Health and safety at the workplace
For Bekaert, safety at the workplace is an absolute priority: safeguarding the physical wellbeing of our employees is a basic principle of sustainable operations. Safety is also an essential component of Bekaert’s operational excellence and is the focus of ongoing attention and improvement at all plants and in all regions in which we operate, in the interest of everyone at and near our sites.
Our safety record is good: in several of our plants, there have been no accidents involving absence from work for many years. To help ensure that our vigilance does not weaken, all production plants were asked to include safety-related actions in their annual plan.
In 2009 we organized our second Worldwide Health & Safety Day, to keep the issue high on the agenda throughout our company.
Practical action
Bekaert fine-tuned its monitoring system, which is based on the international OHSAS 18001 standard for health and safety assessment. All plants carry out self-assessments and formulate plans to improve safety, using the internal monitoring system as a basis. Follow-up audits are subsequently carried out in the presence of an accident-prevention advisor.
Training is provided to raise local management’s awareness of its responsibility for safety. A system has been developed which requires plants to report accidents necessitating absence from work via the intranet within 48 hours. Other plants with comparable activities are given additional information about the incident by e-mail, with a view to avoiding similar accidents in the future.
Safety highlights
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Several of our plants are regularly among the winners of the Safety Excellence Awards in North America.
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In 2009, several plants throughout the world celebrated five to eight years without lost-time accidents.