Health & Safety at A Manufacturing Company

Health & Safety at a Manufacturing Company

Executive Summary

Integration of occupational health and safety matters into environmental management systems can bring many benefits to industrial companies. They can avoid duplicated measures and find optimal solutions, because the principles of prevention are similar in environmental protection and safety management. However, the methods currently used in environmental management and engineering such as life-cycle assessments, best available technology reports, and the models of industrial production can hinder this integration, because they take into account occupational risks only to a limited extent. People can also consider occupational safety risks more easily than environmental risks as a natural part of their work. This can lead to the situation where occupational risks are underestimated.

Health & Safety at a Manufacturing Company

Introduction

There are a number of organizational factors known to be related to fewer workplace injuries, and that arguably depend on managerial practices and attitudes. Workforce empowerment, encouragement of long-term commitment of workforce, and good management -employee relations are deemed essential because each of these components was consistently found to be related to lower injury rates. Factors specifically pertaining to OHS were also related to lower injury rates across investigations and included: delegation of safety activities, an active role of top management in OHS and the safety training of workers.

More recent work has substantiated the crucial role of management attitude and commitment, and in some cases has identified additional OHS-specific factors. Park and Butler (2000) reported that both an active role of top management in OHS issues and the inclusion of workers in decision-making were significantly associated with lower injury rates. In other studies, workplaces which were found to use employee involvement teams, those which conducted internal safety audits (Havlovic and McShane, 2000) and those which provided feedback regarding OHS (Gershon et al., 2000) all experienced lower injury rates. Vredenburgh (2002) found that proactive OHS management practices reliably predicted lower injury rates. These findings are particularly relevant to large and even moderately-sized organizational firms in Ontario (i.e., greater than 20 FTE employees) because legislation enacted in 1978 required these companies to have JHSCs, which should have led to collaborative efforts by management and labour to improve OHS performance.

Nevertheless, there are some organizational factors that were not consistently related to OHS performance, and should be highlighted. Gershon et al. (2000) found evidence supporting the relation between safety training and lower injury rates, while Wood et al. (2000) found a relationship with higher injury rates. Record keeping, such as the documenting of near misses, was also found to be related to injury rate, although the direction of the association is not clear—in one case negatively related (Hinze, 2000) and in another positively related (Vredenburgh, 2002) to injury rates. The training of employees and the recording of incidents are tasks that help to prevent workplace injuries, yet these are probably the same activities that have been upgraded or enhanced in 'high-injury' sites as a way to control poor safety ...