XVIII World Congress on Safety and Health at Work

June 29 - July 2, 2008
COEX Convention Center, Seoul, Korea

According to the International Labour Organization, more than 2 million people die from occupational accidents or work related diseases every year and there are 270 million occupational accidents and 160 million cases of occupational disease by conservative estimates.

Since 1955, the World Congress gathers safety and health professionals every three years to discuss latest safety and health issues, technologies and strategies. The 18th Congress was hosted by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Social Security Association (ISSA) and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) and has drawn 4,550 participants from 121 countries around the world.

UL supported the Congress as a Premier Sponsor and nine UL leaders provided expert sessions and seminars.

Third-Party Assessment: The Solution to Occupational Safety and Health Challenges

	Keith Williams (second from right) reiterates effective role of third-party certification.

In the plenary session, UL’s CEO Keith Williams reiterated the effective role of third-party certification is playing in the proactive system that prevents injury and property loss. He also pointed out the flaws and dangers inherent in the Self-declaration of Compliance (SDoC) model.

The independent third-party certification system is the result of multiple stages of history and learning that can be traced back to a state such as the 19th century US, which was eager to get products to market when worker and consumer safety generally was not taken into consideration. The continued outbreaks of electric fire accidents led to a stage of increased realization of the daily risk we faced, which led to the stage of conscious progress in safety development marked by consensus standards and third-party conformity assessment.

Today, safety became the expected norm and we can begin to forget the lessons learnt and the hard work and deliberate processes that brought success; and today we are starting to see the emergence of the risks associated with the calls for reliance on Self-declaration of Compliance or S-D-o-C.

The SDoC system relies on the manufacturers to test their own products and decide whether they pass or fail.

“Today’s complex supply chains stretch around the world. Manufacturers rely on third-party vendors and subcontractors to produce and assemble components — even entire products and could be unaware of faulty or false declarations by their own suppliers,” noted Williams.

“Being a reactive and remedial system, SDoC will inevitably lead to public outcries after significant events; outcries that will generally end in government regulation. We believe that such regulation will be undesirable and less effective than the voluntary consensus standards and third-party conformity assessment system that works so effectively today.

“Governments around the world recognize the fairness of this (third-party) system and rely on these voluntary consensus standards.

“A century of work has already gone into building the mountain of standards we offer to the entire world free of charge. Embracing these wide ranging standards, can help developing countries and mature organizations alike avoid years of suffering through the trials and errors of independent development,” added Williams.

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