The Pitfalls of Not Following OHS Practice

Belinda J Darling http://jtahealthsafetynoise.com.au 1m 310

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

As the demands of your working day, and the demands of turning a profit in your business take over, it can be easy to start thinking that OHS is there only to make life difficult. It may seem like it’s there to make simple tasks into complex tasks, or to ruin the efficiency of your work. Stop thinking like that.

The reasons that OHS is important will actually never reveal themselves to you if you follow OHS correctly. If you do everything right, you will avoid the hideous life-ruining accident that you’re working against and you’ll understand the value of OHS only in the continuation of normal work and normal life. If you are worried that you don’t have a proper understanding of modern day OHS, or that you won’t be able to institute it properly, then hire an OHS expert.

OHS is preventative, not curative. The pitfalls of ignoring it, that means, are the reasons for following it. Without OHS practice you take your company and your workers back to the seventeenth century, when the concept of human rights didn’t properly exist and when safety and dignity only existed for the upper classes, and the life of the lower classes didn’t matter. Even office jobs need strict OHS practice, even though the risk might seem low.

As empathy developed into ethics, we began to agree that every person has dignity should have basic personhood respected. During the twentieth century, these values segued into governmental standards for protecting workers across the world, and OHS emerged. Without it, you risk the lives and the health of your workers. It also makes your company look bloody terrible. Surely none of the work that you’re doing is worth the lives of the people working for you. Is it? If it’s not, you should be following OHS practice. Simple as that.

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