Employee Health and Safety Practices: An Exploratory and Comparative Study of the Shipping and Manufacturing Industries in Ghana

Abstract

The state of employee health and safety in the shipping and the manufacturing industries in most developing economies remains largely unexamined. The purpose of this study was to examine employee health and safety practices in the shipping and manufacturing industries. The results from the quantitative analysis indicated that employees in the shipping and the manufacturing industries are prone to employee health and safety hazards. The findings suggest that management and employees demonstrated negative attitudes towards employee health and safety practices in the industries. Results also showed that the shipping industry had more employee health and safety initiatives than the manufacturing industry. The results further revealed that the age, gender and levels of education of employees do not influence employees' attitudes toward health and safety practices. The qualitative analysis also revealed that low productivity and high medical and insurance bills were associated with ineffective employee health and safety practices while effective health and safety practices led to high profitability and high productivity. Further, inadequate health and safety education and promotion as well as ineffective regulatory bodies were the major national challenges to health and safety practices. Moreover, non-compliance behaviours of employees as well as inadequate managerial support remained the industrial challenges to health and safety practices. In conclusion, industries must consider employee health and safety as their internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]