Monday, October 02, 2006

Awareness and Knowledge on OSHA 1994

I asked my wife who is currently doing her part-time BEd (TESL) did a survey on awareness and knowledge on OSHA 1994 amongst her course-mates. We used  questionnaires developed by UKM's research team headed by Prof. Dr. KG Rampal, a well known Malaysian Professor of Occupational Medicine.
The following are our findings:
Only 58.3% of respondents had heard or knew about OSHA 1994 as compared to Prof. Rampal's findings -60.5% of 2577 respondents.
87.5% of our respondents mistaken OSHA 1994 with SOCSO Act 1969, while  87.4% of them said OSHA 1994 was enforced by Ministry of Health, Malaysia. 87% of our respondents knew that employers could be charged in court but only 48.5% of them knew that they too could be charged in court for not complying with the act. Our findings is almost similar to Prof.Rampal's findings. 
Although our sample is only 24 but in view of their level of education is STPM and above and majority of them are working with public and private sectors, it is quiet alarming to know the findings.
After OSHA 1994 already enacted for more than 10 years, it is quiet surprising that the target population of workforce are still not heard or knew about OSHA 1994. As OSH Professional we are responsible to disseminate the awareness and knowledge of Safety and Health and its law to the workforce.
Let us increase our effort......
How do we expect the improvement of the level of Safety and Health at workplace, if the worker never heard about the law? 

1 comment:

Wan A. Rafar said...

Thanks for visiting my blog and for this informative postings.