Denise Dodd is a Vancouver musician who told me about a very noisy job she had long ago. It wasn’t playing music that gave her a headache every night – it was selling flowers on a bar circuit in Edmonton back in the 90s.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
I visited a conference for construction safety workers who want to “bridge the gap” in their knowledge about the industry’s health and safety issues. At the tradeshow, I chatted with lots of safety product vendors and service consultants, then I went to a seminar called Pre-Inspection to Ensure Your Protection (nice rhyme!)
Jennie Inkster, safety coordinator for the City of Kamloops, completed a set of written emergency procedures for dealing with chlorine leaks. Then she tested them with the local fire department during NAOSH Week 2011. Kamloops earned three NAOSH Awards: in Best New Entry at the national level and in BC’s Local Government category and Best Presentation of Theme.
If you put people first, everything else will fall into place – including safety. That’s the message from Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks who helped grow the company from 28 stores to more than 15,000 on five continents.
It was exciting to see history in the making on Oct. 27 when 23 CEOs and senior managers signed BC’s first safety charter – similar to documents signed in Newfoundland Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.
NAOSH Week organizers suggest different ways to participate – one of which is “setting new goals for workplace health and safety.” That’s what the health and safety committee did at Tourism Whistler, winner in BC’s NAOSH Week Tourism/Hospitality category.
I found lots of great stories to track down and tell after looking at the list of NAOSH and Canadian Society of Safety Engineering (CSSE) Achievement Recognition awards. Winners were honoured October 20 at the 2011 Safety Forum and Awards ceremony in Langley, and I’ll be following up to find out more about what they did.
Sharon Barbour met with hundreds of young people when she worked for the BC Federation of Labour’s Young Workers program a few years ago. She was always very clear about the worker’s right to refuse unsafe work, but many were already concerned that speaking up would mean losing their jobs.
“Many supervisors recount stories of fear when they took over. They talk about how scared they were of making a mistake and not really knowing where to turn when they had questions or problems,” says safety officer Mike Tasker, one of the people who helped create WorkSafeBC’s new online course for supervisors.
