Who is Really Responsible For Health and Safety in the Workplace?

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In terms of health and safety, there are 3 elements. The management of the business, the employees and the legislation. However, there are 2 broad divisions of responsibility and these are shown when there's an accident. The investigation continuously appears to be directed at either the system or the individual. Generally speaking, if one attributes accidents to carelessness on behalf of the individual, it could be described as "blaming the victim." On the other hand, if the injury occurred as a result of the business violated some regulation, then this might be described as, "blaming the system."

The methods for improving health and safety within the workplace appeared to be centered around these 2 blaming cultures. If it's the fault of the victim, then training and education seem appropriate. If it's the fault of the system, then the companies will be prosecuted. In our society it appears that we have a habit of blaming the victim.
A great deal of analysis has tried to identify the characteristics of those people who are accident prone. This can be a classic case of blaming the victim. Injury statistics are collected and analyzed to indicate the age, sex, personality etc of the victims in an try to form a image of the type of staff who are most liable to injury or illness. This could cause a dangerous state of affairs where employment policies are installed to forestall job offers to those folks who fit the accident prone characteristics.
While this may seem to be a sensible screening policy to stop the utilization of folks who create an accident risk, there are a number of flaws within the argument. Firstly, individuals who report the most accidents and incidents don't seem to be necessarily the most accident prone. Of course, it has been discovered that the most conscientious employees report the foremost accidents. Secondly, screening out workers at risk of injury could be a discriminating policy that will disadvantage people. In several places, this sort of discrimination is currently illegal.

Another approach is to assume that injuries and accidents at work are the results of carelessness on the half of the workers. Along with this approach is the assumption that their employees are ignorant concerning safe working procedures. This offers rise to policies designed to raise interest and awareness in issues of safety among the workers. Once this has been disbursed, it is then assumed that injuries are the results of violations of safety laws by workers. This opens the door to penalizing the violators.
Irrespective of how you study it, our culture of blame when there's a workplace accident, along with all the penalties is not actually solving the matter and creating safer workplaces. It seems that a lot of work needs to be done during this space to prevent the social and economic losses related to health and safety issues.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Nikky has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in Workplace Communication, you can also check out his latest website about: Retro Coffee Table Which reviews and lists the best Coffee Table Furniture

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