Posted By Stuff4blokes
Hi EL. I am a consultant and in my experience companies who are concerned about product contamination and machinery hazards make such a ban and even then invariably allow the wearing of plain wedding ring bands.

For food, cosmetics etc production the argument is pretty clear: whilst a diamond appearing in the soup may be a prize worth finding, a cheap earring would rightly be abhorrent to the customer.

For the machinery entanglement argument, I believe this is less clear. If the manufacturing equipment has exposed moving parts to which the operator is sufficiently exposed to be at risk from wearing jewellery, surely the contact risk is too high to accept anyway, and must be controlled in a more effective way.

To impose a blanket ban "for health and safety reasons" without justification could provoke the adverse reactions, discussions and feelings that our profession is seeking to avoid.

I will be interested to see how this thread develops.

Hi Stuff4blokes

We're a manufacturing company with a total ban on jewellery.

We do not have exposed moving parts, but feel the need for the policy as we have seen some de-gloving injuries within our enterprise caused in other ways (ladders, access hatches etc).

We brought the policy into effect after a corporate mandate, and as such, haven't had any backlash from the workforce.

I think the main reason for this is the way we communicated the change to our employees. We had good discussions with the workforce and let them witness some of the injuries that had been caused by the wearing of rings.

I think it's got a lot to do with the safety culture within the organisation.