ISO 18001

ISO 18001

Among the obligations imposed on the business owner, is the preparation of a safety management plan. Careful preparation of a plan has important potential for improving the safety and health of workers at the factory, but a plan also creates legal exposure of the corporation and its directors, for several reasons. First there is the concept of acceptable risk which is the basic concept of the regulation which requires the preparation of a comprehensive safety management program, this is a vague concept and it is hard to know in advance how it might be interpreted in court. Acceptable risk is defined in the Risk Regulation as reduced to a defined level to be acceptable by the business owner, taking into account the obligations under the law and the workplace policy of safety. Since this is a subjective definition of the business owner and not one provided in the law, it is difficult to predict the outcome of the determination what is acceptable and hence the risk, uncertainty and increasing legal exposure. Especially it is difficult to understand the precise meaning of the acceptable risk concept, given the fact that the first use of the term and the concept occurred in the regulations of the Labor Supervision Organization and were never mentioned earlier in the Israeli rule book. Another aspect of a safety management program, is the transparent nature of it. Firstly, each employee can review the safety management program and, in addition, it has been transferred to the authorities so that any citizen or resident can apply under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act to review the program. 

We are familiar with the regulatory instructions requiring the preparation of a safety management program and provide legal support for the preparation of such plans. Given that the provisions of this program are bound, at a high level of probability, to be used someday as an admissible document in court, the formulation of the plan, the definition of acceptable risk and other provisions in this program should meet all criteria to be determined in court and should be accompanied by a survey of compliance with the law.