The advent of an oil and gas industry will challenge Guyana to raise its safety and health game above the currently existing level since that is what will be demanded by any major foreign companies likely to be associated with the industry, going forward, a leading local safety and health official has told Stabroek Business.
“Companies like Exxon and the like are bound to come to the table with their own safety and health standards and those local entities collaborating with them in the recovery process will be required to measure up to those standards,” Dale Beresford, a former municipal safety and health employee, who now runs his own training service, told this newspaper in an interview on Monday.
And according to Beresford there is no evidence up to this time that the country’s health and safety standards are moving in the direction of meeting the requirements associated with the international oil and gas industry. “I suppose it will take time but given the oil recovery timetable there really isn’t a great deal of time available to us,” he noted.
Beresford said that while he was not entirely certain regarding what was happening in the gold-mining industry, “from what we know there is both an absence of adequate official control and an attitude on the part of many miners that does not help the safety and health cause. The mining sector still has a long road to travel.”
Meanwhile, he said he believed that privately run, profit-oriented businesses were, in many instances, prepared to compromise the safety and health of their workers “for the sake of the bottom line. I recall raising the issue with a certain businessman, suggesting to him that in a company like his own it was important that safety audits are conducted. He told me bluntly that the only audits that he is familiar with are financial audits. Frankly, there are some red flag companies as far as safety and health transgressions are concerned.
“To be frank both the public and private sectors have been indifferent to issues of health and safety over the years. There has been a lot of talk, a lot of lip service but by and large that is as far as it goes. There is training going on, but there is evidence that a lot of that training is not being converted into good safety and health practices. I see no real evidence that issues of safety and health are on the agendas of the business support organizations. There is a lot of talk about business growth but I’m not sure that we want to grow businesses at the expense of people’s health and their lives,” he added.
Beresford said that the Ministry of Social Protection formerly the Ministry of Labour had to accept the responsibility “for its own failure to implement and police an effective safety and health regimen that can be applied in both the private and public sectors.”
Asked to express an opinion on the reason for what he described as “an indifference across the board” to good safety and health practices, Beresford said that the state agency responsible for safety and health had failed to give effective leadership.
“We have to begin with expertise. The fact of the matter is that the ministry concerned has failed to stay abreast of evolving safety and health standards globally. Accordingly, our standards are well below those that are required. “In many respects we are out of touch with the present-day realities. We are lacking in both the skills and the technology.”
And Beresford criticized what he said was the sloth of the Ministry of Social Protection in investigating workplace accidents and producing clear and coherent reports, a shortcoming which he said was due in large measure to a scarcity of the investigative skills and the “necessary tools” to conduct investigations effectively. “I have no doubt that there are quite a few accident reports that are yet to be completed,” Beresford said, adding that workplace accident reports ought to be placed in the public domain.
Asserting that there was evidence of inefficiency at various levels of the state-run safety and health administration Beresford said that the manner in which critical safety and health information is disseminated to business houses and to the public leaves much to be desired. Stabroek Business has seen a piece of undated correspondence emanating from the Ministry of Social Protection requiring “factories, shops, offices or workplaces” to apply to the ministry “for the registration of an industrial of establishment,” as dictated in the Occupational Safety and Health Act. However, the document stipulates no time frame for completion of such registration and simply notifies the target groups that “failure to register may lead to action being taken against you.”
Beresford said he considered the Ministry of Social Protection’s communication to be “a good example of the inefficiency that applies in the dissemination of information on safety and health issues.”
