ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A mature-age apprentice mocked his fellow tradespeople this morning on a residential site in the French Quarter, telling them that wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) is for people who subscribe to left-wing politics.
Shortly after Dale Chutney, a 29-year-old building apprentice, began attacking a load-bearing wall with a jackhammer, a fellow apprentice at Glorified Tent Homes tapped him on the shoulder and offered a pair of ear muffs.
“What?” he said.
“Wear fucken PPE? What am I? A leftie?”
Later in the morning at smoko, the 16-year-old who offered his own hearing protection asked Dale why he doesn’t believe in protecting his hearing from sustained loud volume.
“It’s all bullshit, mate,” he told the apprentice.
“Like the science is still out on it. It’s not the sound that makes people lose their hearing; it’s the vibrations. I hold the jackhammer in a way that only vibrates my hands and not my whole body.”
As he finished saying that, he looked over at a plumber that he knew was a vaccine and climate skeptic, as if to catch a nod in agreement or even just a smile.
Instead, the plumber just squinted a bit.
“Nah, bra,” said the plumber.
“That hearing shit is legit. You gotta wear hearing protection, boss; you’ll go deaf, ey?”
Dale squinted himself.
“What? I can’t hear you, mate. Speak a bit clearer, get that fucken bread out your mouth,” said Dale.
“What I’m saying is that they make you buy all this shit you don’t need because cunts in the unions own the companies that we buy PPE from, and there’s literally no research to suggest that wearing PPE like earmuffs, goggles, and fucken steel cap boots does anything,”
“The fact that the foreman is never here, man, speaks volumes. You never see the fucken architects or the engineers wear PPE, do you? It’s fucken bullshit, bra. It’s for lefties, for fucken sheep, aye?”
More to come.
