Who are responsible for ensuring safety at work?

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Health and safety at work is the responsibility of both employers and employees. They must think about what, in their organisation, might cause harm to people and ensure that they are doing enough to prevent that harm. 

A senior member of the organisation should be responsible for implementing the health and safely policy and may be supported by safety officers. Employees also have basic responsibilities in this regard. Most companies have a safety committee and representatives who have some experience, are entitled to training and are consulted about arrangements to ensure the effectiveness of the health and safety policy implementation.

Taking each individual responsible for health and safety in turn:

● Managerial responsibilities 

Legislation can only provide the underpinning to safe working practices, ultimately, it is how the legislation is translated in practice that determines whether a workplace is safe, or not. There are a number of ways in which management responsibility can be discharged to make work safe. The management of an organisation carry the prime responsibility for implementing a policy they have laid down, and they also have responsibility under the Act for operating the plant and equipment in the premises safely and meeting all the Act's requirements whether these are specified in the policy statement, or not. Management has a duty to provide a safe and healthy working environment, which is hazard free, and to train others so that they are able to operate and maintain a safe and healthy working environment for themselves. 

● Employee responsibilities

For the first time in health and safety legislation a duty is placed on employees while that are at work to take responsible care for the safety of themselves and others. The employee, is therefore, legally bound to comply with the safety rules and instructions that the employer requires. Employers are also fully empowered to dismiss employees who refuse to obey safety rules on the grounds of misconduct, especially if the possibility of such a dismissal is explicit in the disciplinary procedure. Employees need to be enabled by management to carry out their duties and responsibilities. This might take the form of communicating policies and procedures about health and safety issues, appointing safety representatives, setting up committees and providing training.

● Safety representatives

To reinforce the employees' role in the care of their own heath and safety, provision has been made for the appointment of safety representatives by trade unions. Safety representatives have a legal duty of consultation with employers and are entitled to paid time off for training to enable them to carry out their function. Employers are expected to set up safety committees and consult with safety representatives about the membership of that committee.

● Safety committees

Safety representatives and training officers have to be consulted about the membership of the committee, and detailed advise on the function and conduct of safety committees is provided by the Health and Safety Commission. Since the Act there has been a great increase in the number of Safety Committees in operation. It has also been noted that the effectiveness of committees has been very much dependent on the employment of trained safety officers.

Tyron Seneviratne.

Comments

  1. shanaDecember 21, 2017 at 11:47 PM

    Safety at work is more of a responsibility of employer. Nowadays many employers think about this twice since the main construction of employer is mainly base on the net profit of the organization. For an example when employer is building a new office premise and to reduce the cost they build this with law cost since the building doesn’t have enough ventilation/light(basically not friendly environment for work) and this will affect the health of employees who are working in this building.

    Normally the annual audit should cover those areas and review base on international standards.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Danushka De AlwisDecember 22, 2017 at 6:35 AM

    Hi Tyron,

    Interesting read of organisational structure in respect to health and safety. As line mangers they have same responsibility to themself and their team member's heath and safety.

    It is quite important for all departments of an organisation to report all incidents of accidents for the benefit for all and this should be considered as part of policy creation.

    ReplyDelete

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