A recent Ministry of Labour (MOL) report states that small employers have a general lack of awareness and understanding of their requirements under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and its regulations.
This comes as no surprise to me; in fact, I write about this exact thing nearly two years ago: Not Knowing What You Don’t Know Is No Excuse. The information for employers is out there, but as business owners you must make the time to understand the requirements.
The MOL initiative focused on new, small businesses, with fewer then 50 employees from April 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019. Full report can be found by Clicking Here.
In summary, the MOL inspectors visited 3,942 workplaces in this time frame, and issued 13,907 orders and requirements under the OHSA, including 184 Stop Work Orders — an average of 3.53 orders and requirements issued per workplace visited.
The MOL inspectors were looking to see if employers were complying with the OHSA and its regulations. Items that they were looking for included:
-
Having a Health and Safety policy and a program to implement the policy in place
-
Up-to-date workplace Violence and Harassment policies and programs
-
Health and safety Representative or Joint Health and Safety Committee (JHSC) established
-
Proper posting requirements posted (OHSA, Health and Safety at Work poster etc.)
-
That Employees have received the mandatory Health and Safety awareness training
The most frequently issued OHSA orders involved employers’ failure to:
Resources for Employers
The MOL has done a great job of compiling resources for Employers to refer to when building your Health and Safety program. I encourage you to set time aside to review what your workplace requirements are and do your own internal audit on your current Health and Safety program.
As a starting point, the MOL provides these FREE resources for employers:
-
Health & Safety at work: Prevention Starts here Poster – can be printed by Clicking Here
-
Health & Safety Awareness Training for Workers and Supervisors – can be taken by Clicking Here
-
Sample Health and Safety Policy can be customized by Clicking Here
-
Sample Workplace Violence Policy can be customized by Clicking Here
-
Sample Workplace Harassment Policy can be customized by Clicking Here
Additional resources that are available that may benefit you include:
-
MOL Health and safety for small businesses webpage
For more information on what your requirements are or if this just seems to be overwhelming to take on, the team at CulturedHR would be happy to help.
