Bob,
I totally agree, with most of your comments, in your last posting and I don't reckon, that you should be "shot down in flames" for having these opinions!.
The Electrical industry, no matter what country, we are talking about here, carries it's own inherent risks, electricity is like that.
But like you said, to have all of the PPE and still refuse to do the job, definitely sounds like a bad choice of vocation.
Hot-work in itself, takes years of supervised training, if you're not trained in it, leave it alone, this is a totally different animal, compared to dead work.
Just as an aside, with respect to wrong career choice, I once had an Apprentice Line Mechanic, who passed all the Theory tests and so forth, and he was real good with transformer calcs, but I got him to climb a pole one day, he got to the 3rd rung on the ladder and froze, it took me 3/4 of an hour to get him back down, 4ft off the ground.