TWENTY Caribbean Aviation Maintenance Services (CAMS) employees on the Joint Workplace Safety and Health Committee received certificates, Friday morning, for successfully completing a six-day, four-hour Joint Workplace Safety and National Insurance Scheme (NIS) Training Programme.

The programme, a collaborative effort of the Ministry of Labour’s Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Department, and the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), aimed to train members of the Joint Workplace Safety and Health Committee and prepare them to carry out their mandate in the workplace, as required by Chapter 99:06 of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act.

It also aims to equip representatives with the knowledge and skills needed to design and maintain safe work systems and techniques, thereby minimising or eliminating workplace accidents.
This would then allow participants to demonstrate an understanding of their roles and responsibilities as Joint Workplace Safety Committee representatives.

Participants can now conduct workplace inspections, accident investigations, and adopt methods to control and/or eliminate hazards in their own workplaces. This includes the participants and the workplace receiving certification that would be valid for one year.

Joseph Hamilton, Minister of Labour, congratulated CAMS staff for realising the necessity of being provided with the required skills to maintain a safe and healthy workplace. Their participation, he claimed, would help the ministry’s efforts to promote safe and healthy workplaces and eliminate work-related hazards across the country.

With that in mind, he positioned them to utilise the knowledge and talents they had learned and to become “change makers for yourself and others in your workplace.” The Minister also urged them to share their knowledge with others so that they, too, may contribute to the ministry’s aim of creating a safe and healthy workplace.

“My ultimate goal is to ensure that everyone, be it a miner, welder, electrician or even a construction worker will return home every day after a hard day of work because of what the Ministry is doing and will continue to protect the lives of all workers,” the minister said.

Since assuming office in 2020, the OSH department implemented a comprehensive and holistic approach to protecting the lives of public and private workers in the country.

So far, under the leadership of Minister Hamilton, workplace fatalities reduced by 16 per cent in 2021, and further declined in 2022 by 20 percent.

Also present at the ceremony were OSH Consultant, Ms. Gweneth King, Senior OSH officers, Mr. Roydon Croal and Ms. Maxean Bess, OSH officers, Ms. Neza King, Ms. Johana Vaughn, and Mr. Darwin Bourne and Director of Maintenance and Human Relations of CAMS, Mr. John Issacs, among other officials.