Health and Safety in Today’s Manufacturing Industry

This contribution opens with a review of the process of manufacturing, a glance at current trends in the industry, as well as ongoing occupational health and safety (OHS) issues facing the sector worldwide. The chapter next looks at organizations’ compliance and the influence of legislative bodies on safety outcomes. Mandated safety committees were described as they currently function in the province of Ontario, Canada, as in many other jurisdictions. Research is mixed on the effectiveness of regulation, although the evidence suggests that it specifically addresses more of the technical aspects of worker safety. The contribution devotes considerable time to organization-level OHS practices used in manufacturing companies today (i.e., risk prevention, work reorganization, and health promotion). In doing so, it is appropriate to compare safety culture and climate – two separate but related concepts pertaining to workers’ perceptions of the attitudes and commitment of top management toward worker safety. The last section summarizes a newer approach toward achieving occupational safety that incorporates risk prevention into a broader management system. The final section also evaluates the impact on OHS of other modern organizational practices (i.e., high-performance work systems and lean manufacturing). The conclusion is that, as more and more firms today transform the manufacturing process into higher-value, more productive ‘lean’ systems, now more than ever it is imperative for safety professionals to link safety into everyday practice and remain watchful for unique OHS issues facing the industry.