Safety management legal obligations

There may also be legal obligations associated with the review results. A properly administered process safety management program will help minimize legal exposures. All recommendations produced by the study should be circulated in draft form to all interested parties within the company. The report should be consistent with other hazard assessment reports, and there should be a follow up procedure to manage recommendations in a timely and effective manner. All steps in the process should fully document the resolution path for each recommendation. 

Safety accountability is when a manager is under obligation to ensure that safety responsibility and authority is used to achieve both safety and legal safety standards. Employees too have safety accountabilities in proportion to their safety authority. 

Consistent with the obligation to ensure that compliance remains in the workplace (and not with Government) new performance based standards require hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control. Such activities are basic and necessary to a functional system of safety management, but the requirement introduces a subjective element into the process which continues to cause problems and disputes as to whether what has been done complies with the legal requirement (Dell, 2001). 

Fulfilling these legal and ethical obligations requires that safety risks be identified, quantified and managed accordingly. The crucial question will be whether there was a failure of management (for all stakeholders) to provide for safety. In terms of criminal liability, all companies will have to look very carefully at their safety management systems. 

The text has been written primarily for the student. However, a great deal of the content is directly relevant to the day-to-day work of practising managers. It will enable them to understand their safety obligations, both legal and moral, and to appreciate some of the techniques by which a high standard of safe working can be achieved. It will also provide an extensive source of reference for established safety advisers. 

Managers need to get the big picture. They need to understand safety as a profit center activity, and how to effectively support the safety system. They should receive education about the legal, fiscal, and moral obligations they have, as managers and leaders, to the law, stakeholders, and society at large. 

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