I Hate Left-Handers or Occupational Health and Safety Training

Abstract

The example of the left-handed person illustrates the insurmountable tension that exists between society—with its enormous, virtually irrepressible power of normalization, standardization, regulation, legislation and imposition, with its collective, imperial, vital and irresistible needs and its inevitability that no one contradicts— and individuals, with what are the most important things in their eyes, often hidden, private, oblique (Denoyel, 1991) and adaptive, with their rights and needs that no one disputes, with ultimately everything that distinguishes and vitalizes them. Accepted, this tension—between the individual and society, private and public order, choice and the norm, organizations and men, women, you and me—promotes health and safety. Denied, this tension begets death. How do you bring individuals and groups to accept such ambiguous rivalries, duality and ambivalence? How do you avoid systematic compartmentalization, which generates accidents and diseases, of opposed yet vital characteristics? How do you avoid divisions and prevent disasters? How, specifically, can technical and vocational education and training (TVET) environments contribute positively?