What’s Global Lifting Awareness Day?

This article explains what Global Lifting Awareness Day is, who’s behind it, and what you can do if you want to get involved.

Global Lifting Awareness Day takes place on July 7, where it will be mostly recognized by social media content alongside the #GLAD2022 hashtag. It is powered by the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association (LEEA), which is established across the world as a trade association for all those involved in the lifting industry. The first staging of the event was in 2020 and it has taken place each year since—making this the third instalment.

The idea can trace its origins to a conversation at a trade exhibition about the challenges facing lifting industries across the world. It is now a widely celebrated day where end users are among those sharing material that promotes safe and high quality load lifting. Supporting organizations of the event include numerous and varied trade associations, journals, and others.

It’s true that there are many awareness concepts out there, ranging in type and duration. Many members of the FAD Equipment Store community recently participated in National Forklift Safety Day, while the National Safety Stand-Down again served to prevent falls in construction earlier in the spring. Your own end-user markets will have similar safety days and weeks, all with specific objectives to galvanize a group of people for collective improvement.

What makes #GLAD2022 standout is that it represents a sector that is very broad, in that lifting is everywhere, yet widely underrated. Think about the products that are relevant to the awareness day on this store: cranes, hoists, rigging gear, force measurement, material handling, etc. Then there’s the multitude of industries where this equipment is applied. And that list is endless: automotive, beverage, construction, demolition, energy, fabrication, gas, height safety, etc. You could probably complete the whole alphabet.

Actually, LEEA have done an alphabet of their own in a cool video that they’re sharing alongside #GLAD2022 content, which lists a word of relevance to the subject that begins with each letter. Here’s what they came up with:

• A: Awareness
• B: Beams
• C: Containers
• D: Development
• E: Environment
• F: Force
• G: Gravity
• H: Height
• I: Inspection
• J: Jobs
• K: Knowledge
• L: LEEA
• M: Machinery
• N: Networking
• O: Offshore
• P: Ports
• Q: Quality
• R: Reliable
• S: Skilled
• T: Training
• U: Understanding
• V: Valued
• W: Working
• X: Two chains making the shape of an X
• Y: Yard
• Z: Zinc

J is for Jobs—and millions are created by lifting across the world.

All of them go hand in hand with lifting, especially Gravity. The battle with gravity is essential to our way of life, and a constant challenge in construction, offshore, oil and gas, manufacturing, and every other sector you can think of. As LEEA says, fighting gravity can be dangerous and getting it wrong can lead to accident, injury, and even fatality. As we work higher, lift heavier, and move more complex loads, our ability to lift safely becomes ever more important.

#GLAD2022 objectives:

• Make sure that end users / customers make well informed purchasing decisions by fully understanding their legal obligations.
• Attract new recruits into the sector through showcasing entrance pathways as well as career opportunities.
• Raise LEEA’s profile with stakeholders and legislators who often forget about the importance of lifting and working at height.
• Celebrate the innovations and remarkable work going on within our industries.

How can you participate?

Anyone with an interest in lifting and working at height can contribute by using the hashtag to empower social media posts, videos, in-person activity, articles, etc. Even if it’s adding the logo to email signatures and reposting social media posts—it helps.

Tower cranes are among the more obvious signs of lifting.

Central to the day is attracting new recruits into the sector through showcasing entrance pathways as well as career opportunities and celebrating the innovations and remarkable work going on within industry. End users, manufacturers, and suppliers of lifting equipment are encouraged to share their content so LEEA can post it on a new, dedicated website—www.globalliftingawarenessday.com—especially if it covers several key topics that the association has outlined:

• Apprenticeships
• Military recruitment
• Diversity
• Sustainability
• Technology / digital

#GLAD2022: on the day

The fun part about an awareness day is the live interaction and story-telling over the 24-hour period, especially as a global event dawns in New Zealand and then crosses the world all the way to California and beyond. But there is an abundance of pre-prepared #GLAD2022 content from an entertainment sector webinar to LEEA’s launch of a new state-of-the-art learner management system. The association’s technical team will issue a video on the triage system and the valuable benefits it brings to their members and the industry.

Search for the #GLAD2022 hashtag on social media.

LEEA will also be launching a new suite of training courses as part of the association’s Academy 2.0 Project. End User Guidance will be the first course to arrive—on #GLAD2022. EUG will be available via LEEA’s website as an open link accessible by all. Also on the day, the Introduction to Lifting Equipment course will be available to LEEA members.

Supporting organizations

There are awareness days for seemingly everything, and some of them are better than others. One of the best ways to judge whether a concept, especially a new one, is worthy of your time, is to look at the cause and those that have agreed it is a good idea to support it. If the cause is a single company’s bottom line and they’re the only ones supporting it, then what’s the point? If on the other hand it is raising consciousness about an important subject and major stakeholders are aligning themselves with it, then it’s obviously a worthy endeavor.

MHI is among #GLAD2022's supporting organizations.

#GLAD2022 is a good example. It’s interesting to note the companies and associations that are backing it, including Associated Wire Rope Fabricators (AWRF), International Powered Access Federation (IPAF), and MHI.

• Whether you buy equipment from FAD Equipment Store or not, join us to promote an industry that saves lives every minute of the day on July 7: #GLAD2022