!!CONTENT WARNINGS FOR DEATH, GUN VIOLENCE, AND GUN THREATS!!
That's the reason management gives when they deny keeping a phone on you during work hours, right? I've worked almost exclusively blue-collar jobs over the course of my professional life and almost all of them have a no phone policy. I mean, they're a distraction! You'll get hurt by the dangerous industrial equipment!
Except…the people who got hurt at my jobs weren't due to phones. And in fact, a few died because they couldn't call for help cause…they didn't have access to any phones.
Example: at the very facility I was working at the time, an employee was crushed to death in a hydraulic wrapping machine a year before. Thing turned on during maintenance, killed the worker. Place was under investigation for 3 other OSHA compliance issues before that happened. But phones…yep. Dangerous.
One of the investigations was unsafe wiring. Have any of you witnessed plugging in something with a really old cord? Like, it's so old and twisted the wiring gets exposed and eventually worn down until the cord is barely connected by a thread? On a small scale, a surprise, but no real harm done.
On an industrial scale? Blinding light, loud-ass pop, fire, and a dangling, active, live-wire. Pretty sure that happens due to negligence over a long period of time. Not an employee texting someone. But what do I know? I'm an entitled millennial.
Same place had big-ass machines that, as part of their function got REAL HOT to melt material to squeeze into molds. Sometimes, the material would ooze out into the red-hot labyrinth of pipes in these machines and catch fire. And by sometimes I meant daily. And by daily, I mean multiple times a day. It was such a regular occurrence that there was a designated area for empty fire extinguishers that was perpetually full.
That's not too bad! The business is prepared for such an occurence. They did their due diligence and invested in fire suppression! So if one day, oh, I don't know, a 10-foot plume erupted out of a machine, and your coworkers don't react to the fire because they're desensitized, and the fire alarm takes approximately 5 minutes to trigger, and nobody is leaving despite a nearly 600,000 square foot building is filling up with smoke, you could get hurt if you're jamming out to Britney on your phone!
How's about another place?
My previous job had similar phone policies. None of them on the work floor. Different location had a mass shooting the previous year and nobody could call for help because they didn't have the ability to. Many injured, too many dead. You'd think the company would change policies so employees can have their phones on hand if that happened again, right?
Well…kind of.
You were still not allowed a phone on the work floor EXCEPT if you had a permit that indicated you were the caretaker of a sick family member. There were other reasons that were allowed, but only if a manager deemed it reasonable…or if the manager ISN'T targeting you because you're making them do their job by reporting to them a violently unstable coworker who threatened to shoot up the building 3 times because you were transgender in his vicinity. Blah blah blah, no phones, you get it.
TL;DR: No-phone policies are bullshit, and corporations opt to enforce them under the guise of “safety” because it's cheaper to deny a necessary tool to employees instead of investing in safer equipment, safer policies, a change in work policies.