Search Results for: occupational

Sorting by relevance. Sort by date.

Safety Professionals and Social Safety

Many OHS professionals however come from academic, or office or technical backgrounds, who have mostly experienced industrial relations as barriers to the sensible safety control measures they recommend. Frequently union and employee stances don’t make OHS sense but they make perfectly sound IR sense. It is this dichotomy that is behind those safety professionals and employers who accuse unions of “using” OHS to further industrial relations ends.

Login or subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.

Accountability for industrial accidents in Malaysia

This last week, the New Strait Times reported on an initiative by the Malaysian government to increase companies’ responsibility for workplace safety by making “professionals” “responsible for accidents in the workplace”.

It may be a terminological argument about whether safety professionals or risk managers or company directors are to be held personally responsible for safety infringements and incidents

Is health promotion a workplace safety matter?

I have undertaken work for companies that promote wellness and good health in workplaces.  The companies provide health assessments for various conditions, health advice, fitness services and assessments, and a redesigned staff canteen for healthier food.  All of these initiatives are worthwhile but have not been embraced by the wider workplace safety sector....

Login or subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.

OHS Frustrations and Lobbying

There is a minor professional debate developing amongst Australian safety practitioners on whether occupational health and safety should sit under a government’s industrial relations portfolio or health. In Australia it is in industrial relations, the US has it under the Centre for Disease Control and NIOSH, the UK has OHS more under IR than elsewhere but it has at least expanded OHS to include biological hazards.

OHS and Climate Change

Many of my OHS colleagues have responsibility for environmental safety, some to the extent of being rebadged HSE or OHSE. I have been an ardent advocate of managing business safety and risk issues in a coordinated and integrated manner. Historically, I would have applied the risk management standard as the umbrella framework, others do not.

Is OHS a Joke?

Recently, occupational health and safety (OHS) has been given a “bad press” in the electronic media in Australia with many examples of how an activity or behaviour has been stopped or excluded on the “unreasonable” grounds of OHS.

Drug use in transport workplaces

There is a continuing and contentious parallel between road safety and occupational safety. OHS specialists are worsening this problem by trying to illustrate OHS issues in relation to road safety because road safety is seen to be more easily understandable by the public.

But this approach confuses the public more than enlightens, and it also puts workplace safety in a difficult context