How to Make Forklift Safety Training Painless
First off! The winner of Cromer’s Scavenger Hunt is:
Mark Colbert from Leslie’s Organics in Petaluma!
Congratulations Mark and thanks for playing! Your $250 Visa gift card is on its way.
For the rest of our readers – It’s time for a Forklift Safety Training reminder!
Our forklift training classes are going gangbusters, which is typically the case early in the year. Are your workers due for renewing their training, too?
OSHA requires employers to confirm that their forklift operators are trained & evaluated every 3 years. Many companies train more frequently, by our experience, and that keeps more workers safe—and we definitely want to see that!
How Quickly a Lapse in Safety Training Can Hurt You
Last March we went through the benefits of regular forklift safety training. It’s important to revisit this topic. Not only is it easy to forget, but forgetting can open your business to real danger.
Let’s illustrate the dangers with an example. Meet Mike.
Mike is a site manager, with 1 warehouse and 6 forklifts. He has 18 workers, 6 to a shift. All 18 workers were trained in 2013 and are due for a refresher this year.
Mike tries to find a time when he can send everyone out for training. Schedules conflict. He gets distracted by orders. No one gets their safety refresher.
One day a forklift driver takes a turn in the warehouse at an excessive speed and runs into a rack, causing his pallet to fall onto the foot of a nearby worker, breaking it.
Now Mike has a workplace accident. An injured worker, an insurance claim, and he faces an OSHA fine of up to $70,000.
Don’t let this happen to you. Keep everyone up to date on their safety training.
3 Ways to Get Your Workers Trained
Stagger groups of workers for training. Cromer provides forklift safety training at its Oakland facility from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. one Friday each month. Send a few of your workers out each month to get their training and they’ll come back with a Safety Training Certificate good for another three years. Cost is $115 per forklift operator.
Bring a Cromer Trainer onsite for safety training. If you have five or more forklift operators to be trained, schedule a Cromer trainer to come onsite to your facility. It reduces downtime for your workers and shows them the safety pitfalls that exist where they work every day.
Train your Trainer. If you want to have an in-house Trainer, then send one of your staff to our Train the Trainer workshop. We offer this 8-hour class one day every two months at our Oakland facility. The cost is $795 and includes training materials and lunch.
Time to Book Some Training
Forklift Safety Training is a Federal and State requirement—we all know it. Everyone does have to get their training in. So, let’s all do what we can to make it happen!
Our new forklift operator training dates are on our Safety Training page, with signup details.
Our Train the Trainer page has details & dates for Train the Trainer workshops.
Don’t put off signup. As I said, the classes are filling up like crazy. And the last thing you want is to fall out of OSHA compliance!
Until next month!
Marshall Cromer, The Forklift Boss
Cromer Material Handling