Occupational Health and Safety: Use ISO 45001 to Enhance Workplace Safety

Workplace safety is more than an ethical and legal obligation to employees and other stakeholders. ISO 45001:2018 is a standard for occupational health and safety (OH&S) management systems. Its effective implementation and use support occupational safety, and can help the organization not just meet but exceed the requirements of OSHA. 

This webinar will provide an overview of ISO 45001's main requirements as well as generally-accepted, easily understood, and highly effective ways to put them into practice. These include workplace safety committees, worker-initiated corrective and preventive action for hazards, job safety analysis, error-proofing, and lockout-tagout.

The benefits of a consistently safe workplace far exceed regulatory compliance. Safe workplaces get lower experience modification ratings (EMRs) which means they pay far less for workers' compensation insurance than unsafe ones. The difference can be five-fold or more. Organizations can qualify for OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program (https://www.osha.gov/vpp/all-about-vpp) which offers numerous benefits including exemption from programmed inspections while VPP status is maintained. In addition, "The average VPP worksite has a Days Away Restricted or Transferred (DART) case rate of 52% below the average for its industry." Another benefit is the assurance of continuity of operations because an unsafe condition can shut down operations even if it does not cause injuries.

• Know how the benefits of ISO 45001:2018 can far exceed the regulatory requirements of OSHA to deliver lower workers' compensation premiums, continuity of operations, and fewer lost time incidents.
• Know the key clauses of ISO 45001 and their synergies with generally accepted techniques such as 5S (workplace organization), safety committees, error-proofing, and lockout-tagout.
• Recognize ISO 45001's repetitive focus on worker participation, which is a prerequisite for effective safety committees.
• Know the requirements of effective safety committees.
• Know the twelve principal causes of accidents as identified by Henry Ford long ago. They are still valid today, and all but one can be largely eliminated with 5S, ISO 9001 clauses related to environment for operations, and Ford's "can't rather than don't" safety principle. The latter made Ford's company among the safest workplaces in the United States long before OSHA ever existed. *
• Use job safety analysis to identify hazards proactively.
• Use near-miss reports submitted by workers to identify and rectify unsafe conditions before they can cause harm.
• Recognize the issue of management of change (MOC) which says changes to anything creates risks of unintended consequences.
• Know how Henry Ford's "can't rather than don't" safety principle, which we now call error-proofing, can make many accidents physically impossible. It means that, instead of telling people "don't put your hand in the machine's moving parts," design the machine so they can't put their hands into the moving parts. Lockout-tagout is a form of this.
• Know the need for emergency response plans, which includes coordination with emergency responders.

* To put the effectiveness of Ford's safety methods into perspective, Resnick, "How Henry Ford Saves Men and Money" (1920) reports, noting that the company had one fatality out of 50,000 workers in 1918-1919, "You will appreciate just what this means when I tell you that if this percentage of accidental fatalities were maintained by the industries of the country generally, the accidentally killed in these industries each year would be 760 men and women instead of 22,000, as is now the case." 

The AFL-CIO reports (https://aflcio.org/reports/death-job-toll-neglect-2022) that, for the year 2020, the average workplace death rate was 3.4 per 100,000. There were 2 per 100,000 at Ford, at least in 1918-1919. We must of course recognize that some jobs are more hazardous than manufacturing, but the basic principle is that incidents are still largely avoidable if everything is done correctly as insisted upon by Ford. This still does not happen in many workplaces today. As an example, citations issued for fall protection nonconformances show up routinely on OSHA's top ten list (https://www.osha.gov/top10citedstandards) even though falls are an obvious hazard.

Attendees will receive a pdf copy of the slides and accompanying notes, and the Resnick article.

The presentation focuses on manufacturing but is applicable to services as well.

• Manufacturing Engineer
• Safety Engineer
• Occupational Health and Safety Professional
• Executive responsible for workplace safety