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Reasons to Wear High Visibility Clothing at Work

High-visibility clothing is a type of personal protective equipment. It is worn by people who work in areas where there are moving vehicles, like airports, road construction, and accident sites. In addition to vests, there are hi-vis long-sleeve shirts, T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, pants, and rain gear available to keep you safe. Here are some reasons to wear high visibility clothing at work.

Industry Standards

OSHA and the FHA have standards for high visibility apparel. The industry standard is called the American National Standard for High Visibility Safety Apparel and Headwear. There are three main areas that are addressed.

The first is the background material that must be a certain color and have certain characteristics. Acceptable colors are red, red-orange, or lime. The material must be resistant to tearing, fading and shrinking. Most high visibility clothing is made of polyester or nylon.

Secondly, the apparel must incorporate reflective material, which is usually in the form of stripes. They must reflect very well and be durable in all weather conditions. Colors used are silver, red, orange, and lime.

The third characteristic is the design of the clothing. Each type of clothing is required to have a certain amount of background material and reflective material. All types are required to have reflective material that totally surrounds the torso.

Reduce Accidents From Moving Vehicles

Visibility is important when moving vehicles are around. That includes occupations like traffic police, factory worker, paramedic, fire fighter, construction worker, or road worker. It is crucial that the operator of any moving vehicle can see you so he or she can avoid hitting you. The type of protective clothing you wear will depend on the amount of light at your work site.

Protects in Adverse Weather

High visibility clothing not only protects workers during the daytime and nighttime, but during different types of weather. For people that work outdoors, high visibility clothing will help drivers see them if there is snow, fog, or dusty weather.

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How High-visibility Took Over Britain

Since arriving in Britain almost five decades ago, high-visibility jackets have become inescapable. Is this a blessing or a curse?

It is impossible to ignore – and that’s the very point.

Bright, synthetic and, above all, cheap, the ubiquity of high-visibility clothing means that it surely symbolises the Britain of 2010s in the same way that miniskirts summed up the 1960s.

In the past, “high-vis” was associated with hazardous occupations – the emergency services as well as road and rail maintenance workers. Now it is just as likely to adorn security guards, cyclists, car park attendants and joggers – an all-purpose symbol of both authority and safety-first caution.

Kent County Council is the latest authority to promote its use, heralding its 120 “walking buses” in which children make their way to school together on foot clad in high-visibility gear. UK workwear specialists Red Oak Direct say sales of its high-visibility gear rose 22% in 2008/9 and 26% in 2009/10.

To critics, it symbolises everything that is wrong about mollycoddled, risk-averse, health-and-safety-obsessed modern Britain.

But enthusiasts point to its success in reducing traffic accidents and making the jobs of thousands of workers much safer.

What is perhaps most significant, however, is the manner in which this mass-produced garment, available from pound shops the length and breadth of the country, has come to lend its wearers the mantle of officialdom, licensed to give orders by virtue of their outerwear.

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Do Your Workers Need High-Visibility Apparel?

If your company is not following ANSI 107-1999, your employees may not be as safe as you think.

Fred Rasmussen was convinced that road construction workers with the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LDOT) wore vests that made them highly visible to oncoming traffic. “We had what we thought was a pretty good vest,” said the director of safety for LDOT since the early 1990s.

Yet, as with many companies and government entities across the country that have workers in a variety of low-visibility conditions, LDOT’s workers were not as noticeable as they could be to oncoming traffic. Rasmussen realized, after a visibility study was done, that workers’ vests were not conspicuous from all angles.

“Problems associated with vests were monumental. If a worker was viewed from the side, his visibility was lost completely. He just didn’t show up,” he said. “There had to be a better way.”

Rasmussen visited Europe in March 1999 and was impressed by the type of high-visibility clothing worn by road construction workers. Their clothing contrasted with their work zone’s background and was clearly recognizable to drivers at any angle.

Many of the requirements in the European EN 471 standard were adopted three months later in the United States as part of the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) approval of a voluntary standard for high-visibility apparel.

A Standard Solution

Before there was a national standard, U.S. companies had few guidelines for determining the best design, performance specifications and use of high-visibility apparel for their work sites. What guidelines existed dealt mainly with flaggers, such as the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and OSHA’s construction standard on signaling, which states in 29 CFR 1926.201(a)(4) that “flagmen shall be provided with and shall wear a red or orange warning garment while flagging. Warning garments worn at night shall be of reflectorized material.”

Because there was not a nationwide consensus for how to achieve high-visibility safety, injuries and fatalities continued to be a problem at road construction sites. In 1998, for example, 104 workers were killed in work zones. The concern likely will grow because road construction sites are expected to increase in number by 66 percent over the next six years. The issue was serious enough to prompt OSHA in April to launch hundreds of targeted inspections of road construction zones in Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio.

With the International Safety Equipment Association (ISEA) serving as secretariat, the American National Standard for High-Visibility Apparel (ANSI/ISEA 107-1999) was approved June 1, 1999. The standard provides guidelines not only for road construction employees, but also railway and utility workers, law enforcement and emergency response personnel, survey and airport ground crews, and others routinely exposed to hazards of low visibility. High-visibility garments are available in vests, jackets, coveralls, rainwear and harnesses.

The voluntary standard is in response to concerns that U.S. workers exposed to low-visibility hazards are not wearing appropriate apparel. As a result, these workers face hazards of being struck by vehicles and other types of moving equipment stemming from the inability of others, including fellow workers, to see them.

“There is a real need to protect people who work in situations that make it difficult to be seen,” said Janice Comer Bradley, CSP, ISEA’s technical director. “Low-visibility hazards are an even greater risk where there are complex backgrounds, as found in many occupations such as working on foot in close proximity to construction equipment and vehicle roadway traffic. Vehicle operators cannot recognize a worker who is wearing inadequate or nonenhanced-visibility clothing in sufficient time to avoid an accident.”