SHC has found this recent media on the dangerous blend of sleep deprivation in the skilled labor workforce:

• Lawyers Corner discusses the risks you bring to the industrial environment when you don’t get enough sleep in this blog post from June 6, 2016.
• Employers need to think smarter about helping their workers to get good sleep, according to this ABC News Australia website report (October 23, 2016).
• Check out the top 5 dangers of sleep deprivation for forklift operators as detailed in this November 15, 2016 article by Mass Transit.
• The Journal of Commerce (November 28, 2016) makes a case for requiring construction workers to get adequate sleep as an answer to productivity concerns. 
• Alanna McGinn, founder of the Good Night Sleep Site, writes about the hidden dangers of sleep deprivation on the job in this blog post at Thrive Global (December 12, 2016) which highlights some of the main industrial accidents in history and their relationship to workers’
  lack of sleep.
• OHS Insider reported on January 3, 2017 that sleep loss was considered in a new study of workplace safety as one of the most important causes of occupational fatigue.
• This YouTube trailer discusses the cultural attitudes regarding “manliness” which promote sleep deprivation as a marker of success in the skilled labor workforce in this new audiobook, Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness. The book is free to download. From the trailer posted January 20, 2017:

“Even before the rise of the twenty-four-hour workplace, the relationship between sleep and industry was problematic: sleep is frequently cast as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility are glorified at the expense of health and safety.”