Search results

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the understanding of industrial safety signs and messages by registered and non‐registered safety officers in Hong Kong with ten different user factors, and examine the relationship between cognitive sign features and sign comprehensibility.

The research methodology includes the survey development and appropriate statistical analyses. In total, 92 Hong Kong Chinese participated voluntarily in the study. A questionnaire survey was used to collect information about demographics, personal experience on safety and health issues, experience of reviewing safety sign information, comprehension scores, and the ratings of sign features for 30 industrial safety signs used in Hong Kong. The effect of ten user factors on sign understanding for the design of highly usable safety signs was examined.

Of the ten factors tested, only the factor of possession of registered safety officer (RSO) status was a significant predictor of comprehension performance. As expected, comprehension scores varied with the cognitive sign features of familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, and meaningfulness.

The currently used industrial safety signs should be redesigned as soon as possible, with careful consideration of cognitive sign features. To make the results more generally applicable, further research is needed to collect more data, particularly from females.

This research suggests that an effective education program for promoting the intended messages of industrial safety signs in various industries and work environments should be conducted as soon as possible. Safety officers, especially those who work in the construction industry need to play a more prominent role in ensuring workplace safety, and in transferring safety knowledge to the workers.

There is a need to enhance RSOs' risk perception and to increase awareness of the importance of safety signs through training programs, so as to improve workplace safety and organizational safety culture. The redesigned safety signs need to be launched with a public education program.

The paper's findings emphasize the need to create awareness of the importance of industrial safety and promote understanding of safety sign meanings amongst people in their work environments. Useful information for the design and use of safety signs was generated.

In a recent article in this journal Geoffrey Stuttard argued that the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 which provide for union appointed safety representatives have important implications for extending industrial democracy. The essence of this line of argument is that the subject area of workplace health and safety, which has for so long been dominated by unilateral management decision making at the individual workplace and a framework of common and statute law that has taken a highly “paternalistic” attitude towards the issue of employee and union involvement, is to become at least an area of extensive joint discussion, and possible one of joint decision making.

This paper presents a review of published literature on robot reliability and safety. The literature is classified into three main categories: robot safety; robot reliability; and miscellaneous. Robot safety is further categorized into six classifications: general; accidents; human‐factors; safety standards; safety methods; and safety systems/technologies. The period covered by the review is from 1973 to 2001.

A review of safety‐technology, applicable safety‐related standards and the impact on the use of robots in industrial environments.

Technological developments are presented in safety‐related control technology, including programmable safety controllers, configurable safety controllers, safety networking and robotic safety in human environments. The technological developments are related to new and emerging safety standards.

The development of safety‐related technology and new international and European standards have fundamentally changed the way in which safety is now being engineered in industry. The introduction of new standards and revision of others have allowed safety‐related systems to utilise “state of the art” electronic, programmable, and network based technologies. New international standards are likely to include collaborative working with humans in the robotic workspace. This is set to change how robots are utilised in manufacturing environments.

The review of applicable standards and technical developments: with examples from current research and new technologies, demonstrating engineering solutions that embody the principles of the new standards.

The main purpose of the present study is to develop appropriate construct to benchmark occupational health and safety performance in industrial setting so that deficiencies can be highlighted and possible strategies can be evolved to improve the performance.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA), being a robust mathematical tool, has been employed to evaluate the safety performance of industries. DEA, basically, takes into account the input and output components of a decision‐making unit (DMU) to calculate technical efficiency (TE). TE is treated as an indicator for safety performance of DMUs and comparison has been made among them.

A total of 30 Indian organizations under three industrial categories such as construction, refractory and steel are chosen for comparison purpose. It has been observed that safety performance of construction industries is consistently low as compared to other categories of industries. TE has been calculated using two types of models of DEA such as constant return to scale (CRS) and variable return to scale (VRS). A paired two‐sample t‐test indicates that TEs obtained using two models are significantly different. Mean efficiency of 30 samples is found as 0.898 using CRS model whereas same is calculated as 0.942 using VRS.

The limitations may be number of input and output components considered for each DMU. If different set of inputs and outputs may be considered, the results may be different. Another limitation may be the number of industrial sectors considered in the study.

The method, being a generic one, can be adopted by the managers to assess present safety performance and find a suitable peer to which, it should follow to improve own TE followed by in what respect it has to improve. Industrial safety and occupational health concerns in industries is not only important from government regulation point of view but also essential for enhancing productivity and profitability to become competitive in the marketplace. The practical limitation may be collection data quantitatively from various DMUs because many a time the DMUs are unwilling to share data.

This work proposes use of simple mathematical tool like DEA for benchmarking based on safety performance in Indian industries. In Indian context, safety performance of industrial settings has hardly been assessed. The study provides a simple but comprehensive methodology for improving safety performance. The study also outlines comparative evaluation of safety practices in different industries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the present structure of the Korean disaster-safety industry and propose ways to promote it.

The background of the emergence of the disaster and safety industry in Korea is reviewed, and business networks of 91 companies belonging to the disaster and safety industry in Korea are identified and analysed through a network analysis.

Korean Government is struggling to nurture the disaster and safety industry as it has been on last few decades. This paper finds that the current industry has an ambiguous market structure, and the industry tends to depend highly on the demand of public institutions.

The concept of the disaster and safety industry is not well established in other countries except for Korea. If Korea successfully fosters its disaster and safety industry through its proper understanding, it would bring both disaster risk reduction and economic benefits.

This paper analyses the market structure of the disaster and safety industry, which is uniquely emerging in Korea and rarely designated as an industry in other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the underlying hazards of human‐mimic human‐collaborative industrial robots.

Preliminary hazard analysis is applied to a new industrial upper‐body‐humanoid under development. The result of the analysis is summarized by Fishbone diagram analysis.

Six hazard categories involving a four‐class physical human robot interaction hazard classification are derived from the analysis.

The method of analyzing hazards presented here and the hazard theory derived from the analysis can be used in other developmental projects.