An employee of a food processing company is in charge of a cooling store as the operations manager. Ten employees are working under him and they rely on him for their safety. Every day, the manager is the one in charge of switching on and off the coolers, and opening and closing the entrance to the cooling store. One evening, his subordinates and he are working around the cooling store. That day, they end work late and as they close and leave the store, the manager directs two employees to check on some few parts of the cooling system for some few minutes. As the manager leaves, he locks up the store alongside the two employees, with the cooling systems still on. He leaves for home with the store key. After completing their tasks, the two employees in the store tries to leave but the door was locked. Since they normally leave their phones without the store, they have no means of contacting the manager or any person. They struggle throughout the night to survive the low temperatures and when morning came and the store opened, they were found to have succumbed to the low temperatures.
The incident above clearly demonstrates a violation of the OSHA compliance directives. For one, the manager failed to keep the workplace free of a hazard that led to the exposure of the employees. That came about with the fact that he could have left the keys with the employees or even switched off the coolers. Better still, he would have left the doors open. The hazard was clearly recognized that it could cause a serious physical harm or even death because the temperatures were below ten degrees. The human body cannot sustain such temperatures especially with the fact that the attire of the cooling store was unsustainable for more than three hours. The most obvious feasible and useful method of the correction of the hazard was to leave the keys with the two workers (Heintz, 2017).
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Part II: Interpreting OSHA Standards
The OSHA directive identifies three ways of hazard recognition. They are industry recognition, common sense recognition, and employee recognition. It provides that a hazard that is clearly recognized by an industry in which the employee is not part or does not belong, is insufficient to warrant a violation. Therefore, I begin to think that as long as the rules are not within my workplace, they provide a leeway to go against them. That could be a loophole that could be used by many employees to justify their negligence. However, the following directive provides that there should be common sense recognition. The recognition of common sense is an important element in the issuance of violations (Tapp, L. M., & Bravo, 2017). That is because an employee would begin to think critically and carefully while working around the company. He/she would not only think about his/her safety but also the safety of others. That has also jolted my understanding of the OSHA directives.
The violation definitions are very important and they are not just placed for purposes of adding to the rules but they shape the perspective of how employees think and act, as far as of a hazard and work safety is concerned. Employees can begin to think beyond the rules of work safety and become more creative and responsible for another employee’s life. To further seal the loopholes for negligence, the OSHA hazard recognition strategy includes the employer recognition factor. In that case, even if the hazard is unrecognized by the employer or industry, OSHA can still establish that the hazard would have been recognized by an employee. Owing to that, I think that the hazard recognition method above could get innocent people in trouble sometimes.
References
Heintz, H. (2017). Loftus v. Horizon: Did OSHA Expand the Seaman Protection Act Too Far. Tul. Mar. LJ , 42 , 137.
Tapp, L. M., & Bravo, I. (2017, January). Safety Training Activities for the Ten Most Violated OSHA Violations. In ASSE Professional Development Conference and Exposition . American Society of Safety Engineers.
