London, England, November 12--Polishing the floor too thoroughly is illegal - it's official. Britain's safety watchdog has advised employers to assess their floor coverings for the danger of somebody falling flat on their face, according to the Guardian.
Slippery floors represent a real danger for businesses, according to the Health and Safety Executive, which says somebody slips over seriously in Britain every three minutes, causing 35,000 injuries a year.
The HSE has come up with a portable skid resistance tester, in which a fake shoe is suspended from a metal frame and swings, pendulum-like, over a piece of flooring.
This "standard simulated shoe sole" produces a coefficient of friction. Taken together with a micro-roughness value of the floor surface generated by an electronic meter, it produces an equation which tells bosses whether their staff are going to fall over.
But business leaders said a pamphlet describing the test would have bosses tearing their hair out. Lewis Sibnick, employment policy adviser at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "It's the sort of document that typifies the problem employers face in over-complicated, hard-to-read rules with little value in the day-to-day running of a business."
Employers can buy a computer package to test their floor slipperiness, or use a new HSE online slipperiness calculator.
Alternatively, they can follow the example of one German flooring manufacturer which, the HSE says, tests coverings by suspending staff from a harness and getting them to walk on a conveyor belt with soap rubbed into their feet.
