OSH benchmarking success
17 February 2012
IOSH is committed to helping save lives,
prevent suffering and reduce senseless waste across the world. And
so we’re working to raise awareness of occupational safety and
health (OSH) as a fundamental part of a sustainable future.
The global scale of the human and financial toll to be tackled
is enormous:
• 2.3 million people killed by workplace
accidents and diseases
• 337 million workplace accidents
• 160 million people affected by occupational
disease
• Occupational accidents and diseases cost around 4%
of world GDP
So, we’re delighted to let you know that
IOSH’s efforts (together with our colleagues in the Center for
Safety and Health Sustainability) to improve OSH metrics in the
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reporting
guidelines (G4) have progressed well. If adopted, this should mean
that organisations can benchmark their OSH performance
internationally and seek to improve it.
We issued a ‘call for action’ because of
concerns that GRI had received insufficient stakeholder interest in
OSH to warrant any revision. We sought support from around 85 OSH
groups across the world for our 5 new metrics. We also filed
comments with GRI both online (survey) and off, participated in
GRI’s first public workshop on G4, and met the GRI senior
leadership team several times.
GRI have now issued a report on the
consultation results “G4 Development-First Public Comment
Period, 26 August-24 November 2011 –
Full Survey Report 10 February 2012”.
And we’re very pleased to say, following
everyone’s efforts, OSH received a good level of support in the
consultation survey. The report shows that it was the
4th most cited material topic for ‘reporters’, and
topped the ‘Labour’ category, with 25% of all reporters. And 93% of
respondents wishing to see a standard-set for all organisations
chose OSH as a topic, with a large majority of those offering
ideas, citing the same five OSH indicators.
We believe these positive results were largely
due to the strong support from the global health and safety
community, to improve OSH metrics. We’re very grateful to those
IOSH members who took the time and trouble to support us by
completing the on-line survey. Your input really helped make a
difference!
There is still much work to be done of course
to ensure improved OSH metrics are actually
included in the revised guidelines (G4) due in 2013, so watch
this space.
Steve Granger
Immediate Past President and Director CSHS Board
Richard Jones
IOSH Head of Policy and Public Affairs