By NEIL COUPE

Is it my imagination or on a weekly basis does yet another phony culture war break out?

Radio stations and TV stations have actually been set up to stir this very pot. And what a waste of energy this whole thing seems to be.

Two particular items have caught my eye this month. One concerns name badges and the other is to do with a sneering article about construction workers.

Apparently, employees of the Halifax will have name badges with a pronoun (He/him or She/her) added. This is not an issue on which I have a particularly strong opinion on this, but it is a reminder of a simpler time when name badges used to have clues about people’s gender through the use of titles such as Mr, Mrs, or Miss.

As far as I remember, not too many people were offended by this.

Having a preferred pronoun is on obviously important for some people. What is interesting is the over-reaction of people supposedly closing their Halifax accounts in droves because of this, proudly citing the expression ‘Go Woke Go Broke’.

Why are certain people so easily aroused into a fury because a minor change which has zero effect on their day-to-day life? It is a very odd thing to become so exercised by, like objecting to someone’s choice of sauce on their bacon sandwich and launching a campaign against people choosing brown sauce instead of ketchup.

Oh, and good luck to the people supposedly leaving in droves as they attempt to gather the deluge of documentation to open an account somewhere else. Wait until they find out the processes the other banks have to make sure that their angry new customers are not in fact money launderers.

The other much more disturbing attempt at stoking division was an article sneering about the outcome of a survey into construction workers’ mental health.

Construction workers are 3.4 times more likely than other occupations to take their own life.

According to a recent survey, apparently 75% of them actually talk about their feelings and participate on self-care by meditating, reading etc. This was of course dismissed as ‘Builders going woke’ and as something unusual or weird. The undercurrent of course being that big tough working-class men do not worry about mental health issues.

Back in the real world, I work in the construction industry and a few years ago attended a Mental Health First Aid course. This was set up to help to safeguard people’s mental health, where working hours can be long, the tasks physically demanding, and if not done properly can be dangerous. It is nobody’s interests for individuals to be driving enormous cranes, working at the top of tall buildings, or using drills or other dangerous equipment if they are struggling mentally.

In our company the name of the Mental Health First Aider is as prominent as that of the conventional First Aiders and it is no surprise that the Mental Health First Aider has been the busier, very possibly leading indirectly to a lower workload for the physical first aiders, and of course hopefully assisting the employees to be able to deal with the challenges of the day more easily than they would have done without the conversation.

Accidents in the construction industry can be far more serious than simple paper cuts and slipping on a wet floor.

Mental health is of critical importance in the workplace, especially when the tasks undertaken are so unrelentingly demanding. Sneering at people safeguarding themselves and their colleagues is yet another salvo in the increasingly desperate and pathetic culture war.

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