Hi Thomas
Welcome to the world of working for a US multinational - I have been there.
US organisations tend to use OSHA standards as their starting point for working out how to manage safety and health.
But OSHA standards are almost entirely either simply prescriptive or proscriptive - DO THIS or DON'T DO THIS.
Whereas your profile says you are in the UK where the law sets a goal-setting approach, generally with requirements being qualified by those words "reasonably practicable".
Worth remembering that by whatever indicator of measurement accident incidence rates in the UK and most of Europe are MUCH lower than in the US - which perhaps might suggest that the European legislative model is more effective than OSHA standards.
NOTE - I wrote "accident incidence rates" thereby excluding occupational health risks where, in some respects, sometimes US performance is better than that in the UK.
The more subtle versions of Golden Rules will have some small print indicating that there might be exceptions. But in most versions that I have come across that small print is either difficult to find or non-existent.
So, imagine working in a Listed Building where the main staircase is wide but with a handrail on one side only. If you have a Golden Rule stating "You must hold the handrail" - what happens when one person is trying to climb up the stairs and another trying to walk down?
The obvious answer would be to provide a second handrail but the cost of installing this in said Listed Building would be very high - to get permission the second handrail would have to closely match the cast bronze one in place - so you have to find someone who still has the original wooden patterns used to cast the original handrails (or recreate those patterns from scratch - far from impossible).
Could instruct people to never climb the stairs so that they are always available for emergeny descent when the fire alarm goes off, but most would consider this less than optimal from a public health viewpoint!
Could install traffic lights (though they might not get Listed Building Consent!!)
Then the "you must wear gloves at all times when on site" Golden Rule with claims that whatever you are doing "we can find suitable gloves for the task".
So, far so good. But I got summoned to join a team investigating a fatal accident. Everyone knows the importance of photographs in modern investigations, so I needed some digital photos to illustrate the area around where the deceased had been found + take lots of measurements and draw sketches with those measurements in my note book.
I HAD my cut resistant gloves but of course these are not helpful when it comes to pressing a small button on a camera or do sketches with measurements in my notebook - my handwriting is poor at the best of times and it is NOT good to be unable to read your own handwriting some days after taking some measurements in an investigation into a fatality.
So, I am standing beside plant which has rusted with sharp edges (NOW those sharp edges should NOT have been there, but completely irrelevant to the circumstance of the fatality EXCEPT perhaps as an indicator of the underlying culture) - so I did a risk asssessment in my head.....
Option 1 - refuse to take photos as I couldn't keep my gloves on and take good enough photos - didn't believe that this would be considered a particularly collaborative approach to the investigation.
Option 2 - stop the investigation until I had gloves that would allow me to take the photos and do the entry into my notebook - lightweight nitrile suitable for protection against some chemicals but USELESS for the sharp edges.
Option 3 - take my gloves off and keep those sharp edges in mind and keep my hands away from them. Then replace the gloves before returning to the rest of the investigation team - which would require walking back past those sharp edges.
I will leave you to guess which Option I chose.
In the first chapter of "The Safety Anarchist", Sidney Dekker tells the story of the site with a safety boots Golden Rule which they didn't enforce in the welfare facilities until someone dropped something in the shower, so the Rule was extended to require boots to be worn in the shower. Some time later, people were suffering from trench foot.
I am NOT a fan of Golden Rules. What is wrong with doing generic and task based risk assessments and choosing the appropriate precautions for each scenario?
I watch some of those short videos on LinkedIn where people are sitting in a training room getting safety training - WHY are most of them wearing their Hi-Vis in a training room?!?! Particularly when some - probably the people who are not usually out on site - are NOT.