Four Questions About Your Workwear and PPE for National Safe Work Month

October is National Safe Work Month. Most Safe Work Month reviews focus on procedures, toolbox talks and corrective actions. That is useful work. It also tends to skip the layer sitting closest to the hazard, which is the workwear and PPE people put on before their shift starts.

Personal protective clothing rarely fails in a way that generates an incident report. It degrades quietly, over wash cycles and seasons, and the first sign is usually someone quietly deciding not to wear it. Four questions are worth adding to this year’s list.

1. Is the hi-vis still compliant, or does it only look compliant?

Fluorescent fabric loses its brightness through UV exposure and repeated industrial washing, and retroreflective tape loses return over the same cycles. Both happen gradually. A garment can fall below the requirements of AS/NZS 4602.1 for day and night use, or the tape below AS/NZS 1906.4, while still looking serviceable to the person wearing it and to the supervisor walking past.

Replacement decisions made on appearance therefore create a gap between what a site believes is compliant and what is protecting the wearer. A practical check takes minutes: put a garment from the floor next to a new one of the same style, look at them together in low light with a torch, and compare the tape return. If the difference is obvious, the rest of that cohort is likely in the same condition.

Worth recording at the same time: how the garments are being laundered. Industrial wash temperatures and drying cycles shorten service life considerably compared with home laundering, and a garment washed daily will not last the same season as one washed weekly.

2. Does the workwear fit the people wearing it?

Fit is a compliance question, not a comfort question. Garments that pull across the shoulders, ride up at the back or restrict a reach overhead come off, get unzipped or get modified. Once that happens, the specification on the purchase order stops describing what is on site.

Two groups are most often affected. Women issued men’s garments in a smaller size receive a different cut through the shoulder, chest and hip, not a smaller version of the same shape. Workers needing larger sizing are frequently left with whatever the range extends to, which may be a heavier fabric or a style that was never designed for the task. A women’s fit range from size 6 to 26 and a properly extended men’s size run remove most of that problem before it starts.

Before any rollout, have people try on sample garments in a range of sizes rather than ordering from a size chart. Most suppliers will provide a set of samples for this. It is the single change that reduces returns and reissues most reliably.

3. Can anyone tell you when an item was last replaced?

If the answer involves checking with a supervisor, or waiting for someone to ask, then replacement is reactive. That means somebody is in worn workwear right now and the organisation does not know who.

What a record needs to hold is straightforward: what was issued, to whom, on what date, and what the expected replacement interval is for that garment given how often it is laundered. Ordering portals with employee allocation handle this without a spreadsheet, and they also make the annual spend visible by site and by role, which is usually the information procurement is missing at budget time.

Setting an interval also shifts the conversation. Instead of debating whether a particular jacket looks finished, the site replaces on a cycle and inspects between cycles.

4. Are the workarounds documented?

The tasks where a glove, a jacket or a pair of safety glasses comes off are usually where the real exposure sits, and they almost never surface in a review because nobody reports them.

The pattern is consistent across sites. Gloves come off to operate a scanner or a touchscreen. Safety glasses come off when they fog moving between a chilled room and a loading dock. A jacket gets unzipped on a pick line because the wearer is generating heat, then stays open in the cold store. In each case the workwear is compliant on paper and absent at the moment of risk.

These are solvable through specification rather than enforcement. Conductive fingertips let a glove stay on through a scanner tap. Anti-fog lens coatings and a vented frame reduce the reason to remove eyewear. Breathable panels and a longer body length keep a jacket usable through movement instead of only at rest. Ask supervisors which items come off and when, then take the answers to your supplier as a product brief.

If any of those are hard to answer, that is your audit finding

None of these four questions require an external audit or a new system. They require someone to walk the floor during Safe Work Month with the same attention usually given to the paperwork, and to write down what they find.

Badger works with warehousing and logistics teams to review workwear and PPE programs, from compliance and sizing through to ordering and replenishment. If this year’s review turns up more questions than answers, we can help you close them out.

Talk to Badger about a workwear and PPE review: https://www.badgeraustralia.com.au/contact