- Email: [email protected]
Films on job design and participation
and safety at work is outlined in a short leaflet, Regulations, Approved
Codes of Practice and Guidance Literature, available free, from local offices of H M Factory Inspectorate, H M Inspectorate of Mines and Quarries and HM Alkali Inspectorate. Twentyfive thousand copies of the leaflet, which is free, are being distributed to employees, employers and members of the public, through local Health and Safety Executive offices. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, the leaflet explains, the Commission has the power to extend or modify the law, generate rules for the conduct of dangerous processes, and provide advice on dealing with hazards and on compliance with the law. The Act is mainly an enabling device, providing a statutory framework for detailed provisions such as Regulations, Approved Codes of Practice, other guidance material or any combination of these. Different circumstances will decide whether the approach should be voluntary or mandatory. Existing statutory provisions will be progressively replaced by a new b o d y of legislation designed to maintain or improve the existing standards of work environment. The leaflet gives a detailed description of the chief legal instrument, Regulations, including their scope and form, and provisions for exemption. They are made by the Secretary of State, laid before Parliament and enforced through the courts. They may include absolute duties and may lay down either general standards or specific rules. The special legal status of an Approved Code of Practice is explained ( it can be used as evidence in a court of law). Approved Codes will usually be brought into being by the Commission, the Executive, or Industry Advisory Committees set up by the Commission. They may also be generated in conjunction with bodies such as the British Standards Institution. Codes originating elsewhere will not normally be approved by the Commission unless they are felt to be a necessary and suitable form of extension of the law. Codes of practice published by the British Standards Institution and other professional and industrial bodies are not approved codes of practice under the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The number of Approved Codes is likely to be limited in the early years, but will include those for safety representatives, lead and nois~. The various kinds of Guidance Notes are also described. Guidance
182
Notes by the Commission will be authoritative, but will not endorse a particular course of conduct by an employer. The Executive will issue essentially working Notes of Guidance These are intended to advise industry on how to comply with the law, to provide technical data about specific hazards and interpretations of biological data by medical officers. Industry Advisory Committees will issue Guidance Notes in the form of reports, which will carry the authority o f the particular committee. There may also be guidance notes issued by manufacturers and other associations. to which the Commission and Executive will not normally wish to give recognition. The Commission, however, welcomes the increase in valuable guidance originating from industry itself.
Child-resistant packaging Discussions are to be held with industry to consider child-resistant packaging for some household products, Alan Williams, Minister of State for Prices and Consumer Protection said on 2 April. Answering a question in the House of Commons from Greville Janner, MP, (Leicester West) Mr Williams said: "Preliminary results from an in-depth study being carried out for my Department show that child-resistant packaging can play an important role in reducing the number of children who are treated each year for suspected accidental poisoning involving household products. My Department has therefore asked the British Standards Institution to consider the preparation of a test specification for childresistant packaging for these products. In addition, we will be holding discussions with the industry with a view to securing a voluntary change over to the use of child-resistant packaging over a range of potentially harmful household products. But I must stress that packaging of this sort is a partial line of defence and that the primary precaution is to keep these products out of reach of children."
Films on job design and participation Speaking at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London on 19 May, Mr Booth, E m p l o y m e n t Secretary, said that there was a growing awareness of the links between jobs offering little satisfaction to the people who do them and many of the problems which arise at the workplace. What was also being recognised was the change in people's needs and
Applied Ergonomics September 1976
expectations at work brought about by the developments in education and changes in attitudes in society generally. This was particularly true of young people entering the employment field for the first time. The Tripartite Steering Group on Job Satisfaction was set up with representatives from the TUC. CBI and Government. This Group is now chaired by John Grant, Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Department of Employment. On the recommendation of the Steering Group, the Work Research Unit was established in this Department. The role of the Unit is to help industry to explore the scope for improving the quality of working life and to advise and assist managements and unions who wish to bring about changes in this direction. During the past 18 months, the Work Research Unit has been approached by over ] 000 organisations and individuals for information Nearly 200 companies have asked for advice and the Unit is still in contact with many of these, in a number of instances the staff of the Unit are involved in the planning and implementation of programmes to improve the quality of working life. The Unit has been approached by compames representing virtually the whole spectrum of industry and commerce, and the spread in terms of geography and the occupations involved has been equally wide. In addition to helping to bring about the setting up of the Work Research Unit. the Tripartite Steering Group has also initiated a series of research projects to be carried out by universities and institutes in different parts of Great Britain. The projects are taking place in a wide variety of work locations and the aim is to facilitate changes to improve job satisfaction and to evaluate the effects. Collectively the researchers in this external programme are active in about 20 organisations, ranging from heavy engineering at one extreme to clerical work and nursing at the other. The films made by the Work Research Unit show how four organisations have a t t e m p t e d to improve the quality of working life. These are the South Eastern Electricity Board at Brighton, Canadian Transport Terminals Ltd at Tilbury Dock. Hellermann Deutsch at East Grinstead, and Bax:i Heating at Preston. The organisations vary considerably in terms of their function heavy engineering, electrical engineering, clerical work and dock work as do their individual working systems. But all have one ;,oint m common, namely an effort has been made to train and
better utilise the skills and capacities of the workforce. This allows employees to carry out a wider range of tasks and have a more varied work life; employees are provided with more freedom to determine how they carry out their jobs. Normally, such a situation can only be achieved if groups of employees work together as teams, Another important feature of these films is the extent to which the trade unions and the workforce were involved, at all stages, in the bringing about of the changes.
Call to speed up OSHA's procedures A coordinated effort by voluntary standards writing organizations and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to speed up OSHA's procedures for revision of its regulations was proposed in Washington on 27 May by F. Carl Saacke, chairman of American National Standards Committee Z49. He spoke at a joint ANSI-OSHA Standards Conference called by the American National Standards Institute to examine ways in which the national voluntary standards system coordinated by ANSI can help OSHA make sure that its regulations keep pace with advancing technology. The plan outlined by Mr Saacke calls for changes in the practices of both OSHA and the standards developing groups: The latter should write voluntary safety standards and revise existing ones in a form that will make them suitable for OSHA adoption with little or no change. OSHA should encourage this action by making its requirements clear and by giving enough pre-proposal lead time for the private sector groups to develop consensus standards tailored to the agency's needs. Five years ago OSHA adopted 127 American National Standards as bases for its occupational safety and health regulations. Problems have resulted because the consensus standards were written as voluntary codes of practice, not as regulations to be legally enforced. Where words like "'must" and "shall" were used in the voluntary standards, Mr Saacke explained, the writers meant that at the time they knew of no other way to work safely, When they were aware of acceptable alternatives. they offered a choice of procedures. in addition, the standards included advice to guide newcomers to the industry. To be directly usable by OSHA, according to Mr Saacke, voluntary standards should make a clear distinction between mandatory and nonmandatory provisions. The mandatory provisions should be brief,
so clear that they cannot possibly be misinterpreted and acceptable to industry safety experts. They also should state the justification for each requirement. The nonmandatory provisions should include whatever advisory or background information might be helpful to the user. OSHA has no alternative but to rely heavily on voluntary standards groups for help, Mr Saacke pointed out. Its present 2% sampling of industrial establishments is a long way from 100% inspection. Voluntary compliance must remain a major element in its enforcement, and consensus standards are already broadly accepted within industry. OSHA plans to seek more preproposal commentary from the public. More communication with the public is highly desirable, Mr Saacke said, but will add to the agency's paperwork burden. That burden might be reduced if OSHA's pre-proposal announcements gave voluntary standards groups time to "adequately question their indistries and develop a consensus with a rationale that would simplify OSHA's evaluation" of comments.
Disabled best helped by specialist services At a time when the outlook for the foreseeable future is one of constraints on both public expenditure and public service manpower, disabled people can best be helped to find and keep jobs with the aid of specialist services of the kind provided by the Department of Employment Group. This was the view taken by Mr John Grant, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Employment, when he spoke on 21 May at a seminar on Disabled Workers organised by the Department of Health and Social Security in London. Mr Grant said: "'The Department of Employment Group, by which 1 mean the Manpower Services Commission and its Agencies and the Department itself, is basically in the field of providing services. The operation of these services - and there is a continuous effort to improve them -- is aimed at helping disabled people to find and keep the jobs best suited to their aptitudes and capacities and helping them to settle into work as quickly and smoothly as possible. This is good for the individual who wants to work; it is good for the community which gets value from that individual's services.
of cash payments, since the services and the resources they take up are concentrated on those disabled people who at any particular moment most need help. "Of course this is to over-simplify the argument, and the question is where to strike the balance in the use of strictly limited resources. I am sure that there are those who will justly argue that the problem for the disabled worker is not just at the point at which he seeks to progress into the labour market from sickness or unemployment. And in any event policies in the two general areas of cash and services are not mutually exclusive. For example, one nettle to be grasped is the disincentive effects of benefits. This in itself has particular impact on the operation of our rehabilitation services. For example there is no financial incentive for people on invalidity benefits to take rehabilitation courses." But, Mr Grant added, the needs of individual disabled people must be correctly identified and their potential assessed. "Our rehabilitation and resettlement services are much involved in the question of assessment. They are making assessments of individuals, their potential, their skills, and attitudes, and motivations all the time. The Employment Service Agency has been experimenting with new ways of in-depth professional vocational assessment. The Agency is still preparing its final evaluation of these trials. "'The rehabilitation and disablement resettlement service has placed on it heavy responsibilities concerning both unemployed and employed disabled people. The service has been strengthened in a number of ways, especially by better training of disablement resettlement officers and by an increase in the number of senior disablement resettlement staff. The service is also trying to be more sensitive to individual needs - by increased provision of its special aids to employment scheme and by attempting to cater for a wider clientele in its employment rehabilitation centres."
Industry urged to prepare for safety representatives and committees
The Health and Safety Commission have agreed to provide for industry a period of time before the new regulations on safety representatives come into force, Mr Bill Simpson, Chairman of the Commission. said in "If everybody agrees that this is the London on 27 May, opening an right objective, then our aguement is international safety and occupational that it can be achieved at relatively health conference, The regulations will moderate cost through specialist services; provide for the appointment of safety certainly modest compared with schemes representatives and the setting up of
Applied Ergonomics September 1976
183
Codes of Practice and Guidance Literature, available free, from local offices of H M Factory Inspectorate, H M Inspectorate of Mines and Quarries and HM Alkali Inspectorate. Twentyfive thousand copies of the leaflet, which is free, are being distributed to employees, employers and members of the public, through local Health and Safety Executive offices. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, the leaflet explains, the Commission has the power to extend or modify the law, generate rules for the conduct of dangerous processes, and provide advice on dealing with hazards and on compliance with the law. The Act is mainly an enabling device, providing a statutory framework for detailed provisions such as Regulations, Approved Codes of Practice, other guidance material or any combination of these. Different circumstances will decide whether the approach should be voluntary or mandatory. Existing statutory provisions will be progressively replaced by a new b o d y of legislation designed to maintain or improve the existing standards of work environment. The leaflet gives a detailed description of the chief legal instrument, Regulations, including their scope and form, and provisions for exemption. They are made by the Secretary of State, laid before Parliament and enforced through the courts. They may include absolute duties and may lay down either general standards or specific rules. The special legal status of an Approved Code of Practice is explained ( it can be used as evidence in a court of law). Approved Codes will usually be brought into being by the Commission, the Executive, or Industry Advisory Committees set up by the Commission. They may also be generated in conjunction with bodies such as the British Standards Institution. Codes originating elsewhere will not normally be approved by the Commission unless they are felt to be a necessary and suitable form of extension of the law. Codes of practice published by the British Standards Institution and other professional and industrial bodies are not approved codes of practice under the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The number of Approved Codes is likely to be limited in the early years, but will include those for safety representatives, lead and nois~. The various kinds of Guidance Notes are also described. Guidance
182
Notes by the Commission will be authoritative, but will not endorse a particular course of conduct by an employer. The Executive will issue essentially working Notes of Guidance These are intended to advise industry on how to comply with the law, to provide technical data about specific hazards and interpretations of biological data by medical officers. Industry Advisory Committees will issue Guidance Notes in the form of reports, which will carry the authority o f the particular committee. There may also be guidance notes issued by manufacturers and other associations. to which the Commission and Executive will not normally wish to give recognition. The Commission, however, welcomes the increase in valuable guidance originating from industry itself.
Child-resistant packaging Discussions are to be held with industry to consider child-resistant packaging for some household products, Alan Williams, Minister of State for Prices and Consumer Protection said on 2 April. Answering a question in the House of Commons from Greville Janner, MP, (Leicester West) Mr Williams said: "Preliminary results from an in-depth study being carried out for my Department show that child-resistant packaging can play an important role in reducing the number of children who are treated each year for suspected accidental poisoning involving household products. My Department has therefore asked the British Standards Institution to consider the preparation of a test specification for childresistant packaging for these products. In addition, we will be holding discussions with the industry with a view to securing a voluntary change over to the use of child-resistant packaging over a range of potentially harmful household products. But I must stress that packaging of this sort is a partial line of defence and that the primary precaution is to keep these products out of reach of children."
Films on job design and participation Speaking at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London on 19 May, Mr Booth, E m p l o y m e n t Secretary, said that there was a growing awareness of the links between jobs offering little satisfaction to the people who do them and many of the problems which arise at the workplace. What was also being recognised was the change in people's needs and
Applied Ergonomics September 1976
expectations at work brought about by the developments in education and changes in attitudes in society generally. This was particularly true of young people entering the employment field for the first time. The Tripartite Steering Group on Job Satisfaction was set up with representatives from the TUC. CBI and Government. This Group is now chaired by John Grant, Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Department of Employment. On the recommendation of the Steering Group, the Work Research Unit was established in this Department. The role of the Unit is to help industry to explore the scope for improving the quality of working life and to advise and assist managements and unions who wish to bring about changes in this direction. During the past 18 months, the Work Research Unit has been approached by over ] 000 organisations and individuals for information Nearly 200 companies have asked for advice and the Unit is still in contact with many of these, in a number of instances the staff of the Unit are involved in the planning and implementation of programmes to improve the quality of working life. The Unit has been approached by compames representing virtually the whole spectrum of industry and commerce, and the spread in terms of geography and the occupations involved has been equally wide. In addition to helping to bring about the setting up of the Work Research Unit. the Tripartite Steering Group has also initiated a series of research projects to be carried out by universities and institutes in different parts of Great Britain. The projects are taking place in a wide variety of work locations and the aim is to facilitate changes to improve job satisfaction and to evaluate the effects. Collectively the researchers in this external programme are active in about 20 organisations, ranging from heavy engineering at one extreme to clerical work and nursing at the other. The films made by the Work Research Unit show how four organisations have a t t e m p t e d to improve the quality of working life. These are the South Eastern Electricity Board at Brighton, Canadian Transport Terminals Ltd at Tilbury Dock. Hellermann Deutsch at East Grinstead, and Bax:i Heating at Preston. The organisations vary considerably in terms of their function heavy engineering, electrical engineering, clerical work and dock work as do their individual working systems. But all have one ;,oint m common, namely an effort has been made to train and
better utilise the skills and capacities of the workforce. This allows employees to carry out a wider range of tasks and have a more varied work life; employees are provided with more freedom to determine how they carry out their jobs. Normally, such a situation can only be achieved if groups of employees work together as teams, Another important feature of these films is the extent to which the trade unions and the workforce were involved, at all stages, in the bringing about of the changes.
Call to speed up OSHA's procedures A coordinated effort by voluntary standards writing organizations and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to speed up OSHA's procedures for revision of its regulations was proposed in Washington on 27 May by F. Carl Saacke, chairman of American National Standards Committee Z49. He spoke at a joint ANSI-OSHA Standards Conference called by the American National Standards Institute to examine ways in which the national voluntary standards system coordinated by ANSI can help OSHA make sure that its regulations keep pace with advancing technology. The plan outlined by Mr Saacke calls for changes in the practices of both OSHA and the standards developing groups: The latter should write voluntary safety standards and revise existing ones in a form that will make them suitable for OSHA adoption with little or no change. OSHA should encourage this action by making its requirements clear and by giving enough pre-proposal lead time for the private sector groups to develop consensus standards tailored to the agency's needs. Five years ago OSHA adopted 127 American National Standards as bases for its occupational safety and health regulations. Problems have resulted because the consensus standards were written as voluntary codes of practice, not as regulations to be legally enforced. Where words like "'must" and "shall" were used in the voluntary standards, Mr Saacke explained, the writers meant that at the time they knew of no other way to work safely, When they were aware of acceptable alternatives. they offered a choice of procedures. in addition, the standards included advice to guide newcomers to the industry. To be directly usable by OSHA, according to Mr Saacke, voluntary standards should make a clear distinction between mandatory and nonmandatory provisions. The mandatory provisions should be brief,
so clear that they cannot possibly be misinterpreted and acceptable to industry safety experts. They also should state the justification for each requirement. The nonmandatory provisions should include whatever advisory or background information might be helpful to the user. OSHA has no alternative but to rely heavily on voluntary standards groups for help, Mr Saacke pointed out. Its present 2% sampling of industrial establishments is a long way from 100% inspection. Voluntary compliance must remain a major element in its enforcement, and consensus standards are already broadly accepted within industry. OSHA plans to seek more preproposal commentary from the public. More communication with the public is highly desirable, Mr Saacke said, but will add to the agency's paperwork burden. That burden might be reduced if OSHA's pre-proposal announcements gave voluntary standards groups time to "adequately question their indistries and develop a consensus with a rationale that would simplify OSHA's evaluation" of comments.
Disabled best helped by specialist services At a time when the outlook for the foreseeable future is one of constraints on both public expenditure and public service manpower, disabled people can best be helped to find and keep jobs with the aid of specialist services of the kind provided by the Department of Employment Group. This was the view taken by Mr John Grant, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Employment, when he spoke on 21 May at a seminar on Disabled Workers organised by the Department of Health and Social Security in London. Mr Grant said: "'The Department of Employment Group, by which 1 mean the Manpower Services Commission and its Agencies and the Department itself, is basically in the field of providing services. The operation of these services - and there is a continuous effort to improve them -- is aimed at helping disabled people to find and keep the jobs best suited to their aptitudes and capacities and helping them to settle into work as quickly and smoothly as possible. This is good for the individual who wants to work; it is good for the community which gets value from that individual's services.
of cash payments, since the services and the resources they take up are concentrated on those disabled people who at any particular moment most need help. "Of course this is to over-simplify the argument, and the question is where to strike the balance in the use of strictly limited resources. I am sure that there are those who will justly argue that the problem for the disabled worker is not just at the point at which he seeks to progress into the labour market from sickness or unemployment. And in any event policies in the two general areas of cash and services are not mutually exclusive. For example, one nettle to be grasped is the disincentive effects of benefits. This in itself has particular impact on the operation of our rehabilitation services. For example there is no financial incentive for people on invalidity benefits to take rehabilitation courses." But, Mr Grant added, the needs of individual disabled people must be correctly identified and their potential assessed. "Our rehabilitation and resettlement services are much involved in the question of assessment. They are making assessments of individuals, their potential, their skills, and attitudes, and motivations all the time. The Employment Service Agency has been experimenting with new ways of in-depth professional vocational assessment. The Agency is still preparing its final evaluation of these trials. "'The rehabilitation and disablement resettlement service has placed on it heavy responsibilities concerning both unemployed and employed disabled people. The service has been strengthened in a number of ways, especially by better training of disablement resettlement officers and by an increase in the number of senior disablement resettlement staff. The service is also trying to be more sensitive to individual needs - by increased provision of its special aids to employment scheme and by attempting to cater for a wider clientele in its employment rehabilitation centres."
Industry urged to prepare for safety representatives and committees
The Health and Safety Commission have agreed to provide for industry a period of time before the new regulations on safety representatives come into force, Mr Bill Simpson, Chairman of the Commission. said in "If everybody agrees that this is the London on 27 May, opening an right objective, then our aguement is international safety and occupational that it can be achieved at relatively health conference, The regulations will moderate cost through specialist services; provide for the appointment of safety certainly modest compared with schemes representatives and the setting up of
Applied Ergonomics September 1976
183