Employee Wellbeing and Health and Safety at Workplace
This blogpost I am going to focus on employee’s overall wellbeing in the organization. There are two different laws concerning employee’s safety: an employer-funded insurance system which operates at the state level plus law that mandates safety standards in the workplace (OSHA). This second one for example keep records of illnesses and injuries that happens in the workplace. Most of the companies follow some safety program in the organization which allows employers to see how many injuries have happened for example in one year (Mejia Gomez, 2016.)
OSHA (Occupational Safety and Administration) states in their website that workers have right to decline from work duties if all the statements that they have told are met in the organization and regarding the job that employee is doing. They have a very good guide in the website what to do if this situation occurs (U.S Department of Labour)
As a subject this is very important for all the employees to remember and hold on to their rights. Sometimes it’s very good to question and challenge also your employer if you notice something that needs to be fixed in order to make employees safety on higher level. It is only the employees who can notice obstacles and hazardous situation in their workplaces because they do that job every day so thats why it is urgent to report them immediately if noticed.
I have an example for this concern from one of my workplaces. As a cabin crew member, you have to be extra careful when working in the plane because it is not the most ordinary work environment. One thing that was noticed and which needed improvement was noise cancelling, because the aircrafts keep so much noise especially in certain parts of the flight. We managed to get this issue through, and it was taken seriously. After that we got noise cancelling earplugs which eased our work enormously in the cabin.
It was devasting to read the article about young intern who died during his internship at the bank. Even though the boy didn’t tell about his sickness to anyone, employer’s should have arranged some medical check-up before the internship started. Especially for the work like in this case because it included night shifts and extra-long hours until early morning. Usually if the work requires nightshifts and kind of unusual working schedule medical control is needed. Not sure which was this company’s policy regarding to this, but it wouldn’t harm either party if the medical control would have done (Emma Thomas, 2013.)
Lastly about the videos that were linked to the Moodle. In my opinion it was very disturbing to watch all the accidents that were shown but I understand that lot of similar things happen in real life working conditions. These videos made their point that companies have to take occupational safety seriously before fatal incidents occur.
References:
· Gomez. M. 2016. Managing Human Resources. Eighth Edition. Pearson. Chapter 16.
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