INDUSTRY PEOPLE
INDUSTRY PEOPLE
Strapped in for adventure
Sometimes a business - on the surface at least - can have the appearance of something straight
from the distant past .
I remember my mother telling me a funny story about seatbelt restraints in New Zealand in the 1970s . Or should I say , lack of seatbelts .
Apparently my sister , as a baby , was placed in the back seat of mum ’ s Hillman Imp ( red and white with the razor blade tyres ) in a bassinet . And off mum drove to Hamilton on the southern motorway without a care in the world .
This was commonplace , and there was no question about rear restraints until 1979 when legislation was passed in line with the rising road toll .
Road deaths had risen steadily since 1960 , from 374 to 843 in 1973 . Once people had gotten their heads around car safety , it was time to look at the workplaces and workplace equipment . After all , much of New Zealand industry relies on some kind of transportation or ride-on machinery including forklifts , diggers , excavators , farm bikes and tractors .
Try to get a seasoned farmer to belt-in to a farm vehicle , though ... It ’ s a cultural rite of passage in this country to feel invincible . Who needs to wear a bloody seat belt ?
Don Wilkinson , formerly of Wilkinson Smith Contractors Ltd , a civil engineering and contracting firm , had first-hand insight into the need for a change in the culture of safety in workplaces .
Having overseen several major construction projects and the way legislation had forced businesses to take responsibility for identifying and rectifying in-house risks to personnel , he knew that there needed to be a bridge between the culture of “ she ’ ll be right ” and a real attempt to encourage drivers to “ make it click ”.
The result was the invention of the Springbelt , a patented device that allows drivers to quickly buckle into a heavy industrial machine . Simply put , on any given work day , an operator might climb in and out of a machine multiple times , each time requiring them to locate and deploy the seatbelt system . Don explains that with the established system of
Mike and Eddie of Seatbelt Sales in Christchurch . Between them they have fitted over 18,000 seatbelts to a range of vehicles .
locating , pulling and crossing the belt over , operators are less likely to actually put the belt on at all .
“ They are fumbling around down the right-hand side , trying to find the belt , then pulling it across and having to locate the clasp on the left . It ’ s not exactly conducive to being efficient and many of them just give up . Supervisors might not be enforcing it or might not even notice it ’ s happening at all .”
To counter this , the Springbelt is a molded system that simply clips in . There ’ s no strap to find as it ’ s an all-in-one unit . It sits naturally at hand height . The idea behind it is , of course , safety but in order to implement that safety , the seatbelt needed to be simple to use and not cumbersome .
“ The Springbelt is about as easy as you can make a belt work . If you start making things easy for people it starts to become habit . It ’ s a typical Kiwi mentality , “ she ’ ll be right ”.”
This is a monthly series on businesses in our industry . We profile one business per month to find out how our hard-working business owners , employees and contractors manage to run these specialist businesses and what makes them tick in the New Zealand trade business environment . These are the stories of our CAM people .
www . cammagazine . co . nz CAM October 2018 81