Chapter 20 - Business management, health and safety, and environmental quality: An assessment of trends

Abstract

Environmental as well as occupational health and safety regulations have given a progressive emphasis to the identification of personnel having specific responsibilities for the design, implementation, and day-to-day management of regulatory compliance programs. Environmental quality and human health and safety define the basic context in which all other business objectives are to be pursued, and that all corporate employees will be held responsible for the effective and efficient integration of health, safety, and environmental (HSE) policies with all workplace activities. The corporate employee who is assigned programmatic environmental or health and safety responsibility is typically a low-level manager, supervisor, or technician who has little if any discernible authority on key corporate decision-making or over any substantive planning or production-related process. In such a situation, it is not surprising that the safety officer usually becomes preoccupied with actual health and safety incidents and regulatory compliance failures rather than effectively managing a comprehensive health and safety program—or that the workplace continues to be the focus of governmental and social concern about human health and environmental quality. The only practical way to ensure that the authority of corporate safety officials commensurate with their responsibility is to extend that authority to the extent required for the effective managerial control of the sources of health and safety hazards and of all circumstances that may contribute to or is affected by human exposure to those hazards.