Yesterday’s risk management practices are no longer adequate to deal with today’s threats and they need to evolve. This reasoning drove ISO to revise risk management standard 31000:2009 to 31000:2018.2
Millennials have a reputation for not being intensely loyal to their employers and willing to change jobs quickly – but is that reputation deserved? A couple of researchers who are themselves millennials set out to test negative perceptions about workers born between 1981 and 1996 – and some of their results are surprising.
I’ve never given much thought to pedestrian safety because I’ve never been in harm’s way or seen pedestrians at risk. That’s until two months ago. In February I attended a conference in Houston.
American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) members have decided on the organization’s next roster of leaders, whose terms will begin on July 1. At the top of the list: Rixio Medina, CSP, ASP, CPP, who will become ASSE’s new president for 2018-19, replacing current president Jim Smith, M.S., CSP.
Criminal charges have been dropped against Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA), according to Quebec’s Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP), for causing the deaths of 47 people when 73 cars of highly combustible crude oil derailed in the small Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in 2013 turning the downtown into a raging inferno.
In our previous two columns on this subject, developing an actionable safety plan is covered in three parts. First Actions was explained in Part One (October 2017 ISHN) and Core Actions detailed in Part Two (January 2018 ISHN). The rest of this column focuses on Sustaining Actions.
Why are we still talking and writing about confined space training a quarter century after OSHA issued its confined space standard for general industry in 1993?
Internal audits are a fact of life for many environment, health and safety professionals -- especially those working for large companies. I recently had a discussion with a long-time Phylmar client about internal safety audits. There is a lot of guidance and advice available on how to prepare for such audits and how to create corrective action plans to respond to audit findings.
Recently, I did some health and safety “due diligence” consulting work for a client who wanted to acquire a small, 65-employee business. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with supervisors and employees and touring the facility and was struck by two important findings: this small company didn’t have much by way of written programs that supported health and safety regulatory compliance AND it had a remarkably good safety record -- one that much larger companies would envy.
If there’s a workplace fatality, or if injury/illness rates are too high, or workplace hazards and risks are perceived to be great, employers, disgruntled workers and outside interested parties, such as OSHA, often seek an EHS revolution -- rapid fundamental change.
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