Miller workers in row over wrong colour hard hats

Workers from Miller Construction were ordered-off part of a £250m shopping centre yesterday for wearing the wrong coloured hard hats.

Miller is main contractor on the Union Square project in Aberdeen which borders the city’s main railway station.

A Miller crew was kitted-out with standard issue white hard hats. But the headgear fell foul of Network Rail demands that workers without track safety certificates must wear blue hats near the tracks.

A Network Rail official made a complaint about the gangs’ gear and they were redeployed on another part of the site for several hours while a batch of blue hard hats was ordered.

A spokesperson for Miller Construction said: "Network Rail recently introduced new health and safety rules stipulating that all contractors working on the railway lines should wear a blue hard hat.  Since our works in Aberdeen station are in a sectioned off secure area away from the tracks and we are not working directly on the rail line, we were led to believe that white hard hats were acceptable.

"Subsequently, we were asked to comply with the blue hard hat rule, which we were of course happy to do.  We are committed to adhering to all health and safety rules and regulations and for a short period of time on Tuesday 2 September, we redeployed a small number of workers from the train station in Aberdeen to other areas of the site while we dispatched the new PPE (personal protective equipment) required.  Works within the station were resumed within a matter of hours.

"We would like to stress that this will not cause any delays which will impact on our scheduled completion date of autumn 2009."