Management/employee relations requirements

Writing a health and safety policy statement is more than just a legal requirement - it is your commitment to planning and managing health and safety. It is the key to achieving acceptable standards, reducing accidents and cases of work-related ill health and it shows your employees that you care for their health and safety. 

One of the best ways to determine that potential is to examine the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), which by law in most jurisdictions must be provided by the manufacturer for any hazardous material used in the workplace and made available to the employees by plant management. The MSDS provides all the information necessary to determine the hazard potential and the requirements for control of any hazardous substance. Still other information can be found in the various guidelines published by the American Industrial Health Association, or by the U.S. National Safety Council, or by NIOSH (the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) or various other national, state, or provincial government bodies. (See Appendix II for information on sources.) Once you have an inventory, of course, you can start relating potential health problems to possible sources in particular areas. Also, in the process of preparing this report, you will begin to build an invaluable library that will stand you in good stead for further consideration of the problems at hand. 

Corporate management systems in the areas of environmental protection, employee protection and consumer protection should be integrated further to avoid a shift in risks and also to save costs. All areas require reliable and systematic data about substance properties and application-related exposure. Mechanisms are also required for effective dialogue along the supply chain as well as between companies and authorities. In addition, the comparative assessment of chemical products (for example, in purchasing or in product development) can only be done intelligently if all essential risk areas are included in the evaluation. 

The GHS is not intended to harmonize risk assessment procedures or risk management decisions (such as establishment of a permissible exposure limit for employee exposure), which generally require some risk assessment in addition to hazard classification. In addition, chemical inventory requirements in various countries are not related to the GHS... 

Once the job-evaluation system is complete, those who will be conducting job antilyses and evaluations will require training, especially those evaluators who come from outside the human resource department. These employees may also need background information on the entire pay system and how it is related to the overall strategies for managing human resources tmd the oiganization s objectives. 

Once hazards have been examined, rated, and ranked by the committee, some plan of action for their control should be developed either by the committee or by company management. The results of the hazards review by the committee tmd the action to be taken should be fed back to employees. Experience using this type of program indicates that for every 100 hazards reported, 1 is very serious, needing immediate action, 24 require attention quickly to avert a potential accident, 50 require some minor action to improve the quality of working conditions but do not concern a serious hazard, and 25 concern gripes and hassles of employees that are not related to safety hazards. 

I conducted workshops on selected incident reports they had sent me. To help the attendees explore the reality of accident causation, they were given copies of the exhibit A Systemic Causation Model for Hazards-Related Incidents shown in Chapter 10. It works as a reference base. The point to be made was this The employees in that entity could do a good job of investigation if management so required. 

---