Today, it is paramount that you ensure that you protect your business. We buy insurance to cover our liability, our automobiles, our life and health and we have insurance coverage that is mandated by the government to cover employees if they are hurt on the job.
As the owner of your business, you have put countless hours into starting up your business and growing it to the point that you have been able to hire some help, whether it be employees, volunteers or contractors for specific areas of your business. But you think Health and Safety isn’t your concern with contractors and your one or two employees can wait until there is a full staff on site, or you have unpaid interns or students doing co-op work for you. Unfortunately, the liability that you are exposing yourself to can ruin all of your hard work with one employee becoming injured or sick.
· Note that Bill 18 – Stronger Workplaces for a Stronger Economy Act, 2014, states that unpaid or paid interns and students are treated the exact same under the Occupational Health and Safety Act as your employees.
· Under the construction regulations (Regulation 213/91), the constructor (Contractor) must have their own coverage and programs in place, and it should be approved by you including documentation in order to have them working for you.
Although you may not responsible for the contractors like you are employees unless you fall under the definition of a constructor, you have a duty to ensure you take every reasonable precaution to ensure the safety of your workers. Ensuring your contractors have their own health and safety program in place will help you prove due diligence in case there is an injury or illness.
As the owner, there are responsibilities that you need to be aware of your responsibilities and take into consideration when it comes to the health and safety of your workers. By doing this, you will be taking every reasonable precaution to protect the people that work for you and others. Some of those responsibilities will include:
· Having definite procedures in place to identify and control hazards in your workplace.
· Having a hazard reporting procedure in place stating when hazards and unsafe conditions need to be reported, including who to report them to and monitoring until they are controlled
· Holding supervisors, managers and workers accountable for safety and health
· Keeping records of your program activities and improvement
· Training your employees on safety awareness, hazard awareness, their rights and responsibilities and how they can participate in health and safety in the workplace and keeping records of such training and renewing it as required
· Reviewing your policies and procedures at least once a year and make improvements as needed
· Investigate unsafe situations or incidents and develop corrective actions and follow through with them
· Regularly inspect your workplace and document your findings
· Take corrective action and discipline employees, contractors, volunteers or any other persons that violate your safety policies and document these occurrences
You may already comply or have someone in place assisting you with your Health and Safety program whether it is an employee dedicated to this role or an outside provider, or you may not know where to begin and have little to none of these in place. If you fall into the latter category, do not panic. You may not realize that you currently do some of these things, but you may not document them. Start to document what you are doing, and you will improve your chances.
If you do not have the capability to have a dedicated health and safety staff member, contact an outside health and safety consultant like myself to gain some assistance, whether it is finding out what you need to do or helping you with creating policies and procedures. Leaving this until you are forced to comply may cost your company thousands of dollars in one shot, where a steady expense can be built into your current budget and show you are dedicating resources to your health and safety program.
If you have further questions or would like to learn more, please contact me at 416 984 1107 or doug@sooleyssafetyservices.ca.
Remember, Prevent, not React. At Sooley’s Safety Services, that’s what we do.
