Safety Featured Articles | Birmingham, AL

Material Handling Inc.'s Safety Related Featured Articles Library

Best Practices in Forklift Safety – Forklifts are at the heart of your material handling operation. If everyone is trained on how to operate them safely and how to behave around them, your operation will be safer and more productive; history has shown this to be true.

Three Essential for Effective Training – Training is one of the most important functions of any manager. From top to the bottom levels of an organization, employees that are well-trained to do their jobs perform them better, are more efficient and make greater contributions to the bottom line of the organization.

Proper Fork and Chain Inspections – Forks and chains lift hundreds of thousands of pounds each shift and unchecked wear on either can cause a load to come crashing to the ground. This can result in severe damage to property, or even the death of an employee.

The Four Essentials of a Safe, Productive Forklift Fleet – There are plenty of little things you can do to improve forklift safety in your facility. Things like keeping the floor clean, installing mirrors at the ends of your aisles and prominently displayed safety posters will all improve safety. We have found four main recurrences within companies that take forklift safety to the next level.

Pedestrian Safety is No Accident: Things You Need to Know – What we see quite frequently is a lack of training for employees working in a warehouse situation but who do not operate forklifts but merely work around them all day, every day. Working around them without knowledge pertaining to their potential hazards creates a dangerous scenario for catastrophe.

Top 5 OSHA Forklift Safety Violations – MHI has trained thousands of operators and visited hundreds of facilities. During our facility visits we observe plenty of hazards and violations. Following is our “Top Five” list of most-seen violations or safety hazards.

Four Decades of OSHA: See the Results – Since OSHA was instituted 4 decades ago, its focus has been on improving workplace safety. Not only does OSHA penalize companies that are outright flagrant with their ignorance of their employee safety, they seek to help companies understand areas that they may not have considered as hazardous. They also provide a vast amount of data to help employers achieve a safe workplace. See the differences OSHA has made in the past 40 years.

Safety Training vs. Teaching: Knowing the Difference – Too often we become focused on the regulation and the direct costs of non-compliance, namely fines and potential lawsuits. However, if we focus on truly making cultural changes in our organizations that revolve around a safer workplace, many other cost-savings will occur, including: