Human Rights Watch – Clothing Companies in Bangladesh Not Complying with Safety Plan

/

After the 2013 garment factory collapse that killed 134 and injured over 1,000 workers in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi government and several U.N. agencies joined with global clothing companies in adopting a plan which would improve workplace safety across Bangladesh’s vast garment industry, the second largest in the world. Unfortunately, per New York-based group Human Rights Watch, many of these companies are not complying with the minimum disclosure guidelines outlined in the safety plan.

Read More

Leatherhead Food Research: EU Food Safety Law to Provide Framework for UK Regulations

/

Leatherhead Food Research managing director Chris Wells has said that post-Brexit UK food safety law will likely import much of its framework from existing EU regulations. He also stated that increased border security could lead to shorter shelf-lives of UK food and beverage exports, making those industries less competitive in the European marketplace; Europe is the UK’s biggest export market for food and beverage products

Read More

World Day for Safety and Health at Work Encourages Reporting of Workplace Casualty Data

/

April 28 was the annual World Day for Safety and Health at Work, an awareness-raising campaign started by the International Labour Organization in 2003 to focus attention on occupational safety & health issues around the world. The theme of this year’s event was the need for countries to collect and report reliable OSH data, in response to Target 8.8 of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which calls for countries to report “frequency rates of fatal and non-fatal occupational injuries, by sex and migrant status.”

Read More

After Numerous Deaths in Israel, Construction Safety Inspection Force to Grow from 18 to Over 2,500

/

With dozens of construction workers dying on the job in Israel every year, the Social Affairs Ministry wants local governments to start taking responsibility for their safety. On March 28, the Occupational Safety Administration sent letters to municipalities across Israel detailing three new orders to be followed immediately, one of which would make municipal building inspectors check for safety regulations, effectively increasing the number of construction safety inspectors from 18 to over 2500 - more than enough for the estimated 13,000 active worksites in the country.

Read More

Hong Kong Self-Storage Facilities Comply with Less than 5% of Fire Safety Citations

/

In the wake of two fatal self-storage facility fires last summer, Hong Kong’s Fire Services Department (FSD) inspected 885 self-storage facilities, issuing 2,548 fire hazard notices to 453 operators. According to Permanent Secretary for Security Joshua Law Chi-Kong, as of late February operators had only complied with 117 (4.6%) of these notices. Law also revealed that the HK Buildings Department had issued 976 separate orders around the same time, of which only 11 (1.1%) were complied with.

Read More