A lot of workers don’t wear protective gear. By choice. Nobody to blame but themselves.
Well, it depends on the situation.
If I, a factory owner, offer optional safety equipment that slows workers down a bit, but I also demand such high productivity that corners have to be cut - whose fault is it when the inevitable happens?
What if I, a factory owner, provide optional basic safety equipment costing $30 per person, but the mask makes the goggles steam up and the boots aren't comfortable? There's better safety equipment available for $300 per person - is it my fault for not buying it?
What if I, a factory owner, happened to start my factory by hiring macho tough guys who don't like wearing a mask, and subsequent hires learn that behaviour from them?
Generally I to listen to the craftspeople I employ on issues of safety because keeping them safe is the whole point of safety. But they and I have a shared responsibility to make sure, if they say the machine is actually safer without the guard, that they're right about that.
I actually worked in such a factory, so this is based on direct experience, and what I saw was people cut corners mostly because they were tired after long shifts, though lack of comfort was also a factor due to the heat.
The employer did try to make everyone wear the gear and had inspections and most people wore most of the stuff most of the time, we even won a safety award at one point for going so long without any OSHA-recordable injury. But we weren't perfect and one day I helped bandage a guy who was airlifted after slicing his arm open in a really bad way, something the kevlar wrist protectors should have stopped.
So I would say that employers do try, to the limit they can, but all accidents happen during gaps. And the employees tend to have their own interests in comfort or cutting corners that sometimes conflict with their safety. More limited shifts and attention to comfort might help, but it's not always clear how to provide that.
You can still have things like the guy who got crushed by his forklift after rushing to dump a hopper of trash by doing something really dangerous while unloading it because he wanted to hurry and finish so he could go to his family for Christmas vacation. And it's not easy to stop that kind of thing, even if you do a lot of warnings and inspections to yell at people who don't do things right and pay attention to close calls.
Go on…
If anything I'd worry more about the temperature of the floor or the number of hours worked, but it's hard when some people had second jobs or what have you.
After all, if you get a minor injury and you know getting treatment will cost your colleagues a $200 bonus, you might keep quiet about it and tough it out to the end of your shift.
To achieve a good culture of safety, you need to make the rewards for safety strong enough to resist the rewards for cutting corners - but you also need to make sure a guy can get a band-aid from the first aid kit or tell his boss about a trip hazard with no disincentives.
There are plenty of people to blame, and there is plenty that can be done. This dumb ass "No regulations needed, free market will take care of itself" is how the rich put the poor or ignorant into early, terrible graves.
There's some small margin of workers who have access to protective gear but don't wear it, but in reality for most workers it's the job of the company to provide it and train workers to use it.
Weirdly enough, that doesn't apply to car mechanics which seem to be dead set on bringing their own tools to work.
I am a nerd and my glasses were falling off from the sweat. I think I was wearing a pair of work boots which may be required. But the guy giving me orders on-site was not my employer. These clients are well-aware that day laborers may not be back tomorrow. So why give us durable safety equipment that costs money? The day labor office is my employer, but they may not be accurately informed about the safety requirements of the client and the site. They may require us to purchase safety equipment at own expense, but if we don't know what the site requires, or how long we will be there, that's an up-front expense we are unwilling to part with.
Day laborers are one step up from the guys hanging out in Home Depot parking lots, whereby they are legal to work in these United States, but can't get a job anywhere else.
So it's a 3-way tug-of-war of vagueness and parsimony, and it always just ends up being nod-nod, wink-wink, do the best you can.
Not saying it's good or right, but there are incentives that push towards it.
You know the when these stores even supply this protective gear, they get the cheapest option that’s still legal.
I was the safety representative at a previous job. Management care a lot about safety and provided everything required, and high quality gear as well. Still people would cut corners and not use the equipment because it was faster not to. These where people paid by the hour, they have zero incentive to work faster. If people work on contact however, it's easy to create an environment where speed is priorities over safety.
Of course they made so because otherwise it would be convenient to the company provide the safety equipment and not enforce their usage, this way getting work done faster (and thus have more profit).
Then they get written up, and eventually fired. Companies need to be stomped on(and are where I live), if they don't do this.
Objectively, it has a very high utility per dollar. Heat resistant, water resistant, knife resistant, stain resistant, etc.
With that mentality we'd still have 1800s lifespans