Abstract:

After the industrial revolution, tremendous progress has been made on the industrial technology development. It also significantly promotes the quality of people’s life. However, the well developed industries also cause people’s concerns on industrial safety and environmental pollutions. Industrial safety, health, and environmental management has very close relationship with respecting human rights. This is because “human being” is the most critical element in the industrial safety management, and “human right” is the fundamental need of each individual. This thesis illustrates how to create an excellent enterprise culture and safety, health, and environmental performance through the executions of human rights, as it will be the foundation of enterprise’s sustainable development.

After the industrial revolution, tremendous progress has been made on the industrial technology development. It also significantly promotes the quality of people’s life. However, the well developed industries also cause people’s concerns on industrial safety and environmental pollutions. For example, there was a nuclear reactor explosion incident happened at Chernobyl Ukraine in 1989 which resulted in more than 10 thousands people deaths and severe radiation contaminations in Europe. This incident has triggered plenty of nuclear safety reviews. Another example was the methyl isocyanate (very toxic chemical and raw material of pesticides) release incident in Bhopal India in 1984, it resulted in over 3 thousands people’s deaths and over 10 thousands people lost their sights or seriously injured. The company Union Carbide has went bankrupt due to huge amount of indemnity. The concerns of industrial product safety management have been reviewed globally. In fact, industrial safety, health, and environmental management has very close relationship with respecting human rights. This is because “human being” is the most critical element in the industrial safety management, and human right is the fundamental need of each individual. If we can create an organizational structure and company culture that respects people’s human rights, then the industrial safety, health, and environmental management can be on the right track.

Advanced strategies on industrial safety, health, and environmental management have been one of the critical foundations of enterprises’ sustainable developments under current speedy economic changes in the world. A lot of multinational companies have committed to safety, health, environmental, and human rights by adjusting their organizational structure and company’s core values (like safety, health, environmental, valuing people, etc), they also try to internalize the culture into employee’s mindset. The strategies include:

Leadership’s support and commitment
Integrations of safety, health, environmental, valuing people, and businesses
Use of management systems
The goal of zero

Leadership support and commitment

The enterprises must make solid commitments on safety, health, environmental and human rights, and involve the management into decision making process. Line management is accountable for developing the specific tasks and execution plan. The performance of implementing safety, health, environmental, and human rights will be one of the most important personal performance metrics and needs to be reviewed periodically. Enterprise’s success will heavily rely on the core values of environmental stewardship and human rights. This is also the belief that must be established within the leadership.

Integration of Safety, health, environmental, respecting human rights and business

Enterprises should believe that safety, health, environmental, and human rights are part of the business, as well as good business. If the enterprises can reduce the occupational incidents and injuries, the employees would not go slow at work, absence rate would be lower, work satisfaction would be higher, and the employee’s moral will be promoted. In addition, enterprises must respect the diversity of employee’s language, color of skin, race, religion, age, and sex. Employee’s scope of work needs to be arranged by considering their fitness to work. With that, every employee can devote themselves and create the maximum benefits to the company. In brief, enterprise’s productivity, quality, effectiveness, image, and competitiveness will be much benefited from creating a working environment that respects people, , safety, health, and environmental stewardship.

Use of management system

The goal of enterprise’s safety, health, environmental, and human rights should not only focus on regulatory compliance, it should also include the world citizen’s corporate social responsibility. For example, within the multinational petrochemical and chemical companies, they adapt the Responsible Care management system. The Responsible Care system includes “Community Awareness and Corporate Social Responsibility”, “Environmental Stewardship”, “Process Safety”, “Distribution Safety”, “Employee Health and Safety”, and “Product Stewardship”.

Actually these systems have very close connections with respecting people and the environment.

Community Awareness and Corporate Social Responsibility

In the past, enterprises hesitated to communicate with community around safety, health, environmental, and human rights. However, in the current modern times, as people’s awareness is promoted, more and more enterprises have dedicated themselves on the interactions with their communities. They invite all the stakeholders including employees, community representatives, shareholders, government, and academia to oversight the executions of enterprise’s corporate social responsibility. The most critical success factor for the company to drive corporate social responsibility is the trust from stakeholders. The trust mostly comes from the company’s core values and culture on safety, health, environmental, and respecting people. With good culture and core values in place, thus the company can build up a healthy platform of dialogue with all stakeholders to achieve the mutual visions.

Environmental Stewardship

The company needs to conduct a thorough environmental impact assessment prior to building a manufacturing plant. They also need to try their best to minimize the environmental impact to the community. The plant should take the highest safety, health, and environmental standards from design, construction, commissioning, and production. Inherently safer processes considerations need to be in place to set multi-layers of safety protections with the goal of zero incidents. The enterprises must set a clear and stretch goal of energy and carbon footprint reductions, and achieve the goals by applying projects of energy and greenhouse gas reductions. The company’s environmental policy needs to develop and can only execute well based on the respects of human rights and environment

Process safety

Process safety management has three aspects of personnel, technology, and facility. IT can be divided into 14 elements which include personal training and performance, contractor safety, incident reporting and investigation, management of change on personnel, emergency response planning, auditing, process hazard analysis, process technology, safety work practices and operating procedures, management of change on technology, quality assurance, prestart up safety reviews, mechanical integrity, and management of subtle change. In the manufacturing plants, people adapt this management system to achieve the consensus of safety and health promotion. Enterprises also organize some voluntary programs on safety and health by involving the shop floor employees to promote their ownership. Leadership plays a key role on process safety management. The only way to achieve excellent safety and health performance in the working environment is that leadership recognizes that safety and health is the basic and given human rights.

Distribution safety

Enterprises have the responsibility to verify that all the company’s raw materials, products, wastes, and the whole supply chain process have followed the regulatory requirements on safety, health, environmental, and human rights. At plant sites, warehouses, and supporting units, they must evaluate the potential risks on the product properties, transportation routes, and the consequences once the product leaks. Countermeasures must be developed based on the risk assessment. For transportation companies, periodic training and communications on safety and health must be conducted. Regulatory compliance status must be audited. In addition, emergency response alliance among the government agencies, customers, and distributors must connect well. Enterprises must provide the total safety and health consultation in order to reduce the risk from the customers. Overall, enterprises must respect the human rights and the environment along their value chain by working with the stakeholders on the risk assessment and management.

Employee Health and Safety

Enterprises must believe that employees are the most important assets. Valuing people shall become one of the company’s core values. No enterprises can have sustainable development without healthy employees. Every business units need to have professionals and committees to drive employee’s safety and health programs which improve employee’s working environment and mane sure occupational health can be sustained. Communications and consultations must be provided to all employees.

Product Stewardship

Enterprises must make sure that all the product life cycle must comply with the company policies and regulatory requirements from the aspects of safety, health, environmental, and respecting people. The product life cycle includes design, research, production, sales, distribution, use, recycle, reuse, and waste. Meanwhile, enterprises shall establish the information of product’s potential hazards to safety, health, environment, and human rights and use that as the base while developing the countermeasures for risk management. Sufficient training to employees and contractors must be conducted to ensure they can handle the products safely. Follow the Responsible Care principles to set up the criteria for selecting and certifying contractors, distributors, and suppliers. Audits need to be done periodically and audit results shall be referred as contract selection criteria. For customer side, safety, health, environmental and human right compliance information shall be provided. Customer compliance status needs to be verified to ensure compliance. If not, support the customer to improve. If compliance continues to be an issue from customer side, then stopping sales shall be considered. Overall, what the product stewardship demonstrates is the enterprise’s commitment on safety, health, environment, and human rights through the value chain.

The Goal of Zero

Enterprises shall communicate with all employees that the goal is zero for safety, health, environmental, and human rights related incidents. It’s every employee’s responsibility to achieve that goal, instead of safety, environmental, or human resources managements’ responsibility. Employees can only internalize those concepts in their daily work through continuous improvements on training, communications, and executions. There are many root causes behind the incidents while the at-risk behaviors and factors on safety and human rights are accumulated. The goal of zero can only achieve by mitigating all the at-risk behaviors and factors. Overall, there are several key deliverables to achieve the goal of zero:

Line management’s responsibility

Line management shall communicate with all employees continuously that safety, health, environmental, and respecting people is part of their job. Observations on working environment shall be conducted to realize the safety and human right climate indicators. Managing tools shall be developed to promote the safety and human right awareness. 

Felt leadership

All line management need to involve through employee’s activities and build up employee’s concepts on safety, environmental, and human rights. The overall performance needs to be measured, analyzed, improved, and communicated. All employees can sense the strong felt leadership on the values of safety, health, environmental, and human rights.

Employee’s involvement

Enterprise shall encourage employees to attend the relative activities like safety or human right promotion activities. Incentives shall be provided to motivate participations. Employees will be able to promote their awareness through involvements and then influence others to achieve the growth of whole organization.

Design of safety, health, environmental, and human right promotion programs

Enterprises can design the programs by considering the working environment and characteristics. The programs like monthly activities, safety and human right milestones, which can help employees set specific goal for executions.

For Safety, health, environmental, and respecting people, they are the combination of employee or leadership’s habit, culture, goodwill, and welfare. They are also the competitive advantage and the foundation of enterprise’s sustainable developments. Prior to the 2010 World Citizen