BALANCING SAFETY AND PRODUCTIVITY

By: Evan Lucyk

All of life is a balance. This rule of thumb extends to the mining industry as well. One of the most vital balancing acts we must navigate daily is between safety and productivity.

This is no easy feat to accomplish. That’s why we wanted to dedicate an entire article to exploring the importance—and challenges—of balancing mining productivity with worker safety during the time of COVID-19.

As we continue to navigate our way through the pandemic and increasing risks due to variants, mines are still under pressure to maintain productivity due to global demand.

These are truly unprecedented times, and while we have taken a functional approach to industrial safety and productivity in the past, this global pandemic has placed a different type of pressure and uncertainty on so many. Specifically, we are seeing a rising number of our mining clients being forced to make some hard decisions regarding whether or not they can maintain their productivity

This is because of their new and unexpected needs to now balance that productivity with both standard industrial safety and also COVID-related health safety. All of this—combined with intense and ever-mounting international pressure for raw materials due to worldwide shortages—has brought the raw materials industry in mining to the brink.

Simply put: The pressure is on.

DOING MORE WITH LESS

While we are glad to see that clients are not willing to compromise safety measures to increase production, this does inevitably place a lot of pressure on their staff to maintain the extra steps now needing to be taken to maintain the safety status quo. Why? Because taking those extra safety measures takes a far greater amount of time.

For instance, when you’re going up and down in a cage to go underground, due to the pandemic’s distancing requirements, you are now limited in the number of people you can have inside that cage in order to ensure you can stay spaced out properly. Think about how much more time this now requires for an elevator to go up and down each time—and how many more trips are now needed.

Instead of being able to take everybody down in one trip, you are looking at five (or more) trips. This is just one example of how things have changed, and that same rule applies to underground transportation with vehicles, as well. Instead of being able to pack a vehicle full of workers, it may now require two trips out to a mining machine.

One extra thing might be an inconvenience, but when you have several extra safety steps to take, they quickly add up—leaving much less time for actually performing the mining task itself. Also, since global demand is so high right now, the pressure that workers feel knowing that they have to produce more than what they did in years past is intense. Put everything together and it’s a recipe for real turmoil.

The bottom line: Today’s workers are now having to try to do “more with less”—the “less” in this scenario being mainly time. While safety has always remained a focus—and we don´t ever see that changing—the main concern in this perfect storm is not that we will see companies cutting corners, but instead, that we will see the weight of fatigue on workers taking an increasingly alarming toll. The workers and the corporations as a whole are both feeling it—that constant striving to attain that pivotal balance between and the need to focus on worker safety while still supplying global demand.