Rules are so easy to make that safety offices are often accused of being a “Rule Mill” because they continuously produce their rule-of-the month. Why do we create so many rules? One particular cog in our mill that causes us to create rules is incidents. When we suffer an incident, we want to throw every tool in the arsenal to keep it from happening again.
Class action lawsuits regarding reproductive health rights were recently filed against Walmart, the U.S.’s largest private employer, in Illinois, New York and Wisconsin. Many other employers such as Amazon, Merck and Novartis face similar lawsuits, too, relating to pregnancy discrimination, failure to provide reasonable accommodations and violations of EEOC rules.
The American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), the world’s oldest professional safety organization, has launched a biweekly Safety Standards and Tech Pubs Podcast to help occupational safety and health professionals stay informed of industry consensus standards and technical publications.
In a recent safety excellence workshop, our firm facilitated a brainstorming exercise with a group of safety professionals interested in solving a particular problem they were experiencing in their safety journey. Their safety process was boring them to tears and they worried it would grow stale and become irrelevant with the workforce.
ACGIH® is pleased to announce new members for its 2019 Board of Directors and its 2019 Nominating Committee. ACGIH®’s membership elected three (3) members to serve as Directors on the Board of Directors.
ACGIH® announced today that its Members approved an amendment to the organization’s Bylaws. An overwhelming 95% of eligible voting members voted to approve the amendment. The amended Bylaws will take effect January 1, 2019.
Just by putting “Congo miners” in the title here will have most readers flipping to the next page. I learned this lesson years ago writing an article about workplace safety, or the lack thereof, in China. “Why did you write this article?” asked a reader. “I don’t read ISHN for articles about China.” Another reader opined: “Everybody knows nobody values life in a country like China.”
Twenty-five years ago, as a young safety professional, I struggled to find a set of leadership practices I could call my own. In 1996, I wrote about many of the leadership practices I was already using but found more clearly established in Servant Leadership (Sarkus, 1996).
The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA®) and OSHAhave renewed a partnership aimed at fostering safer and more healthful American workplaces. Through the alliance, the two organizations will pursue the following national priorities, among others: young worker health and safety; temporary workers; workplace hazards within emerging industries; disaster preparedness, response and recovery; and opioids in the workplace.
Simply stated, process safety is a management system implemented to prevent major incidents involving hazardous materials. It is necessary for managing complex process operations. An effective process safety management system focuses on three important aspects of your business: