Effort towards better working conditions and environment: An active safety committee

Establishing an active safety committee is a prerequisite for joint management and worker efforts for better safety, health and working conditions. The legal and social conditions for setting up such a committee can be different from country to country. The committee may be called a safety committee, a safety and health committee or a specialized unit of a joint management-worker consultation body. In a very small enterprise, it may not be called a committee, but simply a safety group or a group of people in which both management and workers are represented.

The primary purpose of the safety committee is to prevent accidents, but other activities include reviewing occupational safety and health programmes and the relevant welfare facilities of the enterprise. Thus the committee is involved in corrective measures spanning the entire range of the above mentioned workplace inspections.

The following duties are usually assigned to safety committees:

§ Meet at regular times to discuss the safety and health programmed of the enterprise and to make recommendations to management.

§ Make systematic inspections of workplace conditions at regular times to discover and report unsafe and unsatisfactory conditions and practices.

§ Review the circumstances and causes of accidents or occupational illnesses and recommend corrective measures.

§ Discuss unsafe or unsatisfactory conditions at the workplace.

§ Examine suggestions that employees make about safety.

§ Plan and supervise educational activities in safety and relevant areas.

Information given by employees often helps the safety committee. Therefore, the committee member should, in inspection rounds or through their daily contacts, listen to suggestion by employees and bring them up at the committee meeting. Committee members should try to bring up practical suggestions in the committee discussions so that they can be reported to the management for action. The committee should maintain its independent position and base its recommendations on its own observations and careful discussions.

Investigating an accident may not be a routine part of the safety committee’s job, but there is hardly a committee that has not been asked to review the circumstances of an accident and find out what caused it. The committee should tactfully help collect accurate information. Remember that the purpose of an accident review is to find out how to prevent similar accident in the future. The committee should not be involved in making accusations.

Attitudes for safety will grow if people take part in discussions about how accidents can be prevented. The committee should present facts about actual conditions and help organize such discussions. The committee can work effectively when it reports and recommends, and does not complain.