According to the U.S. Department of Labor, injuries to hands accounted for nearly 25 percent of all lost-time industrial injuries - a total of 110,000 annually. Seventy percent of those injuries resulted when an employee was not wearing safety gloves, while the other 30 percent of hand injuries occurred while an employee was wearing the wrong kind of gloves.
Hand injuries are preventable. Protective gloves, like any safety product, must be selected properly for the specific application. To do so, first determine the scope of the work, and next, identify any potential hazards within that scope that may injure employees’ hands. Protective gloves tend to be less effective than other control measures, but if avoiding contact is impractical or is not enough to protect employees then gloves are needed.