Do more manufacturing company is involved in the buying of both coated and uncoated coils made of steel and processing them according to the desires of their clients. The process that they major in include shearing the coil, painting them and packing the end product according to the desire of their clients. The company has different units of machines that are engaged in the production process; the machines include a paint line, a shear line and a slitting line. The company has existed for over forty years and has 400 employees currently. It has severally resisted from being knocked out of the market by various multinational cooperatives over the past decade. It has three departments, i.e., the engineering, fabrication and electrical service department in charge of the smooth running of the production process in the company. The workers have overtime jobs and take three shifts per day and are given one day of the month for leisure activities.
There are individuals who are in charge of the various departments. Fred Hope is the safety advisor for the company and also is responsible for the compensation and security of the workers. The company is quite serious about the employees’ health and safety and has even formulated programs that are under the watch of Fred Hope. As most of the accidents are caused by machines training for the health and safety program is mandatory to all employees as required by the work health and safety act 2011 (Yuan, Khakzad, Khan and Amyotte, 2015, pp.57-71). The health and safety program is outlined as shown below;
Slitting line operation involves the slitting of large steel metals into small pieces of coils that can be easily used by customers for different purposes. The slitting line is an integrated machine made up different parts and powered by hydraulic energy, and the parts are moved using electrical motors. The Do more slitting line has the capacity of taking up to 29500 kg mass by 1900 mm width and 4.5mm thickness of steel that can go in per unit. The coil that goes in is uncoiled and slit along its length as per what the customer had ordered. The slit strip coils are rewound and then packed as required by the clients. Along this slitting line is where the accident occurred.
The do more company is the company conducting the business, and it therefore has the largest responsibility towards the health and safety of all its employees. The WHS act ensures that the responsibility of the health and safety conditions goes beyond the relationship between the employer and the employees to even secure future risks and new arrangements in work (Amponsah-Tawiah, Ntow, and Mensah, 2016, pp.12-17). The Do More Company has the following responsibilities as the owners and conductors of the business.
The company had various shortcomings that did not comply to the work health and safety act, therefore leading to the death of one of their employees through an accident.
The Do More Company had never provided enough information to the workers as they had never been on how to handle such a situation. The information such as what to do when the threader slitting line table had gone off the rails, the lack of information caused the death of Rob Hansen, an employee and according to WHS standards the company would face a penalty of 150000 dollars for a corporate body, 50,000 dolars per worker involved in the accident or a fine of 300,000 dollars for an officer and the PBUC (Nordlöf, Wiitavaara, Winblad, Wijk, and Westerling, 2015, pp.126-135). The failure of compliance of the health and safety duties owed to the workers would also earn the same penalty.
From the mechanical supervisor who was responsible for the machinery from a couple of years, he states that the problem with the threader table clamp had existed for a long period and the company had withheld information to the HRS as it was a safety issue. Also, the withholding of information is seen on the statements by various officers such the health and safety advisor Mr. Fred Hope and Craig Pollard. The penalty for withholding of information according to the WHS act is that it will be treated as an offense (Scanlon, Lloyd, Gray, Francis, and LaPuma, 2015, pp.27-37).
Do More company had several officers in charge of several departments within the company. They were involved in different tasks to ensure that the production process was a smooth running during the manufacturing period in the company. The officers include;
Fred Hope who was the safety advisor for the company and also is responsible for the compensation and security of the workers. He reported that the incident for Rob Hansen took place around the threader table which lies between the recoiler and the pinch rolls. Fred Hope as a safety advisor had the following duties to uphold.
Fred Hope reported that the accident occurred when there was an overrun of the wheels which started abruptly after being fixed and finding, Hansen unprepared, on the site that he as trying to fix the machine from. Hansen was pulled into the clamp which moved swiftly giving him les time to react and was crushed by the unit and suffered internal damages. He was caught in between the pinch roll and the lugs causing him to get internal damages and later succumbed to the injuries and lost his life in the hospital.
Craig Pollard was the slitting line operator. He roll was to ensure that the operations in the slitting line ran smoothly. According to his statement, on the day of the incident, he was had been asked by the Management to assist Rob Hansen to put back the slitting line threader on to the table that had come off its rails. He had received the request from his foreman, Ima Necte to assist him in repairing the slitting line threader to its rails for it to fully function. He had the obligation of asking the question about his safety and that of his colleagues as he had noticed that the safety pin was not in place, but he did not do so.
According to the statements given, Craig Pollard and his foreman undertook the task recklessly, as the unit had failed several times before and they saw the work as normal routine, which caused the life of Hanse, according to WHS act such actions were to be punished and the persons responsible in this case, the above-mentioned individuals were to receive a penalty of 300,000 dollars or five years or both per a worker involved in the accident.
According to Joe Rite statement who was the mechanical supervisor during the time of the accident he indicated that the problem had occurred several times and he had been able to handle it without an incident. The Do More Company had no records to show that the problem had occurred and had not done any risk assessment of the problem. The company had also not carried training on the workers nor advised them on how to handle the problem if it occurred in future at a point where Mr. Joe Rite was not available to fix the problem. Due to this negligence, Mr. Rob Hansen paid for it with his life. Also, Mr. Joe Rite had assumed his role as he was the person in charge of the correction of the machinery (Koivupalo, Sulasalmi, Rodrigo, and Väyrynen, 2015, pp.128-139). The company had no written procedure on how to correct the Threader table camp if it came off its rails, with the assumption that Mr. Hansen had the knowledge of fixing the problem without any training was quite dangerous and therefore exposing the fitter to unsafe and dangerous working environment (Stark, Stoessel, Wohlleben, and Hafner, 2015, pp.5793-5805). This is an offense according to the HS regulation acts, and therefore it has a penalty of;
Failing to comply with the safety and health duties owed to the workers by the company which has a penalty of, 50,000 dollars for are workers,100,000 for an officer or the PCBU and 500,000 for a corporate body (Brenner, Neu-Baker, Caglayan, and Zurbenko, 2015, pp.469-481).
Also in another way, it would also be said that the company had exposed Mr. Hansen to a risky environment which later caused his death. They did not equip Mr. Hansen with safety equipment and the knowledge required to keep him safe. This was also a violation of the WHS regulations, and the penalty was 300,000 dollars for a worker, 600,000 dollars for PCBU or the officers and 3,000,000 for corporate body Or 5 years for each individual (Abdel-Shafy, and Mansour, 2016, pp.107-123).
Joseph Sparke, was an officer in charge of the plant engineering department. According to him, he was informed by the managing director, Mr. Leaves at about 8.00 am of Rob Hansen incident. The Unit had had problems, and the engineering department had been asked to check it out a couple of times in the past few years. There had been a modification on the electrical circuits which were to ensure that the machine in question was well suited to perform its intended function. It appears that the difficulty was a problem to do with clamp creeping down the table after the hydraulics have been turned off for the hydraulic pumps.
Because of the establishment of the new painting facility, he stated that they had not been able to pursue maintenance procedures that had been raised. This issue was due to the new painting facility that had taken all of the resources in the engineering department; they had only decided to take care of the issues that were of top priorities, i.e., are the issues that could stop the production process. For this reason, it was not considered urgent to deploy resources to review the design of the unit or its operations. It had been approved that the existing procedures adequate, provided they were adhered to (Bouwman-Boer, and Crauste-Manciet, 2015, pp. 551-584). This was a serious because their assumption left the employees environment unsafe and unhealthy environment which caused the death of one of the employee.
As seen in the statements provided by the various officers in charge of the various departments in the Do More Company, there was plenty of breaches that caused unhealthy environment for the employees and even leading to the death of one other employee. Plenty of steps could have been taken to avoid the unhealthy environment which was quite evident to the workers.
What the workers should have done to avoid this;
The company which in this scenario is the Do More Company can be responsible for the following ways to ensure that the environment is safe and health for operation;
Also the health and safety representative for ensuring that the company has a large role to play as they are the regulators in the company (Jilcha, and Kitaw, 2017, p.372). The company safety and health advisor is responsibly ensuring that the company employees are protected and know their rights;
The volunteers that happen to work on the company have specific rules that they are given to the especially by the officers within the company. This will help them be able to avoid getting too unsafe units. Proper clothing should be worn according to the work health and safety regulations when the visitors or volunteers are going in to a high risk area of the industry, in order to protect the individuals from physical and mental harm. Failure to follow the regulation it is a breach and serious penalties will be put upon the management. These are individuals who are working on a temporary basis whether they are getting payments. Their movement on the company should be restricted to avoid them causing an unhealthy environment or them being exposed to the unsafe environment (Tokar, Benbrahim-Tallaa, and Waalkes, 2015, p.375). Example of volunteer workers are the HRs individuals who are investigating an incident for the company.
Conclusion:
Do More company was responsible for the death of Rob Hansen as they did not provide a healthy working environment for the employees. The issue of the slitting line table going off its rails had occurred several times and the Company lack had not properly addressed the issue, even yet they had not taught all the workers that were responsible for fixing it the safety measure to undertake when repairing it (Kalantary, Dehghani, Yekaninejad, Omidi, and Rahimzadeh, 2015, p.215). The company had not put up the memo after the electrical department had fixed the circuits to automatically turn the motors that were involved in the movement of the slitting line table clamp (Armstead, and Li, 2016, p.6421). Therefore Rob Hansen did not expect the unit to operate as it did because it should not have moved when the circuit was put off. The safety pin was not put as required for the purposes of the safety of the workers and avoidance of accidents and other disasters.
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