Industrial safety engineering (safety in work enviroment) Term Paper

Industrial safety engineering (safety in work enviroment) - Term Paper Example The government regulations on organizational safety and health (OSHA) demand that organizations maintain health and safety standards to ensure that their employees work in a minimum risk working environment. Failing to comply with these regulations attracts legal penalties that often are consequential to the organization. One of the superior ways of maintaining health and safety within an organization is educating the employees on the need for safety in a working environment and the minimum safety level requirements demanded in the organization. The management should thus be aware of how to induce effective training programs and how to align the employees towards the managerial objectives as far as health and safety is concerned within the work place. In reality, employee training is a key strategy to minimization of accidents, illnesses and death in work environments. Safety and health are two closely related terms yet very distinct in an industrial setting, hence the need to separa te them. Goetsch (2008), an industrial and safety professional, define safety in an organization as the ability to keep the employees away from the accident-causing situations that might cause damage, injury or even kill the employee. For instance, in an engineering firm, engineers have to operate electrically driven machines such as conveyor belts and grinders. When such machines come into contact with human beings, they are likely to cause accidents, some of which may be fatal. As such, it is crucial to safeguard the life of an employee from such machines to avoid unnecessary accidents in an organization. On the other hand, health maintenance refers to the ability to protect employees from disease causing environments. In industrial organizations, say a manufacturing plant, employees are exposed to smoke that may cause lung diseases. In this light, organizations have a core responsibility to avoid accidents and industrial related diseases within the employee population. In the Uni ted States the Organizational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) provides the standards that industrial organizations should comply with. The OSH Act provides that each business organization has a general duty to ensure that their employees are safe and free work environment hazards. Each year, the federal government, through their safety supervisors, conduct random safety inspections to observe whether organization have applied safety programs that comply with the OSHA standards. Over 50, 000 organizations are scrutinized and failure of compliance attracts fines, penalties and even temporary or permanent closure of organizations. One requirement of the OSH Act is that the employees have the â€Å"right-to-know† the health risks and conditions of the organization before they are assigned to their duties (United States Department of Labor, 2013). Resultantly, the act recommends that every organization implement an employee training program to ensure that employees are aware of the d angers that they risk in their working conditions. In essence, the implementing a health and safety training program is a compulsory requirement for every organization. Putting the legal side of organizational health and safety aside, a healthy working environment has many economic benefits to the organization. Burton (2008) points out to the high financial cost that organizations pay for failing to implement standard work environment conditions. First, unhealthy employees are likely to absent from