Safety committee
Organize or re-energize your company's safety group

Who is required to have a safety committee?

Minnesota law requires employers with more than 25 employees to establish and administer a joint labor-management safety committee.

If you have 25 or fewer employees, you may still be required to maintain a committee, depending on your company's safety record and your industry. If your company has multiple locations that all do essentially the same thing, one committee is probably adequate. If you have multiple locations of 50 or more employees, a safety committee should be established at each location.

Safety committee make-up

Your safety committee should be made up of a mixed population of employees and management with representatives from both production and administration.

Preferably, employee committee members should be elected by peers or by their collective bargaining agent. If no employees volunteer, the employer can select the employee representatives.

Committee functions

A safety committee's basic duties should include:

• Conducting visual surveys of the workplace to identify safety and health concerns at least quarterly
• Implementing a system to gather safety-related suggestions, and to report hazards and other information from employees
• Conducting regularly scheduled meetings to discuss accident and illness prevention methods, safety and health promotion, hazards noted on inspections and other pertinent subjects
• Reviewing incidents that resulted in injury or illness as well as the "near misses" that didn't result in injury
• Taking action to correct the identified hazards by developing suggestions for management
• Promoting safety and first-aid training for all employees

Make your safety committee as effective as possible

Avoid these top 10 mistakes:

1. Roles are not clearly defined
2. Lack of a budget
3. Inadequate size of the committee
4. Lack of new member training
5. No formalized meeting agenda
6. Lack of follow-up
7. Lack of communication
8. Management domination
9. Lack of employee participation
10. Unable to adapt to change

Download or order the Pak through SFM's online Resource catalog.

Related info:

• How to set up your loss prevention program
• How to analyze an accident so it doesn't happen again
• Accident analysis Q & A