Question 1

Does the OHS Act apply to a small trade business?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The Occupational Health and Safety Act applies to every employer and every workplace in South Africa outside mining and shipping, with no lower size limit, so a plumbing business with two employees is under the same general duty as a factory. What scales with size is the machinery: health and safety representatives are required once a workplace has more than twenty employees, and a health and safety committee once there are two or more representatives. The general duty to provide a safe working environment, to identify hazards and assess risks, to train and supervise, to provide protective equipment and to report incidents applies from the first employee. A sole trader with no employees is outside the employer duties but is still a person on someone else's site and is usually required by the client to follow the site rules. Omni Field keeps the checklists, training records and attendance that a business of any size uses to show the duty was met.

Question 2

Do technicians need a risk assessment for every job?

Accepted Answer

The Act requires the employer to identify hazards and evaluate the risks of the work and to take the measures the assessment calls for, and the Construction Regulations require a written risk assessment for construction work before it starts. In practice that means a risk assessment for each type of work, reviewed when the work or the site changes, plus a site-specific check at the start of each job to confirm the assumptions hold: the roof is as expected, the isolation is possible, the client's site rules are known. A generic assessment for geyser replacements does not need rewriting for every geyser, but the check on the day should be recorded. A checklist completed on the phone before work starts, tied to the job, with a photograph of the isolation or the harness anchor, is that record. Omni Field carries the checklist on the job card and keeps the completed version, with time, place and signature, against the job.

Question 3

What must be reported after an injury on site?

Accepted Answer

Section 24 of the Act requires the employer to report to the Department of Employment and Labour any incident at work in which a person dies, becomes unconscious, suffers a loss of a limb or part of one, or is injured or becomes ill to the extent that they are likely to die or to be unable to work for fourteen days or more. Certain dangerous occurrences with no injury must also be reported, and the General Administrative Regulations set the form and the timing. The scene of a serious incident may not be disturbed until an inspector has released it, apart from what is needed to rescue people or prevent further danger. Separately, the injury is reported to the Compensation Fund for the employee's claim. The employer must keep an incident register. Who was on site, when they arrived, what training they had and which checklist was done are the first questions; Omni Field holds those records on the job and the technician's profile.

Question 4

What training records should a field service business keep?

Accepted Answer

The Act requires the employer to provide the information, instructions, training and supervision necessary for the work to be done safely, and an inspector or a client will ask for evidence that it was provided. The records that answer are: the induction record for each technician, trade qualifications and any registrations the work requires, task-specific training such as work at height, confined space or first aid with the certificate and its expiry, the appointment letters for supervisors and competent persons under the regulations that apply, and the attendance record for toolbox talks and refresher training. Many of these expire and must be renewed, and the failure is usually a certificate that lapsed unnoticed. Omni Field keeps each of these on the technician's certification record with the document uploaded and the expiry date tracked, sends alerts before expiry, and can prevent assignment to a job that requires a certification that has lapsed.

Question 5

Do the Construction Regulations apply to electricians and plumbers?

Accepted Answer

Often, yes. The Construction Regulations define construction work broadly to include the building, alteration, renovation, repair, maintenance and demolition of a structure and the installation of services in it, so an electrician rewiring a house, a plumber replacing a geyser in a roof space or a solar installer on a roof can be doing construction work under the regulations even though nobody would call it a construction site. Where they apply, the client has duties to prepare a health and safety specification and the contractor must produce a plan, do risk assessments, make the competent appointments and, for work at height, have a fall protection plan. Smaller works are exempt from some of the administrative requirements below thresholds the regulations set, but the risk assessment and fall protection duties remain. Omni Field carries the site checklist and the fall protection confirmation on the job card and keeps the appointments and training on the technician record.

The Occupational Health and Safety Act for field service teams

The employer's duties

Regulations that reach trades

What the records need to show

What Omni Field does about this

Questions

Sources