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.
When time is short and resources are limited, this hand-held device brings the lab to the scene.
The American landscape was forever changed by the events of 9/11.With the anthrax mail scare that followed shortly afterward, one company found itself in a unique position to help the emergency responder community with a portable chemical identifier called HazMatID™.
Treating commercial truck drivers who have sleep apnea significantly lowers their health care costs, lowers their preventable accident rate, and reduces their turnover.While the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration revised the hours of service rule in this decade to reduce fatigue-related commercial motor vehicle crashes, the evidence in two recent studies is an even more compelling reason for trucking companies to address sleep apnea.
The importance of a good lock is oft overlooked but cannot be overstated. As author/philosopher Ayn Rand saw it, the very concept of civilization can be thought of as progress toward a society of privacy, a notion that is pretty much the fountainhead of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a.k.a. the Privacy Rule.
You may be thinking, “I’m not in sales, I’m a safety professional!” You’re half right: You are a safety professional. The Truth — as we often learn the hard way — is that if we are in safety, we are indeed in sales. The fact of the matter is that we are at the mercy of our ability to sell, no matter how “tight” the presentation. Regardless of our education or the facts surrounding an issue, we are still in a position where we have to make the sale in order for a positive change to take place. And the better we are at selling, the greater our results.
Quite a few federal agency leaders will be looking for work six months from now, but some are still contributing. Two, HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt and FDA Commissioner Dr.Andrew von Eschenbach, visited Chinese health officials in Beijing and Shanghai two months ago, arriving soon after the disastrous earthquake, to discuss product safety cooperation. Both men are scheduled to moderate panels at ANSI’s July 9 Import Safety Summit in Washington, D.C.