Análisis de la influencia de una carga de compresión en el nivel de

OHS performance. In contrast, employers who largely followed a top-down style of management prioritising on fixing the employees’ behaviour, i.e. followed a safe-person approach, performed comparatively poorly.

The weaknesses of implementing requirements on health and safety management predominantly from the safe-person standpoint have been critically assessed by a number of authors. Bohle and Quinlan (2000: 506), for example, argued that in organisations in which employers remain preoccupied with modifying employees’ behaviour or controlling parameters related to the human qualities for improving workplace OHS meet with ‘a dead­ end alley’. They pointed out that in such circumstances the most common approach taken by employers is to train their employees, motivate them and generally take a narrow focus on improving employees’ rule-following behaviour, and cautioned that employers who subscribe to such systems find it difficult to raise their standards of OHS.

Several other studies have also reiterated these findings. They have revealed how employers taking this approach place significant emphasis on employees’ behaviour and attitude (Fahlbruch and Wilpert, 1999), take disproportionate interest in employees’ training and strict supervision (Wokutch and VanSandt, 2000), and focus heavily on employees’ medical screening (Bohle and Quinlan, 2000).

Such ‘fix-the-worker’ approach integrates well with the wider notion that highlights how the role of human element is an important building block in organisational operations. Many studies show that, although, there is a degree of validity on how human input plays a pivotal role in safeguarding workplaces, employers who are biased towards making it their major focus undermine the significance of regulated self-regulation. Authors, such as Denton (1982), Hofmann and Stertzer (1996), Dotson (1996), Krause (1997), Farrington- Darby et a l (2005) argued that such an approach is considerably myopic as it generally overlooks the employers’ primary obligation to provide a safe working environment. Arguing more critically, authors, such as Hale and Hale (1970) and, more recently, Nichols (1997), pointed out that such an approach takes the attention away from the workplace hazards and places the emphasis on identifying the weaknesses in the individual workers. As a consequence, it individualises the workforce and simply reinforces the employers’ control over their workers.

Studies have also shown that using a safe-person approach encourages employers to locate faults with the individual workers. It helps in benchmarking the ‘accident safe workers’ as the desired type. Research by authors, such as Culvenor (1996), pointed out that managers with such a frame of mind tend to focus on the last link in the causal chain of incidents - which, in most cases, are the workers on the production line or the operators of factory machineries. In cases of incident investigations, locating shortcomings of the individuals thus becomes the focal point undermining other underlying causes of incidents. Moreover, studies have also shown that as employers operate free of injuries and incidents for a great majority of the operating period, the employers tend to develop confidence in the success of their operating systems. Thus, when an accident does occur, the careless and the

accident prone workers are generally identified as the cause (Kinnersley, 1973; Mathews,

1986).

The one particular model that has arguably taken this idea to the extreme is the DuPont approach, which almost entirely focuses on employees taking on ‘good safety habits’ and believes that workers’ behaviour should be measured and transformed for improving OHS (DuPont, 2007). However, such model is widely criticised in a large body of academic literature which points to the weaknesses and myopic nature of this approach. Wokutch and VanSandt (2000), for example, highlighted how the DuPont approach merely provides the managers with additional managerial tools to target only what is visible on the surface - ignoring the importance of providing a safe workplace or paying no attention to the underlying social and economic factors such as employment practices, downsizing and production pressures that affect the day-to-day life of the workers.

In the maritime industry the role of the employers in safeguarding OHS requires a careful examination. The ISM Code, which regulates self-regulation in the industry, lays down a series of responsibilities for the employers, such as establishing company’s safety policy (ISM Code section: 2.1), ensuring that all employees are duly qualified (ISM Code section: 6.2) and providing measures to deal with in emergency situations (ISM Code section 8.3). While the ISM Code identifies these operational responsibilities of the managers (employers), it does not mention the employers’ obligation towards conducting risk assessment nor does it mention how and who should conduct it. The Code only places the obligation on the managers to safeguard seafarers from hazards - implying that they should safeguard seafarers from hazards that have already been identified. Equally the Code,

especially in section 6, gives considerable attention to the abilities of seafarers to adhere to the companies’ procedure. Among other features, the Code mentions the need for seafarers’ training, motivation and medical fitness but makes no attempt to highlight how seafarers should participate in managing OHS in their workplaces. By studying the ISM Code in the light of the above discussion, it may be argued that the focus of the Code is considerably skewed towards the ‘safe-person approach’.

Articles from the maritime press also indicate that in practice too ship-managers largely do not concentrate on risk-based management and place considerable focus on rectifying seafarers’ behaviour. They highlight how ship-managers predominantly tend to victimise individual seafarers by blaming them for most mishaps that take place on ships. The ship- managers frequently point to seafarers’ negligence as the most common cause. By taking examples of the practice of incident reporting mechanism of the operation of SMSs, a number of press articles have shown that managers place a disproportionate level of focus on blaming individual seafarers which discourages them from reporting incidents to their managers (see for example, Lloyds List, 2004a, 2007a).

Employers’ commitment: the importance of audit

Moving on, the importance of the use of audit systems by employers to assess the effectiveness of health and safety management systems is also widely acknowledged in the literature. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) guidelines on occupational safety and health management (ILO, 2001b), for example, urge employers to make use of the audit system to assess the effectiveness of the company’s SMSs. It points out that by using the audit system effectively, employers should check for the adequacy of the management arrangements in relation to the risks encountered in their organisations.

A number of studies have also critically investigated the ways employers used audit mechanisms to assess the effectiveness of SMSs. Hopkins’ (2000) case study on the explosion at the Esso Oil plant at Longford in Australia - where two workers lost their lives and many more were injured - serves as an example. The author showed that even though the employer had a SMS in place and conducted audits at regular intervals, Esso failed to identify any weakness in the system. In fact, an audit conducted a few months prior to the accident could not detect the symptoms which subsequently contributed to the cause of the explosion. The author pointed out that the audit system used at the Esso plant failed to

reveal the adequacy and the factors affecting the implementation of the organisation’s risk assessment procedures. It merely inquired the presence of organisation’s SMS and the functioning of management mechanisms. It conveyed only positive messages to the top management of the organisation and failed to communicate its actual effectiveness.

Power (1997) and Parker (2003) in their studies also provided similar arguments. Although their research were based on audits conducted by external entities (regulatory bodies or quality auditing organisations, such as the DNV21) they identified the limitations in the use of audit in OHS management generally. The well known critical work of Power (1997) brought to light the current societies’ disproportionate dependence on auditing. The author pointed out that the commonly used audit systems through their certification mechanism only measure employees’ adherence to SMSs. The author showed that auditors rarely look into the validity of the different elements of SMSs used in the organisations. Instead, they merely ensure that the existing SMSs are in place and workers are adhering to the details of the systems. Such mechanism, the authors cautioned, provided a legitimate tool for reinforcing managerial control over employees.

The views from the maritime industry provide a similar picture on the practice of audit. They cast doubt on the adequacy of the requirements laid out in the Code and also on whether the ship-managers fully realise the potential of the audit mechanism. They highlight, for example, how companies use audits solely as fault-finding exercise. One article (Lloyds List, 2003b), for example, pointed out that auditors use checklists mechanically as their audits reveal very little with regard to how well the SMS is actually implemented. The report argued that such auditing practice was crude as it merely satisfied the procedural formality of the audit and thus turned it into a symbolic exercise.

Frick et al. (2000) after reviewing the debate on the practice of OHS management developed three possible hypotheses with regard to the outcome of regulated self­ regulation: success hypothesis, paper-tiger hypothesis and sham hypothesis. The authors pointed out that the difference in the outcome depended primarily on the employers’ commitment to the implementation of systematic approaches to OHS management. They argued that in organisations where top managements are committed to safeguarding OHS by focusing on detecting, abating and preventing workplace hazards, and engage workers

21 DNV: Det Norske Veritas is a Norwegian based accreditation and certification body for various industrial