Sacrificing H & S over increase output to deliver on time

In a very competitive business environment, many companies are hard pressed to ensure all customers order are delivered on time.

Price is not the only consideration when customers places new orders.  In many cases, well organized customers will award the order to the suppliers based on the price, available capacity and quality of the produce.

Audit will be made to cover production processes, capacity issue and manpower concern.

Nevertheless, businesses do grow from time to time and if a business entity were able to expand their share in the market by having new customers, those audit report will be rendered invalid.

How does companies deal with the increase of orders, thus, stretching the production capacity to above 100% of the rated capacity of the plant?

There are few option available:-

a) increase manpower to run the production process
b) overtime works are made frequently, including on holiday and weekend
c) expansion of production assets (machines and materials)
d) delaying deliveries to customers (last resort)
e) outsourcing works


Some companies will not be able to add new assets due to lack of space and capital constraints. On top of that, profit objectives override many of the considerations. Delaying deliveries will normally a last resort, to avoid negative records with customers.

Many will go for the easiest option, i.e. workers are asked to work longer hours.


When business profit override all other considerations, when workers are ask to increase output via overtime works, who is monitoring the welfare of the employees?

During the course of my audit and inspection of suppliers site, I have came across workers who hardly have a day rest in one month! Some of these workers are working almost 18 hours per day, 7 days per week.

I cannot stop to wonder, how these workers manage to stay alert on a daily basis.

On the workers part, monetary benefit of higher take home wages override their own well being, If you are a worker from a 3rd world country and your salary is less then USD250.00 per month, working long hours to gain more money to take home is the primary consideration.

 During one of my visits to a China factory a few years ago (understood that, workers safety has improved over there since then), workers are paid on piece rates and there is no control on how many hours a workers can work per day! The bottom consideration was actually, how much these workers want to take back per month in wages!! The factory bosses of course is happy to oblige these workers needs cause there is a hunger for cheap product out from the factory.

The question we have to ask ourselves is at what risk we are taking? What were the probability of  one worker got into an accident due to exhaustion, putting his or her life in jeopardy? Worst, the tired worker may also put their colleagues life into danger.

A tired forklift driver may drive the truck over the shipping dock with a load of material, for example. The end result, he may be killed or seriously injured.

There was an actual incident in a chemical company belonging to a large conglomerate, where a tired workers failed to observe a key process during overtime work and the mixture in the tank flare up and cause an exothermic reaction. The fire department has to be summoned to the plant to prevent a serious incident, including fire.

Normally, companies which chases monetary gains over safety and health issue resort to such practices of uncontrolled overtime works. This is not the only reason,

Other reasons could be as following:-

a) Swallow management skill in solving problem related to capacity matter
b) Lack of health and safety awareness
c) Unable to communicate effectively with customers to plan ahead orders
d) Inferior thought of losing a contract, thus pushing facility to work over the capacity
e) Lack of long term planning to forecast future business expansion
f) Placing corporate and social responsibility at the bottom of the list of priority

To solve this matter and avoid disruption to supply chain, many large organizations are now putting more effort to carry out annual surveillance audits on corporate and social responsibility of suppliers. These audit may not be fool proof as many of the audit are carry out within a day and records could be tampered with, but this is a real start.

These audit will cover, for examples, rest days to employees, controlled overtime work and other workers benefit as required under the legislation.

The key objective of carrying out such a audit is not only to enforce compliance, but also raise awareness to the suppliers and also to the employees.

There are key responsibility from both buyer and seller (customers and suppliers) to ensure profit are made with sacrifices to health and safety issue.