Worker Safety Committee
The Jefferson Lab Worker Safety Committee is empowered to promote and continuously improve work place safety at JLab. The Committee provides JLab management with working level feedback, ideas, and recommendations for improving safety laboratory wide. The committee also provides safety stakeholders - employees, subcontractors, users - with the opportunity for communication of their issues and concerns. This Committee is not intended to bypass existing procedures and processes. Rather, it serves as a vital communication link for highlighting work force safety issues and concerns and as a means for ensuring improvement actions of interest to the work force are initiated and completed.
The Committee members actively engage employees, users, and subcontractors regarding strengths, areas for improvement, and overall perception of Lab safety. Frequent work site walk downs, conversation with individual or small groups of employees from a cross section of the Lab, and comparison results of these observations and discussions among Committee members are key sources of information.
The Committee members have direct access to the Director's Safety Council, or the Director anytime they deem necessary. A Committee member will brief each of these committees at least quarterly.
A message from the Worker Safety Committee:
Dear fellow employees,
The Worker Safety Committee would like to take this opportunity to offer our support for the Jefferson Lab policy on injury reporting. The policy, that all injuries will be reported, serves several functions:
- It allows tracking of first-aid cases as mandated in the contract;
- It allows for trend analysis, so that steps may be taken to prevent further injuries in the future;
- It builds trust among all levels of employees at Jefferson Lab - from senior management to supervisors to line workers - showing that the actual safety of the workforce is more important than the TRC and DART charts;
- It ensures that employees will be compensated for injuries not immediately apparent and helps to identify any subtle injuries that need attention or could need attention in the future.
The reporting is usually as simple as a phone call to the Occupational Medicine office, ext. 7539, explaining the extent of the injury and steps taken toward remediation. In some cases, you may be asked to go to the VARC and have the injury examined. This policy is not only for the worker's protection, it also helps the lab in its ongoing quest for a safer workplace.
Sincerely
Joe Beaufait
Chairman
Worker Safety Committee