Hi Dan

As you've already stated forklift training is the law in Australia. And you know I'm passionate about forklift safety, so I'll go further with my comments:

Does that mean companies who wish to employ people to drive forklifts ask for people to have licences. In my observation generally yes.

Does that mean companies strongly enforce with all their employees that to drive a forklift they need to have a licence. In my observation in many medium to large companies this is enforced strongly. But in less forklift safety aware companies I get the impression it is not unusual to find unlicenced people driving forklifts.

Does that mean companies train their licenced forklift drivers in the particular issues and risks associated with that business and work site and their forklifts. In my observation generally no even though most training is done on counterbnalance forklifts with capacities from 1500 kg - 2500 kg (3000 lb - 5000 lb).

Is the training effective at the basic levels? If you take the most basic requirement to know the weight of the load you about to lift and to know the capacity of your forklift, and to make sure the forklift can safely lift the load, then my answer is definitely NO! I've only come across a handful of forklift operators who know their forklifts capacity and the heaviest loads commonly lifted on site (and that's out of hundreds of operators). Along with this are the unreadable load plates (reasonably common), the missing load plates (rare), the load plates under clipboards or that have had stickers stuck to them (very common), the load plates that do not have ratings for for the attachments used with that forklift (common).

And then there's all the pallets that don't have a weight on them including inwards and outwards goods - and in process pallets rarely have weights.

In summary most drivers don't do these basic checks and often can't do them because they don't have the information.

And whenever I do refresher training I find that drivers have developed bad habits - the most common being raising the load during travel and just before turning to line up with racks - load typically will be at 1.5 - 2.0 metres by the time they are at 90 degrees to the rack.

You'll get the idea - basically while training is compulsory here it has a very limited impact on forklift safety