Junior8
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Posts posted by Junior8
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If you want to be really depressed take a look at the Michael Coveney & Peter Dazely London Theatres book and look at the desecration of some of those lovely spaces by all sorts of intrusive equipment. All black and much of it execrably designed.
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Well if they were trained properly - which they aren't any more - they wouldn't need to be told because they'd be risk assessing as part of the job continuously due to the indoctrination into the responsibilities that went with the job. It was drummed into us from day one that the first concern was to look after our charges and that meant looking out for them. Most experienced old school teachers could walk into any space and pretty well instantly identify where the risks were. We didn't write it down of course we just did it.
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I'd argue with the word loophole and replace it with people and organisations 'trying their luck' to save 'ees 'ers and other on costs including employee benefits. The folk who moan about, or maybe I should say are affected most by, tighter definitions of self-employment are those who aren't really self-employed at all according to even the simplest definition of that status. They often really conform to that old hackneyed and now legally pretty meaningless term ' casual labour'. The real villain though, and here I think I do agree with Clive, is the varying approaches to such things over the years by HMRC. What was once a quite relaxed attitude seems to have been replaced by a much firmer regime.
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Tell the guitar bloke about my uncle who was in a band in the sixties and early seventies when the backline would have been drums and 200 watts max ( or at least a claimed 200 watts) with 100 watt PA who has crippling hearing loss/tinnitus now that his consultant says can be pretty well put down only to that exposure.
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I am still confused by the judgement. For example one para states that they accept that hearing protection cannot be worn at all times by musicians while another states that failure to reduce the upper EAV below 85dB makes the pit a Hearing Protection Zone where the use of hearing protection is mandatory.
Ergo no orchestra pit can be permitted to exceed 85dB if players will not for any reason use protection.
On the other matter of festivals etc. it seems to me that employers will have to monitor, and probably should already have been monitoring, the noise levels for staff in the situations you outline.
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There probably is a market for it! My Excel spreadsheets are pretty well set up, it's just that I had made a couple of stupid mistakes which I then didn't notice until I'd done the find-and-replace to build another eight or so graphs.
It was just as easy to do similar in the days of paper and pen. Getting over it is probably a bit quicker these days though!
I just hope the screams of exasperation didn't breach the noise regulations
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If you read para 46 of the judgement you realise everything else is irrelevant to this case. Once the ROH permitted the levels they did they were in breach of the law. This judgement makes an orchestra pit once and for all a place of work under the regulations.
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If you reduce a musician's noise dose by employing several musicians for each position and rotating them carefully through loud and less loud performances with appropriate hearing protection, how does an orchestra management actually know what else they do in life and how much noise load they gain from employment from self employment and from recreational activities. Is there a musician anywhere that doesn't teach or occasionally dep for another as a personal arrangement, Could you contractually prohibit your orchestra members from acquiring noise dose outside their employment?
I think this is the nub of the different issues. For a jobbing musician it would be almost impossible to make a claim for NIHL against one particular employer. The ROH failed in its appeal because it was found they were in breach of the law in this one incident, Indeed the original trial judge was so dismissive of their case one wonders why they bothered to appeal unless it was in the belief that a higher court might somehow come to the conclusion that as it is art it must have an exception.
Kerry is right to point out the difficulty here but the judgement does at least oultine in clear terms what the duty is. Irrespective of the claimant's injury the defendant was already in breach of its duty.
As the court put it as early as para 46
We accept that it was not foreseen by anyone, and perhaps was not reasonablyforeseeable, that exposure to noise levels of 92dB(A) (as opposed to peak noise levelsin excess of 137dB©) would cause sudden injury. But in our view this is irrelevant inlaw. The Regulations were enacted in order to protect employees against the risk ofinjury to their hearing caused by excessive noise at work. It was foreseeable that if theupper exposure action value was exceeded by a factor of four the musicians wouldsuffer injury to their hearing. Once the Defendant has failed to show that it reduced thenoise exposure to as low a level as was reasonably practicable, and that it took allreasonably practicable steps to reduce it to 85 dB(A), the fact that the foreseeable riskwas of long term rather than traumatic injury is in our view neither here nor there:Hughes v Lord Advocate [1963] AC 837; Page v Smith [1996] 1 AC 155.
For this reason the question of knowing what other work a player is doing is quite irrelevant to this kind of sudden traumatic hearing damage.
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I wonder if some defendant QC will now claim NIHL is a career choice for orchestral musicians?
The costs of insuring against his £750,000 compensation minimum claim could send many less wealthy orchestras to the wall and I wonder what his fellow musicians think of that? More shall be revealed.
I suppose they could try - if they'd not read the legislation.
On your other point there is double jeopardy since even if they can insure against the risk you can bet your life they'll have to prove compliance if they want to make a claim. Could this mean the days of continuous monitoring in all circumstances?
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The Royal Opera House has lost its appeal in this case. There is a link to the judgement in the article. I would draw your attention to the final points made by Sir Brian Leveson in regard to the arguments of the 'interveners' who accompanied the ROH in the appeal.
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I looked into this business around the time of the collapse of P&H and Carrillion and the ABI were boasting about how much their members had paid out in claims. It didn't seem to occur to them what such puffs said about their industry's credit rating skills or perhaps lack of them. In the case of the high profile collapses listed in the ABI releases any supplier could have seen how risky they were just by looking at the freely available balance sheets. I suspect Tim is right and the balance is made up of chasing people who could pay given a few more days. I suppose it all depends on your experience of bad debts and whether you want the chased customers back afterwards.
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It is very unwise indeed to rely on media reports of these judgements. They are available via the Tribunals Service and are usually quite readable. Importantly here this is a First Tier Tribunal and it is quite possible that HMRC will appeal to the Upper Tier where the decision may well be reversed. (This happened in the VAT treatment of some market pitches.) Similarly each such decision is merely indicative and can't be automatically relied on in other similar cases.
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Remember...
1) It only applies if you turn over more than £85k
2) My accountant recently wrote...
Finally, although I am writing as though this is sure to happen, I am not convinced that HMRC will not defer it at the last minute. That is one reason that I am not recommending the so-called pilot programme. Everyone has enough to do without playing guinea pig.
This is not a pilot - that ends in April. The continuing pilot is the similar mechanism for filing tax returns.Link
In the next tax year if you are VAT registered and your t/o is over £85K you must use MTD with a limited number of exceptions. VAT registered businesses below £85K can take part voluntarily.
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For those looking for 'bridging software' HMRC have said they will allow cut and paste until the end of Tax Year 2019 -2020 which gives a bit of breathing space. I do know of several firms changing accounting packages due to the arm and lag being charged for updates to their existing systems.
This all has its roots in G Osborne's 2015 Budget when it started out as Making Tax Simple.
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I would not want to try and second guess the outcome of the overall legal process, but the argument that a concert has to be of a certain sound pressure level because of its artistic merit does appear somewhat specious. It has been used before (a judge dealing with an environmental noise complaint, said that the outdoor opera "would only be as loud as it needed to be". His remarks were met with some bemusement by those who wondered what the outcome would have been, were it an outdoor electronic dance music event.
The fact that the music and entertainment sectors were deliberately and explicitly included in the 2005 regulations is rather telling, and somewhat confronts the "noise vs music" argument.
It may be specious but I suspect from the final para in the article linked by Gridgirl alerting us to the appeal it's likely to make an appearance in the case!
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Probably best to write it off to experience - if only in your own mind. There are people mounting events for 'charity' who won't pay whatever happens. I am owed £15 from 1972 in precisely the same circumstances and research in the local media for the area shows he is still up to the same tricks 46 years later!!!! :(
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I think there is a lot in that. I'm not involved with professional orchestras, but even in amateur brass bands instruments have become much more powerful. There is a group (I think in the USA) which performs the late 19th / early 20th Century repertoire on original on replica instruments. From recordings I have heard the most obvious difference is in the balance and timbre of the ensemble, but I suspect they were also significantly quieter! This is not of course a new trend - string instruments have been for a couple of centuries "uprated" by adjusting the weight and tension of the strings, bridge height and so on. This seems to be well acknowledged for the 18th Century and before (where use of replica period instruments is now widespread - and they are a lot quieter!), but the romantic / symphony orchestras have not really taken on board that the same trends continued through the 19th and 20th centuries, and most of what is now considered "traditional" is much more recent than the repertoire they play (with strings it tends to be vibrato used to make this point).
There is also (it seems) a particular problem with orchestral pits, and (at least in the case of the Royal Opera House) trying to play music written well after the architecture was designed, without accepting the compromises that leads to. Sydney doesn't have that excuse ...
When the period instrument movement got into its stride I think many of us were amazed that such ensembles made really a very small sound but on reflection it must have been thus. The traditional Harpsichord is a relatively quiet instrument but the music of the time depended on the continuo being heard against the rest of the ensemble. On brass I had to leave an outdoor event when I was seated directly in front of the brass section - it was unbearable, mind you it was also unmusical.
But then everything is getting louder it seems to me - and not for the good. At the same time as the period instrument bandwagon got rolling a few recording companies went back to recording orchestras out of the studio in few takes with just a crossed stereo pair, Blumlein style. Compared with more 'produced' recordings of the established labels the difference was stark - and it should have made more people think about the artificiality of what is so often produced these days. Often it seems to me if the dynamic range of a performance doesn't match what listeners can achieve in their living room and especially the lack of low frequencies ensembles are miked and the sound reinforced. I had a good example of this back in the seventies when I was at a concert by Stephanne Grapelli and the Diz Disley Trio. Halfway through the PA went down and without a break they just went on and adjusted the volume of their playing. It was obvious I had until then not been listening to the performers but the tin eared dumbo at the sound desk's idea of what the performers should sound like. One also recalls the lessons of Gilbert Briggs' fifties concerts of live and recorded music - one featuring Thurston Dart.
I think Kerry is right - there has been a sort of leapfrog effect in all this in live performance so now we are all pinned against the back wall by digital sound of painful purity but when you think about it there is something quite ludicrous in having to provide musicians with earplugs. (In Wagner they should be issued to the audience of course.)
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OOOO that's interesting, it may cause a few problems in the industry.
If you read the whole thread then it shows that it shouldn't be any trouble if you do things correctly. We still don't know what the outcome will be and he may just be given representative damages of a nominal amount because of his own contributory actions.
Not just sitting right in front of a Wagnerian brass section but possible cumulative damage from over-rehearsing his own instrument for years and playing in heavily amplified, large scale events.
The judge is quite clear in rejecting any cumulative effect and finds, based on medical records and the like, that the hearing damage was linked to this one rehearsal. I would urge anybody in a managerial position to read this judgement in full if only to understand how their own actions might be examined in such a case. For example in one paragraph she deals with the notion that players might be left to decide when to use protection she says in relation to the point made in the last post:
I find that the ROH did not inform the claimant, nor it would appear other orchestra players, of the mandatory requirement to wear hearing protection when the noise was likely to be above the upper EAV. It is not enough to leave the issue to the musicians to judge for themselves, they should have been informed of the strict requirement and the need for it, an instruction which should have been replicated in signage in and around the orchestra pit at the time of the rehearsal on 1 September 2012. For these reasons I find that there is a breach of Regulation 10(1).
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The full judgement is here https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/christopher-goldscheider-v-the-royal-opera-house-covent-garden-foundation/
The matters of long term exposure and contributory negligence are dealt with in depth.
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He has won his case http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43571144
From the above
Mrs Justice Davies disagreed, ruling that "the reliance upon artistic value implies that statutory health and safety requirements must cede to the needs and wishes of the artistic output of the Opera company, its managers and conductors.
"Such a stance is unacceptable. Musicians are entitled to the protection of the law, as is any other worker."
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Why rope which immediately becomes a tripping hazard?
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Indeed - any first aid is better than NO first aid!
Which would have been impossible to provide at a venue Mrs J8 was trading at in March. The kit - when found - did not contain a plaster fit to deal with a simple cut, or indeed much else in usable condition. Points were made...
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that "Australian" standard you mention is a British standard number...
No, no gazebo has a fire rating relevant to deliberately cooking inside it - whether they're made from a plastic/synthetic material or old-school canvas none of them will survive prolonged exposure to heat as you would get with cooking; you might get away with a griddle/burner against an open side but if you are wanting to BBQ then at the very least you need to expect smoke damage and low-level melting no matter what brand you choose.
This not entirely true. I can think of many hot food workers who routinely use pop up stalls. Indeed I spent a not altogether comfortable hour or two trying to help some novice Belgian Waffle workers sort themselves out at an event a few years ago when a gale blew up. I'm not saying I'd recommend it - in my view if you want to work hot food you should really have a trailer but in some sites they aren't allowed especially town centres. I certainly wouldn't want a BBQ in one but bain maries, hotplates and the like are frequently seen. For preference in these circumstances though I'd use a Zapp Umbrella. You just have to go to a good UK based stall manufacturer and tell them exactly what you want and what you want to do and if they expressly tell you not to use it for hot food darned well don't. The key thing to remember is that no temporary structure is designed as a refuge. The big problem with the waffle workers was that despite my instructions they would not take the side sheets off and lower the stall to half its height then get the hell out of it. When pop ups first came out there were some very dubious claims made for wind resistance - these days the firm is quite likely to say not for use in extreme weather conditions. In actual fact with the side sheets on things can get quite hairy in quite low winds and even if the things stays put the stresses can do serious damage to cheap imported frames. For endurance start with the Tectonics Fast Frame and work down...Incidentally Tectonics do guarantee performance to BS7837
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Buy a UK made product look at City B, Instant of Camelford are two excellent suppliers.
Rock n Roll touring vs H&S
in Safety
Posted
The report mentions fatigue and or low blood sugar but it is obvious that the real cause is too much automation - again. The incident resulted from an on board computerised control system rebooting itself after being overloaded by fault messages from the ventilation system on the unit. This prevented some of the doors from opening The attendant - you cannot really call him a driver on the Jubilee - in confusion about what to do operated and over-ride switch which switched out his door control buttons. This over-ride switch had no alarm. LUL technicians who designed a system which allowed the train to take power with this door closing over-ride switch operated have a part to play in this.