By Aisha lawal
As early as 7 am, the construction site is already filled with workers. The usual sound of drilling fills the air as construction workers move between piles of sand, steel rods, and unfinished concrete structures.
One worker adjusts himself before carefully climbing a ladder, while another carries materials across the site. From the road, it probably looks like an ordinary day for them. But inside the site, an ordinary task can carry extraordinary risks.
A loose plank, an exposed electrical wire, an unstable scaffold, or a falling object can turn a routine morning into an accident.
The construction work is only one example.
For thousands of Nigerians, the workplace is where they spend a significant part of their lives. Yet, the dangers they encounter are not always as obvious as a fall from a building or an accident involving heavy machines. Some workplace hazards are so familiar that workers eventually stop noticing them.
“Working around heavy materials can become normal after a while. Obviously, they are dangerous, but you become so used to it you don’t think about it anymore,” Adam explains.
A factory floor can be just as dangerous. Although the risks may look different from other fields.
The constant movement of machinery, exposure to heat and chemicals, excessive noise, and repetitive tasks can all take a toll on workers. A machine may appear harmless from a distance. But a missing safety guard or a faulty component can make it dangerous for the worker, and potentially to others around them.
In health care, workers may not be standing next to a crane or an industrial machine; but they also face risks in day to day activities. They may face exposure to infectious materials, accidental injuries, chemicals, physical strain from moving patients, and exhaustion caused by the long working hours.
Unlike a construction site, there may be no obvious warning sign that danger is present.
“It’s really common to feel tired in the course of work. Everyday, we are dealing with patients with different personalities, and it can become really exhausting when trying to understand them, especially when they aren’t being transparent,” Miss Salamat said.
While they are usually over-looked a journalist usually documents other peoples’ risks while facing risks on their own, as the workplace is wherever the story takes them.
A journalist might find themselves covering protests, reporting from accident scenes, entering danger zones, working at unsafe hours, travelling hours to cover stories, facing harassment, and experiencing psychological stress from repeated coverage on disturbing stories.
For many workers, unsafe conditions are not unusual occurrences. They are simply part of the working environment.
This is what makes workplace safety so under-looked, because at some point, people become used to all the dangers because they are part of their daily routines.
A construction worker may walk past the same exposed wire every morning. A journalist may become used to the risks of uncovering news stories, and a health care worker may become accustomed to working through exhaustion.
The longer a hazard remains without causing an accident, the easier it can become to stop seeing it as a hazard at all. This normalisation of risk can become dangerous for the worker .
The absence of an accident does not necessarily mean that a workplace is safe. It may simply mean that the accident has not happened yet.
For workers, however, avoiding these dangers is not always as simple as walking away. Work has to be completed. Deadlines have to be met. Customers have to be served. Patients have to be attended to. After all, regardless of the risks involved, it is still a means of livelihood.
Employers can reduce risks by regularly inspecting their workplaces, maintaining equipment, training employees, educating employees on workplace safety, and providing appropriate protective equipment. Workers also have a role to play by following safety procedures, and reporting hazards when they identify them.
But safety cannot depend entirely on individual workers. A helmet cannot make an unstable scaffold safe. Gloves cannot compensate for a poorly maintained machine. And telling a tired worker to “be careful” does not address the conditions causing the fatigue.
Effective workplace safety requires systems that make the safe choice possible. It means identifying hazards before they cause harm, assessing the risks, and taking steps to remove or reduce them.
Creating safer workplaces requires a collective effort from employers, workers, and institutions responsible for worker protection. While employers must identify hazards, maintain equipment, and provide adequate training and protective gear, workers must also be encouraged to recognise and report risks.
“Safety is really important, and (it) is something I take really seriously, especially in the workplace. It shouldn’t be something that should be overlooked, cause safety is first, second, and always.” Farouk says
Institutions such as The National Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) is part of this wider framework of worker protection, for when employees are affected by work-related incidents, while also promoting awareness on workplace safety. While there are safety nets like NSITF in the case of emergency, it is still important to ensure that workers are able to do their jobs without being exposed to danger.
At the end of the working day, workers leave the construction site, the hospital, wherever they may be, and begin their journeys home. For many, the risks they encounter during the day may have become so ordinary that they barely think about them anymore.
But danger does not become less dangerous simply because people have become accustomed to it. Workers can do their jobs without having to gamble with their health or their lives.
A workplace should not be considered safe merely because an accident has not happened. True safety begins when hazards are recognised, risks are addressed, and other factors are put in place in case of an emergency because the truth is that accidents are inevitable. But that does not mean they should not be safety precautions.
Because at the end of every shift, the most important thing a worker should be carrying home is not an injury, but the assurance that they made it home safely.