Keeping Workers Safe and Healthy

Is your company doing all it can to keep workers safe and healthy?

Is this government speak. With wording like this "doing all it can" and "to keep workers safe and healthy".

Doing all it can, with in fiscally reason? to eliminate all risk? or reduce it to an acceptable risk? and to what extent of safe and healthy, and to who's definition of safe or healthy, the company, the workers, the government.

This is just smoke be blown. with the economic crisis with high unemployment, do you really think the they (the government, or current administration) well give this department the teeth needed to shut down a company and lay off its employees.

They may use a company as a sacrifice goat, such as the coal company in West Virginia, because of the media attention. But its not wide spread, there will be appeals, and reductions in fines, and more government spending.

As far as programs, I would say the typical requirements, electrical cord, ladders MSDS sheets, and anything else a insurance audit may turn up. Would be an average and typical for any small business.

Doing all it can, with in fiscally reason? to eliminate all risk? or reduce it to an acceptable risk? and to what extent of safe and healthy, and to who's definition of safe or healthy, the company, the workers, the government.

In california the arbiter would be the workmens comp insurance carrier

I worked in food plants for more than a few years, where there was also the food safety requirements. The incident at jack in the box [& others] drove many new programs. Most notable HACCP [hazard analysis critical control points] Then 9/11 increased food security & the awareness of the need to secure the ingredients. any facility that used meat products also falls under the jurisdiction of USDA.

There were monthly safety inspections by teams from a cross section of the employees on all 3 shifts

there are mandatory[calosha requirement] monthly safety meetings, which on the surface sound like bullshine, but actually did serve as a jumping off point for discussions of safety & usually seemed to hit on topics of relevance.

There were weekly food safety inspections by management teams, which resembled conga lines with maintenance guys being slung off & rejoining as the line proceeded.

We had 300 employees & in 12+years had never had a representative of calosha or osha on site. That did change after a outside contractor was killed working on a dockplate, he failed to block it up while changing a spring & was decapitated.

I would say the more directly safety is driven by the bottom line the more effective it is. It does get tricky to try to quantify it to the hourly employees

& I've seen lots of different schemes, but how many coffee cups, t-shirts & caps do I need to me the best is money or food. My running joke was "if you get hurt, we'll have to kill you" The definition of lost time doesn't include death, as since you're dead, you don't work for the company any more do you?

How would you design an effective safety program?

Food safety falls under a different standards such as sanitation, the Federal department for this is USDA or 3A In CA it would more than likely be FDA depending on the USDA inspectors discretion, and the states which in CA is CFDA which is rarely used or that matter respected. my experience is its FDA, but don't put them together, the regulation and specs counter-dict each other. Like any other government agency.

p911

you would think that was true, no meat on usda...

had a friend in a tomato packing plant, same deal no usda

FDA same thing never saw em

independant inspectors from our customers you bet

we were also running an ISO type organizational structure under the umbrella of the american institute of baking [AIB].

I was on the construction site of a commercial building last week, there were plenty of violations, the company appeared to be set up to fold up should anything go wrong & they were to be sued

getting off on a string, but OSHA is no different in operating that any other government agency. So I'm leaving it on-topic

Earlier in my career, I had designed a pasteurizer to be installed in CA. looked into CFDA specifications, built it under USDA-3A Specs. The USDA-3A New equipment inspector rejected it. Had a phone conversation with him, asking about the issues, his responses was nowhere in the USDA-3A book, I asked where are you getting these violations from, his response was FDA,

FDA? my reply, you do not use USDA-3A? His reply was of course not, fix it.

I learn a valuable lesson there, and that is to get in contact with all local authorities and question and never assume.

the company appeared to be set up to fold up should anything go wrong & they were to be sued

those fly by night can be a risk. sometimes I think its the structure of the business model set up, usually (I said usually, not always) from a head guy that no longer works there? Which basically painted the company into a corner. Left them no other exit plan, to deal with adversity.

p911

SHARP 2008

http://www.osha.gov/dcsp/smallbusiness/sharp.html

I would really like to see some statistics on how many accidents OSHA rules have actually prevented. I once worked in a plant where they company was fined because the hand rails were at the wrong height (I don't remember if they were too high or two low), while the inspectors totally ignored a large rotating machine that was unshielded (of course, there was a yellow stripe painted on the floor around it, which was all the inspectors were concerned about). That particular plant had never had an injury resulting from the handrails being the wrong height, but there had been serious (life-threatening) injuries resulting from employee inattention in the vicinity of the rotating equipment...

I was at a shipyard in the 90's where OSHA fined us over 2 million for safety issues. elec. cords on the floor, ladders not tied down. our company challenged them and it was brought down to I think about $11,000.00.

What was told is OSHA had shut down and put a company out of business. they (OSHA) got a lot of heat from the administration. so it was pretty much postulating.

Our company did have one death in 40 years, an investigation found a temp employee removed the safety barriers, and that employee fell.

But we did have accidents, but I felt very confident it was a safe yard.....1000 people even at the size, we knew each other at one point in our lives, even in upper management. (high school sports and such)

p911

OSHA has limited rules and regulations. It goes by the idea that if an employer see some thing that may cause harm to his employees then he should do something to correct it.

I don't know of any statistics on what any of the regulation that they have imposed are. One regulation that I know of that has reduced harm. Is the limiting of air pressure from a blow off gun to 30 psi. Before this limitation there where numerous incidents where air was injected though the skin and into the blood stream. Or damaged ear drums or eyes from employees using them to blow off their clothes. This regulation came from statistics of damages done by the blow off guns. I guess it could be correlated into how may then prevented. The height set for handrails is so the upper body mass of the average person is not above it. So when tripping or falling against it the body does not roll over it.

As far as the painted line is concerned they saw a warning sign on the floor to indicate moving equipment and the boundary in which it moves. The employer has noted an area that is a hazard an warn the employees of it with the lines. If in OHSA estimate do numerous accidents from the machine or similar equipment then they would push to have other safety devices installed. Like a light curtain or barrier. Some times OHSA will make these recommendations to the employer. They may have done so at that location. They will not enforce it unless there has been accidents in which the employer is deem at fault.

Even with the best of safety devices in place you can not prevent accidents do to the employees inattention. They have to bare some of the responsibility for their own safety.

OSHA, and in fact all regulatory agencies, ultimately result in allowing the individual to ignore his own responsibilities. 2It?not my fault I did something dumb!" attitude ultimately winds up in people of questionable intellectual capacity winning judicial awards from McDonald's, because they served the coffee "too hot"- never mind she was trying to drive and supporting the coffee in the wrong place...

By the same token, an OSHA inspection does not absolve management or employees from personal responsibility for their own actions. OSHA has done one thing very, very well, and that is raised an awareness of safety-related issues in the work place. But, I suspect, the unions and conscientious management has done considerably more to save lives and prevent energy than any OSHA rule...

yes such as a safety committes and such.

It's in the employers best interests to keep its employees healthy, the added dividends is; more productivity, less insurance premiums. fewer lost hours due to injury.

IMO, I would also add, making the facility a smoke free environment also be an advantage.

p911

That is how EU works. Note that safety there is a serious discipline: each company has to have a Safety Service Head.

(backed with a service if necessary) (qualification Level 1 or 2 resp. for high risk units, or lower risks or 1 starting from 50 employees or more - this is a 3 year course at the university, on top of a engineering degree).

They work together with the committees for risk assessment, evaluation and remedying the detected safety issues.

Safety starts in the company..... a institution similar to Osha - collects all the risks and accidents cases within a legal time frame, inspects work places and provides recommendations, to be implemented in laws.

Do I read it right? Is Osha, detective, police and executioner? IMO, That is no democratic principle but one of a police - state

In th EU who pays when there is an accident?

I can say that here in california, the the workers compensation insurance company pay the claims of the injured workers, that are over & above lost time, lost time is covered by the disability [state] program for the 1st year out of a fund that both the employee & employer contribute to. Disability also covers lost time from illness or causes other than workplace injury.

The workmans comp insurance company, would do an assessment twice per year, going over the records & doing an inspection. During the course of the assessment they would make "recommendations" failure to follow the recommendations result in increased premiums.

The absurdity of the recommendations depended on the inspector

Is a similar situation. Only with intensional "wrongdoing" the employer can be hold responsible too, even partially.

Follow up of the recommendations may/or may not imply a lower insurance cost.

All together it is in the employer's benefit to create a safe and healthy work space and the cost of a safety engineer or expert is common for all the companies.

A good safety department however can bring down unnecessary costs of material and physical damage.

Besides the EC norm, the Head of Safety implements extra requirements to the machine supplier if he does consider the goods "not safe enough". He needs to make reports and also produce a risk assignment before ordering to the Safety Committee, that consists of "elected members" by the work force. These elected people have a strong legal protection - not easy and very expensive to let go. In Europe there is a Safety Inspection, a service of the ministry of Labor, that can act. However only the Labor Court can verdict.

The committees have also a strong work union character and the election number is related to the members' participation or representation of each of the different unions.

Like Liberals, Christian, Socialists, to name some.

Do I read it right? Is Osha, detective, police and executioner? IMO, That is no democratic principle but one of a police - state

Yes....as the political wind blows.

OSHA will do;

Detective:

1.) spot inspections,

Police:

2.) issue citations, where the company can challenge them, and if their are fines, the fines are reduced.

Executioner:

3.) if they go too far, and actually shut the company down, OSHA got back lash from the administration for putting people out of a job.

Here's one from the Clinton Administration and this was were the administration was very much involved, never really found out if the labor department was trying to make a statement of the company, and forcing something onto the company, or if the company actually had problems. Its very hard to determine if good sound safety procedures were in place, or if it was too light, or not being followed.

The Clinton administration tried to put a positive spin on it, afterwards they did not stick their nose in those kind of things again, they did have red faces because they never expected the plant to shut down.

I myself think that safety issues should be determined by people who know, which is a committee from inside the company, and not from a politician who's intelligence challenged and is unfamiliar with what safety actually is.

p911

Thank you for the post and research.

There are also times that the employer is only trying to cover their butts [CYA]

go to a safety meeting sign a paper saying

"technicians may not work in live electrical panels"

which makes troubleshooting impossible

or the ever popular

all employees must where steel toed boots

but it's ok for a secretary to wander through the production area in her spike heels as long as she stays between the lines.