U.S. to Suspend Trade Privileges With Bangladesh Over Labour Safety Standards

The NYT reports that the Obama administration on Thursday will suspend trade privileges for Bangladesh over concerns about safety problems and labor rights violations in that country’s garment industry, according to administration and Congressional officials. This follows a factory building  collapse there in April, killing 1,129 workers, and a factory fire killing 112 workers last November. See full article here.

New York Times: U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh

The New York Times reports that American retailers remain sharply opposed to joining an international plan to improve safety conditions at garment factories in Bangladesh as their European counterparts and consumer and labor groups dismiss the companies’ concerns about legal liability. Full article here.

To Compliance and Beyond: Getting the Most From Global Incident Investigation

Michael Tooma and Michael Torrance write about global incident investigation in this month's Mining People and Environment magazine. For more information on this topic see my earlier blog post here on global incident investigation.

Technical Revision of the World Bank Group Environmental, Health, and Safety Guidelines

The World Bank Group has begun a three-year process to review and update its Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Guidelines. More information can be found on the International Finance Corporation (IFC) website HERE.

The EHS Guidelines are technical reference documents with general and industry-specific examples of Good International Industry Practice (GIIP). They contain the performance levels and measures that are normally acceptable to the World Bank Group, and that are generally considered to be achievable in new facilities at reasonable costs by existing technology. They are used by the World Bank, IFC and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA).

OHS and Environmental Incident Investigations: Best Practice in Equator Principles Compliance

Industries like mining and energy know all too well that a health and safety disaster can cost shareholders millions and create untold legal and reputational liabilities. What may not be so well known is that disasters are often averted, not through prescient foresight, but by acting on the warning signs that precede most major health and safety incidents. Those warning signs are identified through one of the most potent tools in the occupational health and safety (OHS) arsenal: incident investigation.

This article discusses incident investigation in the context of mining companies operating in emerging markets, possibly seeking to comply with the requirements of the Equator Principles and IFC Performance Standards. To this end, we introduce a new process for investigation pioneered by OHS expert Michael Tooma in Australia, called the Positive Incident Investigation.