Responsibilities and Duties of Employers

Employers have a duty to ensure the safety of their employees. In particular, they must:

• provide and maintain a safe working environment
• provide and maintain facilities for the safety and health of employees at work
• ensure that machinery and equipment are safe
• ensure that employees are not exposed to hazards
• develop procedures for dealing with emergencies such as accidents, earthquake, fire, and flood.

Employers also have a duty to:

• take all practicable steps to ensure that no action or inaction of an employee harms any other person
• record accidents and instances of serious harm
• immediately notify the Secretary of Labour of any serious harm or accident and report on the occurrence within seven days
• inform and involve employees
• provide supervision and training
• ensure there are effective methods for identifying existing and new hazards to employees
• determine whether hazards are significant.

If a hazard is significant, employers must eliminate them if it is possible to do so. If it is not possible, the next step is to isolate the hazards, and then, if this can't be done, to minimise the hazards.

Ensuring that these duties are performed and that the workplace is safe is often the responsibility of a manager to oversee. They may delegate certain aspects of these requirements to other staff, but in the end the overall responsibility lies with management.