BSHSP1010 Occupational Health and Safety Editing Services

Introduction

Do more manufacturing company involves in the buying of both coated and uncoated coils made of steel and processing them according to the desires of their clients. The process that they major in include shearing the coil, painting them and packing the end product according to the desire of their clients. The company has one of each of the machines that are engaged in the production process; the machines include a paint line, a shear line and a slitting line. The company has existed for over forty years and has 400 employee benefits currently. It has resisted from being knocked out of the market by multinational cooperatives severally over the past decade. It has three departments, i.e., the engineering, fabrication and electrical service department in charge of the smooth running of things in the company. The workers have overtime jobs and take three shifts per day and are given one day of the month for leisure.

Body

There are individuals who are in charge of the various departments. Fred Hope is the safety advisor for the company and also is responsible for the compensation and security of the workers. The company is quite serious about the employees' health and safety and has even formulated a program, which is under the watch of Fred Hope. As most of the accidents are caused by machines training for the health and safety program (Yuan, Khakzad, Khan and Amyotte, 2015). The health and safety program is outlined as shown below;

1. New employees are educated on fire prevention, injury reporting, emergency procedures and finally the knowledge of the basic safety rules (Seo, Han, Lee, and Kim, 2015).
2. They are also given booklets containing safety rules and machine isolation procedures.
3. Poster displays.
4. Safety meetings.
5. Training and supply of personal protective gear.

Slitting line operation involves the slitting of large steel metals into small pieces of coils that can be easily used by customers for different purposes. The slitting line is an integrated machine made up different parts and powered by hydraulic energy, and the parts are moved using electrical motors. The Do more slitting line has the capacity of taking up to 29500 kg mass by 1900 mm width and 4.5mm thickness of steel that can go in per unit. The coil that goes in is uncoiled and slit along its length as per what the customer had ordered. The slit strip coils are rewound and then packed as required by the clients. Along this slitting line is where the accident occurred.

The do more company is the company conducting the business, and it therefore has the largest responsibility towards the health and safety of all its employees. The WHS act ensures that the responsibility of the health and safety conditions goes beyond the relationship between the employer and the employees to even secure future risks and new arrangements in work (Amponsah-Tawiah, Ntow, and Mensah, 2016). The Do More Company has the following responsibilities as the owners and conductors of the business.

There are responsible for ensuring that any input or output at the work station is safe and does not cause health issues to the workers and also the customers (Salanova, Cifre, Llorens, Martínez, and Lorente, 2016).

Has the responsibility of providing reasonable means of eliminating or responding to risks with reasonable costs towards the management of the risk.

Should also consult about the health issues with the health and safety representatives that are available.

Give or allow the access to health and safety information to the HRS if needed.

Allow individuals access to the work stations, who are assisting the HRS in case of an accident or an incident.

Ensure that the HRS is given humble time during the investigation of the incident and as much time as is deemed reasonable (Phillips, 2016.).

Penalties

The Do More Company had never provided enough information to the workers as they had never been on how to handle such a situation. The information such as what to do when the threader slitting line table had gone off the rails, the lack of information caused the death of Rob Hansen, an employee and according to WHS standards the company would face a penalty of 150000 dollars for a corporate body or a fine of 300,000 dollars for an officer and the PBUC (Nordlöf, Wiitavaara, Winblad, Wijk, and Westerling, 2015.). The failure of compliance of the health and safety duties owed to the workers would also earn the same penalty.

From the mechanical supervisor who was responsible for the machinery from a couple of years, he states that the problem with the threader table clamp had existed for a long period and the company had withheld information to the HRS as it was a safety issue. Also, the withholding of information is seen on the statements by various officers such the health and safety advisor Mr. Fred Hope and Craig Pollard. The penalty for withholding of information according to the WHS act is that it will be treated as an offense (Scanlon, Lloyd, Gray, Francis, and LaPuma, 2015).

Do More company had several officers in charge of several departments within the company. They are involved in different tasks to ensure that there is a smooth running of the manufacturing in the company. The officers include;

Fred Hope is the safety advisor for the company and also is responsible for the compensation and security of the workers. He reported that the incident for Rob Hansen took place around the threader table which lies between the recoiler and the pinch rolls. Fred Hope as a safety advisor had the following duties to uphold.

As an officer, he is required to comply with DO More company obligations.

He is also required to ensure that the workers are well aware of the health and safety policies of the company and they observe them(Mousavian, Mansouri, and Nezhadkurki, 2017).

He is also responsible for the keeping the DO More management well informed if any incident occurs within the company(Yazdani, Neumann, Imbeau, Bigelow, Pagell, Theberge, Hilbrecht, and Wells, 2015).

Fred Hope was also ensured he followed to the latter all the information and implementation required by the Do More company (Brock, 2017).

Fred Hope reported that the accident occurred when there was an overrun of the wheels which started abruptly after being fixed and catching Hansen unawares where he was standing. Hansen was pulled into the clamp which was moving swiftly and was unable to react and save himself. He was caught in between the pinch roll and the lugs causing him to get internal damages and after died in the hospital

Craig Pollard was the slitting line operator. He ensures that the operations run smoothly. On the day of the incident, he was had been asked by the Management to assist Rob Hansen putting back the slitting line threader back on the table as it had come off. He received a request from his foreman, Ima Necte to assist him in repairing the slitting line threader to its rails for full function. He had the obligation of asking the question f his safety as he had noticed that the safety pin was not in place, but he did not do so.

Penalty

In this scenario Craig Pollard and his foreman undertook a task recklessly which caused the life of Hanse, according to WHS act such actions were to be punished and the persons responsible in this case, the above-mentioned individuals were to receive a penalty of 300,000 dollars or five years or both per a person involved in the accident.

According to Joe Rite statement which was the mechanical supervisor during the time of the accident he indicated that the problem had occurred several times and he had been able to handle it without an incident. The Do More Company had no records to show that the problem had occurred and had not done any risk assessment on the problem. The company had also not carried training on the workers and advised the on how to handle the problem if it many occur at any point when Mr. Joe Rite was no around. Due to this negligence, Mr. Rob Hansen paid for it with his life. Also, Mr. Joe Rite had assumed his role as he was the person in charge of the correction of the machinery (Koivupalo, Sulasalmi, Rodrigo, and Väyrynen, 2015.). The company had no written procedure on how to correct the Threader table camp if it came off its rails, with the assumption that Mr. Hansen had the knowledge of fixing the problem without any training was quite dangerous and therefore exposing the fitter to unsafe and dangerous working environment (Stark, Stoessel, Wohlleben, and Hafner, 2015.). This is an offense according to the HS regulation acts, and therefore it has a penalty of;

Penalty

Failing to comply with the safety and health duties owed to the workers by the company which has a penalty of, 50,000 dollars for are individual,100,000 for an officer or the PCBU and 500,000 for a corporate body (Brenner, Neu-Baker, Caglayan, and Zurbenko, 2015).

Also in another way, it would also be said that the company had exposed Mr. Hansen to a risky environment which later caused his death. They did not equip Mr. Hansen with safety equipment and the knowledge required to keep him safe. This was also a violation of the WHS regulations, and the penalty was 300,000 dollars for an individual, 600,000 dollars for PCBU or the officers and 3,000,000 for corporate body Or 5 years for each individual (Abdel-Shafy, and Mansour, 2016).

Joseph sparke, was an officer in charge of the plant engineering department. According to him, he was informed by the managing director, Mr. Leaves at about 8.00 am of Rob Hansen incident. The Unit had had problems, and the engineering department had been asked to check it out a couple of times in the past few years. There had been a modification on the electrical circuits which were to ensure that the machine in question was well suited to performance management its intended function. It appears that the difficulty was a problem to do with clamp creeping down the table after the hydraulics have been turned off for the hydraulic pumps.

Because of the establishment of the new painting facility, he stated that they had not been able to pursue maintenance procedures that had been raised. This issue was due to the new painting facility that had taken all of the resources in the engineering department; they had only decided to take care of the issues that were of top priorities, i.e., are the issues that could stop the production process. For this reason, it was not considered urgent to deploy resources to review the design of the unit or its operations. It had been approved that the existing procedures adequate, provided they were adhered to (Bouwman-Boer, and Crauste-Manciet, 2015.). This was a serious because their assumption left the employees environment unsafe and unhealthy environment which caused the death of one of the employee.

As seen in the statements provided by the various officers in charge of the various departments in the Do More Company, there was plenty of breaches that caused unhealthy environment for the employees and even leading to the death of one other employee. Plenty of steps could have been taken to avoid the unhealthy environment which was quite evident to the workers.
What the workers should have done to avoid this;

The workers have the right to say no to an unhealthy and unsafe environment which can cause harm to their heath and even cause death (Cunningham, and Sinclair, 2015). The provision of the protective gear is compulsory and each individual, i.e., especially the workers and the officers when they are under taking serious issues that may cause harm to them.

The workers should contribute to the decision making especially to issue related to they safety and health. They should be consulted and given adequate training on the various ways to handle the different incidents (Saracino, Antonioni, Spadoni, Guglielmi, Dottori, Flamigni, Malagoli, and Pacini, 2015.).

The company which in this scenario is the Do More Company can be responsible for the following ways to ensure that the environment is safe and health for operation;

They should provide the employees with protective gear and also sufficient training for them to be able to curb any incident that may occur during the working period (Schulte, Roth, Hodson, Murashov, Hoover, Zumwalde, Kuempel, Geraci, Stefaniak, Castranova, and Howard, 2016).

They should provide manual booklets to enable the employees to be able to identify the steps that they should carry out during an incident and therefore they will be able to reduce the amount of causalities (Ceballos, and Dong, 2016.).

The Company should regularly consult with HRs to carry out risk assessment tests and make regular repairs on the units that are most likely to break down so as to avoid harming the employees at any time (Cowan, Cheng, Ground, Sahmel, Varughese, and Madl, 2015).

Also the health and safety representative for ensuring that the company has a large role to play as they are the regulators in the company (Jilcha, and Kitaw, 2017). The company safety and health advisor is responsibly ensuring that the company employees are protected and know their rights;

The advisor for Do More Company did not provide sufficient knowledge to workers on their rights and sufficient training on how to engage and repair units that have broken down (Misiurek, and Misiurek, 2017). This causes the life of Rob Hansen as he was no able to cautiously approach the scenario and solve the issue.

The volunteers that happen to work on the company have specific rules that they are given to the especially by the officers within the company.This will help them be able to avoid getting too unsafe units. These are individuals who are working on a temporary basis whether they are getting payments. Their movement on the company should be restricted to avoid them causing an unhealthy environment or them being exposed to the unsafe environment (Tokar, Benbrahim-Tallaa, and Waalkes, 2015). Example of volunteer workers are the HRs individuals who are investigating an incident for the company.

Conclusion

Do More company was responsible for the death of Rob Hansen as they did not provide a healthy environment. The lack of properly addressing the issue of the slitting line table going off its rails had occurred several times, yet they had not taught all the workers that were responsible for fixing it the safety measure to undertake when repairing it (Kalantary, Dehghani, Yekaninejad, Omidi, and Rahimzadeh, 2015.). The company had not put up the memo after the electrical department had fixed the circuits to automatically turn the motors that were involved in the movement of the slitting line table clamp (Armstead, and Li, 2016.). Therefore Rob Hansen did not expect the unit to operate as it did because it should not have moved when the circuit was put off. The safety pin was not put as required for the purposes of the safety of the workers and avoidance of accidents and other disasters.

References

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