Legislation, Regulations, and Standards
Core Concepts
Occupational health and safety law generally rests on a general duty clause: employers must take every reasonable precaution to protect workers. Specific regulations then set minimum requirements for particular hazards. Candidates must be able to tell which instrument governs: statute, regulation, code of practice, or consensus standard.
The hierarchy of control is embedded in law in many jurisdictions: eliminate the hazard, then substitute, then engineer controls, then administrative controls, and use personal protective equipment as the last line. Questions often present a scenario where PPE is proposed first; the legally defensible answer usually requires attempting higher-order controls.
Know the internal responsibility system: duties are distributed among employer, supervisor, and worker, and each party has defined obligations. Workers typically have three rights - the right to know about hazards, the right to participate in health and safety, and the right to refuse unsafe work. Refusal procedures are tightly scripted; know that refusal is usually limited to genuine danger and that investigation and reassignment steps follow.
Understand due diligence as the defence: the employer must show it took all reasonable steps - documented hazard assessment, training, supervision, enforcement, and correction. Also know the roles of the regulator, the inspector's powers (entry, inspection, orders, stop-work), and reporting duties for serious incidents and occupational disease.
Traps
- Assuming compliance with a consensus standard automatically satisfies the regulation; standards are often incorporated by reference but may not cover everything.
- Treating the general duty clause as vague and therefore optional - it is the catch-all used when specific rules are silent.
- Believing a worker's signature on a training record alone proves due diligence.
Rule of Thumb
If a hazard can be engineered out, an administrative control plus PPE is unlikely to be accepted as "every reasonable precaution."