How satisfying it would be to sit down with a few thousand of you at 1 p.m. June 29 inside San Antonio's downtown convention center to hear the new OSHA assistant secretary explain the new cranes and derricks rule at a plenary session of ASSE's Safety 2009. I intend to be there, but one or both of the others almost certainly will not.
An unappreciated, underused resource for employers was thrust into the limelight recently when the National Business Group on Health released "An Employer's Guide to Employee Assistance Programs" at a Washington, D.C., news conference. Two years of studying best practices and evidencebased approaches to the design and delivery of effective employee assistance programs (EAPs) contributed to the guide.
Every year in the United States, nearly 100 workers are killed in forklift-related incidents and, according to OSHA, "tens of thousands" more are injured. Truck tipovers are the leading cause of the fatalities, followed by workers being crushed between a vehicle and a surface.
Anyone can write a safety program, but it takes a real commitment on the behalf of everyone involved to create and implement a complete safety culture. The goal of developing a safety culture is to instill the qualities that motivate workers to strive to achieve safety excellence and can be developed only if all on staff work together. Just as a group is only as strong as its weakest member, your staff is only as safe as the least-concerned worker.
We select several management and labor employees to be on the team, get the “lucky members” together, and get them all pumped up. They’re ready to rumble! Next, we announce the committee’s first assignment is to rebuild the engine and transmission in the company van. Once they do the rebuild, their next task is to meet once per quarter to service the van and keep it in tip-top running order.
Mark your calendar on Tuesday, April 21, if you’re an occupational health nurse, if you work with OHNs, or if you appreciate their contribution and keep an eye on health costs. April 21 is the day Kay N. Campbell, incoming president of the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, will speak at its annual conference about the Re- Visioning project and plans for AAOHN’s future. A new name may be coming, along with new goals and new activism and outreach, she told me Jan. 26.
The first and most important objective in the hierarchy of controls is the elimination or substitution of a hazard. This principle was also the impetus for the creation of Leica ScanStation 2, which is manufactured by Heerbrugg, Switzerland-based Leica Geosystems AG. This mobile laser scanner features an embedded high-resolution camera and a high-definition, 3D laser scanning system that can quickly map an environment in 360 degrees, collecting 50,000 measurements per second to create a photorealistic view of any setting.
Halfway through my bachelor’s degree in Environmental, Health, and Safety Management, I made the switch from Operations supervisor to Environmental, Health, and Safety Specialist. Through the course of the next two years, my view of the safety field as one that merely identifies hazards using OSHA and other tools made a 180-degree turn when I realized how versatile you have to be in order to be successful in safety.
By and large, we don’t get around like we used to. Technology at work and home has made it so we don’t need to. Who remembers actually getting up and crossing the room to switch the channel or walking across the office to deliver a message to a co-worker? Since the advent of universal remotes and e-mail, such “activities” have come to seem downright inefficient or, at the very least, inconvenient. We can do so much now without ever having to leave our seats that, typically, we don’t. But remaining happily on our cushions is not without its repercussions.
Where would we be without industrial hygiene? IH is the foundation of workplace safety and health, but without trustworthy, valid exposure limits that match the latest science about health effects, IH would be guesswork. That is a dangerous scenario in our time of swift global movement of new and recycled products, nanotechnologies, and new regulations meant to limit exposures of workers and the public to chemicals that can harm them.
For a chemical manufacturer seeking to become a global supplier, keeping up with numerous foreign safety regulations and requirements can be quite a challenge. MSDgen®, a compliance tool from Carlsbad, Calif.-based 3E Co., was created to streamline one important aspect of this process, the creation and distribution of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs).
Under the “general duty” clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA), 29 U.S.C. §§ 651- 678, “[e]ach employer . . . shall furnish to each of his employees employment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees.”. There is little question that allowing guns at the workplace endangers workers.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that by the year 2010, 17 percent of the U.S. workforce will be 55 and older.
I’ve learned a lot this year about patience, planning, risk taking, and managing. Poorer but wiser, I hope, after the financial markets' tumble, I am looking back on a year of growth and anxiety, with many successes and some disappointments.
Try this: Stand up straight with your arms at your sides, palms facing legs. Slowly raise your arms from the elbow, letting your wrists relax. Now, without turning your wrists, start “typing.”
What OSHA hasn’t done has been much discussed this year, but I believe our focus is about to change. The 2009 shift to an active OSHA may be dramatic or subtle, depending on how the Nov. 4 elections affect congressional oversight and appropriations committees and then on how quickly a new president and Congress act.
Safety is top of mind for many manufacturers, but also growing in importance is the pressure to become “green,” or environmentally sound. GreenRoad Technology Inc., a fairly new driver safety company headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif., has taken the basic idea of a traffic signal and reengineered it into a small device that gives real-time feedback on 120 driving maneuvers to increase safety. The device is installed on a vehicle’s dash and contains three colored lights -- red for unsafe, yellow for moderately unsafe, and green for safe.
Quarrels at home, while driving, and at work sometimes escalate into dangerous and violent arguments. Those caught in the middle—including co-workers, family members, and emergency responders—are at high risk.