WHY PPE is STILL ABANDONED BY THE EMPLOYER

What is Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)? Why we need PPE? When PPE should be used?

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is consider as any devices/equipment which worn by the workers aims to protects them against the health and safety hazards at the workplace. Hard hat, safety shoes, safety harness, goggle, respirator, face mask and hand glove are the common PPE worn by the worker. PPE is a last line defense based on hierarchy of control and the use of PPE should not be given a false thought of security to the wearer because the risk is not eliminated but only prevent the hazards from being in contact with the worker.

Despite of the limitation at the workplace, the use of personal protective equipment may, in certain circumstances, be the only practicable protection. When this is the case these equipment must be properly selected, used and maintained so that adequate protection will be provided to the wearer.

When we talk about PPE, there always in our mind this is the easiest way to protect the worker and cheapest solution to comply with the regulation. But in the real situation why there are some employer still refuse to provide a PROPER PPE for their workers? One of the reasons to this problem is some of the PPE are too costly especially for those imported with the tax range between 5% to 30% and a lot of the PPE used by at the workplaces are still imported.

The employer has to provide PPE to all of their workers and sometime more than one type of PPE is required depending on the risk. As an examples “ Company A employed thirty (30) construction workers and all of them should be provided with proper PPE including hard hat, safety shoes, hand glove, safety harness and safety goggle. All of this PPE need to maintain so that it can give adequate protection.” This condition will burden the employer and for those who have no intention to safety matter will used this reason for not providing and maintain the proper PPE for their workers.

There are a lot of solution to overcome this problem and one of the most relevant is from the government commitment by abolish or reduce the tax of In order to promote the uses of PPE at the workplace.