The platform economy is a conventional term used to describe enterprises, individuals and Internet platforms, cooperating with each other under a business model in which the platforms act as intermediaries between remaining two parties that are suppliers and recipients of specific goods. The article discusses the part of this economy that includes platforms intermediating in the provision of services against payment. The characteristics of the platform economy, which have an impact on the health and safety at work of workers providing services, were identified and the nature of this impact was characterized. It was found that the work organization in the platform economy has a negative impact on the health and safety, causing new hazards or increasing the risk associated with the existing ones. It is postulated to continue and deepen research on OSH in the platform economy in order to identify sources of hazards and develop preventive measures in the form of legal and organizational solutions.

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0014.8051

The second part of the article is based on analysis of committed suicides, including self-destructions of the people connected with sea who killed themselves on land. Additionally, the author pays attention at sham suicides (most frequently homicides) and suicides prima facie (in fact seamen’s desperate jumps overboard). The text is finished by recapitulation in which the author tries to formulate some conclusions. 

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0014.8052

Textile elements, including mainly ropes and webbings of different designs, made of various raw materials, are used in personal equipment protecting against falls from a height. The examples of such equipment are horizontal and vertical anchor lines, self-locking devices on a flexible anchor lines, textile energy absorbers, lanyards, etc. Particular attention should be paid to the components of such equipment containing fibre ropes of up to several dozen meters length, due to their impact on the course of the fall arrest. In the case of equipment used in sports and recreation, but also in industrial conditions, e.g. in arboristics, the use of ropes is often associated with the formation of knots. Due to the impact of such structures on human safety, a study of the mechanical parameters of fibre ropes with knots of different types was undertaken in CIOP-PIB in 2020.

The paper presents tests of fibre ropes of different design in terms of knotability ratio. Parameter K, as determined in these tests, refers to the certainty of tying a knot on a fibre rope, i.e. the impossibility of its self-loosening. Dynamic studies of the performance of fibre ropes ending in loops with three types of knots are presented. The results showed that rope endings in the form of a loop with a knot absorb significantly more kinetic energy than a straight section of a fibre rope when arresting a fall from a height. Studies of the effect of knots on the breaking force of fibre ropes were also presented. The results indicate that the breaking force in the case of a loop with a knot can be e.g. 50% lower than that characterizing the straight section of the rope on which it was formed.

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0014.8053