I absolutely hate the lack of consideration for worker safety at my job. Full disclosure, I will be deleting this in about an hour due to paranoia of it being traced back to me.
I work in hazardous waste disposal. I go to various jobsites in my area and clean out unwanted chemicals and prepare them for disposal. About half of the time I'm cleaning out a university lab when a professor retires, the other half is at warehouses of distribution centers (such as when a chemical gets damaged by warehouse handling). The chemicals I handle are contained (ie: My job is not in spill clean ups or anything like that). My job is to sort the chemicals by hazard class (ie: flammable, acids, bases, toxics, etc) and package them for safe shipment so they can be transported long distances without any realistic risk of any two chemicals that could react together coming into contact with each other.
Today was a warehouse job. It was a 3 day job, with today being the last day as well as my first day on the job since I took a vacation this week. We work at this warehouse fairly regularly. They have a designated area for storage of damaged hazardous chemicals, but are no longer using it. This is because the warehouse is absolutely overrun by inventory at the moment and that area is now blocked off by stuff being stored on the ground rather than on the shelves.
I was not happy with the alternative area we were given. Instead of using that designated area, we were given a semi trailer parked at the dock. The damaged waste we were packing was loaded onto this trailer and we were supposed to sort the waste and pack it within the trailer. We had minimal space on the dock to work with (literally maybe 2 cubic yards). At this particular warehouse, many of the chemicals are in damaged, leaking bottles contained within a spill bag. This is relatively useless for us since in order to know what we're handling we have to rip open the bag in order to look at the bottle (the labels are often unreadable due to being wet and sometimes in foreign languages, but that's somewhat beside the point). The other problem is oftentimes multiple different damaged chemicals are contained within the same bag. I haven't seen this yet with any two things that could react, but it is a possibility. Lastly, the majority of the sorting was done before today, mostly by a new guy who has barely been trained literally knows next to nothing about chemistry.
I didn't like the working conditions given to us at this job because obviously a semi trailer has practically no ventilation. To be fair, most of the chemicals at this site are not necessarily toxic to inhale, but you do occasionally get some that are. As we worked to the back (closed) end of the trailer, there was a noticeable smell. We packaged some stuff up and my co-worker mentioned he heard a sizzling noise (ie: a reaction). I texted my boss to complain about these conditions, he called me to figure out what the problem was, despite him having been on the jobsite the past two days. I explained my issue with it was the poor ventilation while we were handling chemicals. He explained that we were working in those conditions because we were contracted by this company and that was the best the site could offer us. I said that I felt that at a certain point the place we were working at was required to offer us safe conditions to work or else we can't work there. He asked me what I was trying to get at, and if I was telling him I was quitting my job. I said no, that we were basically already finished, and could finish so long as there were no further issues, but in the future the company reps who prepare these jobs for us need to take our safety under more consideration. We ended the phone call with him telling me he didn't want me to have to work under conditions I didn't feel safe with and to call him if there were any further issues with it (I know this was mostly him legally covering our companies ass and definitely got an impression based off tone it would be unpopular if I stopped work). There weren't any issues and we finished the job, but will likely be back there soon.
To be clear, this is not the first time I've been sent to a job that I didn't feel was safe for my level of training, and it's also not the first time I've complained. This has been happening a lot more frequently lately. I definitely get the impression that I'm becoming somewhat of a nuisance to my boss. Is the lack of ventilation today a legitimate issue to be concerned with? Like I said, the stuff we were handling was not super hazardous, and not a ton of it was legitimately a reactive danger. But for example, there was a lot of ammonia and bleach-related compounds, which would obviously be dangerous to inhale if they were somehow mixed, especially in a poorly ventilated area. What can I do if I experience retaliation for expressing these concerns? Obviously they won't fire me for it directly,