Ohs in the Airline Industry

Introduction

OHS plays an important part in maintaining a healthy and positive workplace. Lack of effective OHS policies can lead to a wide range of harmful effects on the productivity of an organization. Accidents in the workplace can cause substantial losses to an organization’s human capital, create massive losses in labour productivity and decreases the organisations reputation in the market (Saridakis & Cooper, 2013).

Studies have revealed that Human Resource Management plays an important part in an organizations ability to maintain adequate OHS (Saridakis & Cooper, 2013). The HR department’s duty is to align HR practices with organisations OHS goals; this could be in the form of recruitment or training policies (Faulkiner, 2009).

HR plays an important part in the Airline industry, as there are no production lines, human capital is an organisations greatest asset and a company’s performance relies heavily on how cohesively their employees can work together (Boyd, 2003).

The following will be looking at the Big Red Kangaroo Airlines (BRKA) case study in regards to Pernilla’s injury, how/why she was injured, how the organisation could have prevented the injury and the organisations responsibility.

Identify how/why she was injured

As Identified in the case study BRKA have started employing cost cutting HR policies in order to compete with budget airlines. This has led BRKA to hire young, attractive and inexperienced flight attendants. Pernilla being one of these inexperienced staff members hired. On one of Prenilla’s first flights, the aircraft experiences severe turbulence, while Pernilla is the galley making coffee and subsequently gets boiling hot coffee splashed on her arms, chest and face. In spite of first aid provided by her supervisor Pernilla sustains severe burns.

From this it can be seen that there are 4 possible factors that could attribute to Pernilla’s injury.

Pernilla’s lack of experience could be a possible factor according to Boyd (2003), who notes that HR policies to hire inexperience staff are a major factor in OHS related incidents within the Airline industry.

The flight experienced severe turbulence. There are many types of turbulence that a plane can experience but Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) is the most common and can not be detected by radar, seen or accurately forecasted (Fuelberg, 2013: Allright, 2013). However in saying this severe turbulence is extremely rare, pilots will only a few minutes of this type of turbulence in over 10,000 hours of flying and can be seen as an uncontrollable variable (Allright, 2013).

In Western Australia alone, during 2010, burns and scalds injuries at work accounted to over $7 million in costs (Kay, A, 2013).