Greetings from Trinidad and Tobago.. I am from the Caribbean branch,I am new in a company I'm with as HSE Manager however management wants to review its PPE and dress code policy,one of the main concerns I have is the new policy requires male employees to have short hair meaning neatly cut, no ponytails as well as to be clean shaved. However existing currently there are a few employees with dreadlocks and beards. Can I get some feed back from you professionals how do I implement and enforce this rule with least damage.

welcome Trinisafe, Can you clarify if are you being asked to review the dress code policy for genuine safety concerns, if so waht are they eg risk of entanglement, PPE not fitting correctly etc. or is the purely for corporate image ?.

The nature of the job is servicing and repairing mostly rotating equipment.There is the risk of Harzadous gases which can arise at any time and the employee has to use a BA (breathing apparatus). These employees also do painting on intervals that requires respiratory equipment. Its the requirement of the risk assessment as well and a concern where the PPE does not fit correctly such as Safety Helmets and Respirators when the hierarchy of control is used in this situation there is no cost benefit since the organisation is small and these employees were hired on to do these jobs,administrative and engineering controls becomes impractical.

Hi Trinisafe, it's certainly true that long hair and rotating equipment are a bad match, just as beards and close-fitting RPE are. As others have said there are likely to be very strong views on why individuals have their particular hair styles and using safety and health as a means to change this is setting you up as the "bad guy" I am assuming that a process and substance change has been considered and rejected as being too costly! A close-fitting head covering such as a turban may be one possible solution whilst there are air-fed respirators that provide full head coverage are available. Neither of these does anything to address the company stance on short hair/clean shaven but as others have said, this is a different management issue and should be separated from the safety and health considerations. Finally, the labour laws in T&T may well be a major deciding factor in the way your management resolve the issue.

My thoughts too. Seems rather an abuse of the aims of HS&W provisions to use them to enforce uniformity. I think your company is chancing it suggesting that "safety helmets might not fit. You could have a policy that all long hair, whether men's women's, dreaded, straight, curly be tied up and tucked in as is common in clinical & immediate care, catering, uniformed services, construction and enginering construction settings. I know many people with dreads in all walks of life; clinicians; doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical students, where one might think cross-contamination might be used as an excuse for discrimination, in food and catering... in fact I can think of a few other people working with rotating equipment and condition monitoring who have dreadlocks. It's not common as hippies (the group of people I know most likely to sport dreads) don't generally get involved in oil and gas (where RE is most prevalent here), for some reason. I know many more people with beard and peyos working in hospitals in Israel and in Magen David Adom, Zaka (founded by men with beards) and United Hatzalah where common sense is applied. I (as a bit of a hippy student) had dreadlocks, still have a beard and worked offshore in uni vacations servicing and carrying out planned and reactive maintenance on rotating equipment in potentially explosive atmospheres. I can't remember issues with face fit tests for the BA sets, smoke hoods etc but even back then industry tended to manage the hazards with permit to work controls, guards, lockouts, fixed fire and gas systems, portable gas detection, ventilation systems etc. I'm struggling to think of any situations where there were open rotating systems. Now thinking about it, with a thicker layer of hair my hard hat stayed on more when I had dreadlocks than it does with my current short hair and a [scaffolders] hard hat with ratchet. It begs the question what state is the plant in and what controls are there to manage rotating and gas hazards before they even become hazards to people with beards and dreads? As other posters have mentioned you should also be satisfying the safety controls hierarchy higher up elimination>substitution>engineering controls>administrative controls> ie guards, M&E lockouts, spindown before PPE> health monitoring. I'm quite astounded to see H&S used for such possibly discriminatory purposes in T&T and would have though it would be more common here in the UK! I worked in an Embassy of Trinidad and Tobago in the 90s, BTW. I can check the law, there's a member of our shul from T&T who trained as a lawyer, though I won't see her for a few weeks.