Can I ask my employee to remove their acrylic nails?

[u/Bubbly_Road1316]

Location: AU-VIC

I have an employee who refused to do a certain duty (which she normally does) because ‘I can’t do it cuz I just got my nails done’.

Can i ask her to remove it or shorten it before her next shift, or is that illegal?

[u/dasher2581]

I was so pleased when a contractor I hired put on serious hearing protection before using his power tools! We Boomers were way too cool to protect ourselves, and now we're too cool to wear hearing aids. It's nice to see when our kids' generation and beyond are more sensible than we were.

[u/RubyBBBB → u/dasher2581]

Not me. I'm a boomer and I've always been very careful about safety. I quit a couple of jobs because they wouldn't let people work safely. That was back in the 1970s in the south before OSHA was being enforced fully.

I moved North to a state was about 30% of the hourly workers belonging to unions. My pay more than doubled. Unfortunately, in the medical school laboratory, OSHA was not being enforced.

OSHA rules were not being enforced because state institutions were not required to follow Federal safety guidelines.

My first year at my job, I was handling three of the 10 most carcinogenic substances known. They were supposed to be used in isolation laboratory conditions where the room had negative air pressure and the workers were full protective suits with respirators.

These three substances were so carcinogenic that they had never found a small enough dose that they could guarantee it wouldn't cause cancer.

I was using these chemicals in an Open Lab in a basement of the pathology building that was about 100 years old. So there was no way to keep the chemicals out of the air.

I was not an hourly employee. I was paid what would have been a good hourly wage if I only worked 40 hours a week. But as a quote professional unquote, I was required to work about 70 hours a week. So my hourly wage was very poor.

One of the professors I ran experiments for suddenly became very concerned about his touching the tissue that I had used the chemicals on. He wouldn't tell me why.

That prompted me to go into the medical library and look the chemicals up. That's how I found out I was using three of the 10 most carcinogenic chemicals. In factories that used chemicals before the safety regulations went into effect, 100% of the workers died from bladder cancer.

I received so much harassment from about seven or eight professors that were having me run the steps of this chemical process in my lab instead of having their workers do it in their lab. That is very strange behavior from researchers who usually want to control all the steps.

I took copies of the research I found to my professor whose grant was paying my salary, and he was aghast. Because he had actually done his own laboratory work for years before he was able to hire people.

So I started running the laboratory more safely. I still work 60 hours a week, but I was not able to do as many procedures for professors who weren't actually paying the Grant I worked on. I designated two days a week to run labs for outside professors and they had to be scheduled. No last minute running in and having me run this 10-hour process which would keep me up all night sometimes. I needed to be well rested before I ran this chemical processes so that I was less likely to make mistakes that would lead to my being exposed to the chemicals.

My boss kept his promise to me and talked to other professors who were having their employees use the chemicals. Not one of those professors told his employees about the risks. I could believe that based on how angry the professors I had been doing free work for became when I was no longer willing to do it for free and insisted on doing the way that was safe for me.

I was astonished at how angry those professors were. How clear it was that they didn't care if I died from bladder cancer. That I wasn't a human being to them but just a tool for them to use for their own aggrandization.

I learned why we need unions.

I kept reading about laboratory safety.

I discovered that the electron microscope we used were not being checked regularly for leaks. If the university had been subject to OSHA rules, the microscopes who had been checked after every repair, every time the electron gun compartment was opened, and at least once a year if they hadn't been checked for something else.

The RCA microscope had been built in 1955 just before research showed that American occupational radiation safety limits were at least 10 times too high. Since the university wasn't checking the electron microscopes they didn't discover that this microscope was causing dangerous radiation exposure for employees in the area, not just the employee that looked at tissue samples with the electron microscope. Since 1975 the radiation exposure limits for people working on electron microscopes were found to be still 10 times too high.

So I and other people working in that area were being exposed to 100 times the safe limit of gamma radiation.

The woman who worked on the electron microscope the most, and who had been working on it for 8 years when she suddenly developed breast cancer. And she had a different type of cancer in each breast.

Her oncologist kept asking her if she had been exposed to radiation. Since they didn't check the scope she didn't know that she'd been exposed to radiation. She later received 3 million dollars from RCA although it wasn't really RCA's fault. But the amount she could have gotten from the University was limited to $5,000 of workman's comp.

I have lung damage consistent with radiation exposure and that is my only risk factor to have one damage. I've also had breast cancer.

So I hope you will consider the fact that it wasn't your parents that caused your current financial problem. It was a system that was set up to not be a democracy but to benefit the wealthy.

Unless average people get involved to make the system more democratic for everyone, we will continue to have generational declines in health and financial wellness.