Workplace incident Inquiry

[Ali Arman Khurshid]

Hi all, This is a question for a friend.

My friend is in charge of workers and a process in a certain chemical plant where a safety incident has occurred on a worker and he was injured. This happened whilst my friend was not on duty/call. The immediate supervisor of the worker failed to inform my friend or anyone else about the incident. The supervisor works under my friend and told him the next morning. My friend knew that the supervisor was in trouble so he wanted to take a day to sort out the problem, whilst doing that, someone from management found out about the incident and has suspended all parties involved for an investigation. My friend is worried that he might get fired as this is what this type of suspension usually means.

My question is would it be a bit excessive of the management of this certain chemical plant to fire my friend? He understands that he should have informed management as soon as he found out the next morning, but he didn't as he wanted to help his supervisor in finding a better solution to the incident he was put in.

I would appreciate your feedback

 

[EmmanuelTop]

Hiding the incident i.e. keeping the information for yourself, for whatever reason(s), is considered a violation of HSE practices and - in many places - even as a criminal act. I am very much sure it is against the standards of your friend's company as well.

There is an obvious fault in this case because they've had a real safety incident in which someone got hurt, yes they failed to react intentionally. That is the whole difference.

Dejan IVANOVIC
Process Engineer, MSChE

 

[drawoh]

Ali Arman Khurshid,

Given that we do not know what industry this is, what company it is, what sort of safety culture the company has, what sort of office politics are going on, how severe the accident was and how severe it could have been, I don't think we can answer your question.

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JHG