Most employers know they have a general duty to keep people safe. Fewer have read how specifically the Occupational Health and Safety Act words the training part of it, and fewer still have the records to show they have done it.
The duty is not "provide training", it is four things
Section 8 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993 requires an employer to provide and maintain a working environment that is safe and without risk to health. The training part of that duty is expressed as information, instruction, training and supervision. Those are four separate obligations and they are not interchangeable.
Handing somebody a procedure is information. Telling them how to do the task is instruction. Training is what makes them competent to do it. Supervision is what confirms they still are. An operation that has issued a procedure and filed a signed acknowledgement has discharged one of the four, not all of them.
It reaches people who are not your employees
This is the part that catches operations out. The Act does not stop at your own payroll. Section 9 places a duty on the employer toward people who are not employees but who may be affected by the work being done, and section 37 deals with acts and omissions by employees and mandataries, which is where contractors sit.
In practice that means a contractor crew working on your site is your exposure as well as their employer's. Asking to see their training records before they start is not administrative box-ticking. It is how you discharge a duty you already carry.
Records are the part that gets tested
After an incident, the question is never whether you believe your people were trained. It is what you can produce. Attendance registers, assessment records, the certificate and its expiry date, and evidence that supervision continued after the course.
This is why we hand assessment records and attendance registers to your health and safety department at the end of every intake rather than only issuing certificates. The certificate proves competence on the day it was assessed. The file is what proves the system around it.
Where to start if you are behind
Work from your risk assessment rather than from a course catalogue. The assessment tells you which tasks carry the risk, which tells you who needs to be competent, which tells you what training is actually required. Buying courses first and matching them to risks afterwards produces certificates that do not line up with the work.
Then check expiry dates across the whole workforce in one pass. Most operations find the problem is not untrained people, it is lapsed people nobody was tracking.
Sources
- Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993, Department of Employment and Labour
Legislation is summarised for orientation and is not legal advice. Always check the current text of the Act and its regulations, or take advice.
Written by
Ian van Eeden
Director, IMJ OHS Compliance Training (Pty) Ltd
Ian van Eeden is a director of IMJ OHS Compliance Training and the person behind the training content published on this site. He works with mining and heavy industry clients across South Africa, and IMJ delivers its programmes at the client operation rather than from a classroom.