GLAD 2026
and technical guidance. Our vision is of lifting and height-safety industries that have eliminated accidents, injuries and fatalities and our mission is to educate, influence and enable so that best practice becomes everyday action. Global Lifting Awareness Day is our flagship annual
awareness campaign and 2026 marks its seventh staging, on Thursday 2 July. GLAD exists to bring the whole supply chain together, manufacturers, suppliers and end users, around a single day that promotes safe, high-quality lifting, with activity bound together online by the hashtag #GLAD2026. Each year we use the day to focus industry attention on a specific, live challenge and to leave people with a meaningful, practical takeaway. As I’ve said in the run-up to this year’s day, GLAD stands on firm footings in its purpose to raise awareness about the challenges facing lifting industries across the world. Whether that message is about skills shortages and shaping tomorrow’s workforce, or reminding industry that not all lifting equipment is created equal, if we can leave the industry with a meaningful takeaway, it gives greater meaning to the everyday efforts of our members and end users.
How has GLAD helped the industry over the years? GLAD’s real value is visibility. It gives the industry a moment, and a reason, to talk openly about things that too often go unspoken, from workforce and skills,
through to product quality, documentation and safe working practice. It turns everyday professionalism into shared stories, and it lets a very technical point, a marking, a certificate, a sling configuration, reach a far wider audience than it otherwise would. Each year’s theme has put a spotlight on a genuine industry challenge and pushed practical guidance out to the people who need it. Over successive campaigns that has helped normalise conversations about competence, quality and accountability across the supply chain, not as compliance box-ticking, but as a shared professional responsibility. GLAD has become a recognised fixture that members build their own activity around, which multiplies the reach of the message well beyond anything LEEA could achieve alone.
What does this year’s theme, ‘Not all lifting equipment is created equal’, mean? It means exactly what it says. Two products can carry the same headline rating and look interchangeable, yet be engineered for very different duties, environments and service lives. The differences aren’t always visible, and they’re not always clear from the documentation. The most consequential decision in a lifting operation is often made weeks before the lift itself, at the point of purchase: what was specified, what documentation came with it and whether the person buying it had the information to make the right call. When that decision is made in an information vacuum,
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While two products may appear to be the same, they could be engineered for very different duties.
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