the ability to select the most effective intervention. This awareness is valuable when developing and implementing an OHSMS.
3 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Seeds for the systems approaches addressed in this chapter can be traced back to some of the earliest advances in OH&S practice and management. Since the early work of pioneers in the quality management field, and ISO's entry into the management system arena with ISO 9001:1987 (8), there have been numerous iterations and developments that have led to the prominent OHSMS approaches.
OH&S MS have significant roots in the quality MS developed in United States in the early twentieth century by Shewhart who first conceived of the concept of a modern control chart. More comprehensive MS became available when his work was expanded and refined by Joseph Juran, W. Edwards Deming, and Armand Feigenbum who developed many of the tools of statistical process control (SPC). However, the wide acceptance of these systems did not occur until they were brought to Japan in the 1940s where an explosion of integration and improvement by Kaoru Ishikawa, Genichi Taguchi, and Shigeo Shingo led to much of what we would recognize as elements of an effective management system today. These pioneers created such tools as such as the Plan‐Do‐Check‐Act (PDCA) cycle or Deming Wheel, Pareto analysis, fishbone diagrams, stratification, histograms, scatter charts, process control charts, tolerance design (Taguchi methodology), and the six sigma DMAIC methodology (9).
All of these systems, tools, and processes focus on reducing variation and defects and encourages the robustness of organizational management processes, including the identification of an acceptable level of variation. Among the earliest adoption of such tools and techniques to OH&S resulted from Frank Bird's analysis of 1.75 million accidents in the steel industry in 1976, which led to his development of the International Safety Rating System (ISRS) (10).
MS standards became more generally accepted in organizations with the development and global deployment of the ISO 9000 family of standards for quality MS beginning in 1987 (8). Around this same time, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States published its Voluntary Safety, and Health Program Management Guidelines that served as a model for many organizations as well as the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) approaches to follow (11, 12).
ISO published an environmental management system (EMS) in 1996, it was designated as ISO 14001:1996 (13). This was one standard within a family of environmental standards that were published largely in response to issues raised at the Rio Summit on the Environment held in 1992. The 14000 series built on the global influence of ISO 9001:1987, and was implemented by organizations in a wide variety in industries albeit at a slower pace than 9001.
The application of the ISO process to environmental management suggested that an ISO‐based OH&S standard might quickly follow; however, this was not the case. It took ISO nearly 20 years to develop and publish an OHSMS (ISO 45001:2018) (14); the first attempt to develop an ISO OHSMS was in 1996, after failed attempts, its development process began anew in 2013, and it was finally published in 2018. In the interim, numerous national and private OHSMS standards were developed and used. Several countries including the United States, Australia, and Canada published national OHSMS standards (15–17). The most widely used was OHSAS 18001:2007 (18). While this standard was not the result of a formal consensus development process, it was developed by accreditation bodies and had at its core several consensus documents including BS 8800 (19) and ISO 14001. In the absence of an ISO OHSMS until 2018, OHSAS 18001 provided organizations with a robust MS framework which could be used in third‐party certification schemes.
In the same timeframe that ISO 14001:1996 was first made available, several important OH&S MS were also published (e.g. BS 8800 and Australia's SafetyMap). By the late 1990s, numerous countries, along with professional organizations (e.g. the Japan Industrial Safety and Health Association, the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA), and the Chemical Manufacturers Association) had started to develop OHSMS standards and guidelines.
In the mid‐1990s in the United States, OSHA began to consider rulemaking for a comprehensive OH&S program standard (20). Activities on this effort continued through the early 2000s. Over time, the priority of these efforts diminished and was officially off OSHA's agenda by 2003, and until it was revived in 2010.
Researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) developed an ISO 9001‐based OHSMS that was published by the AIHA in 1995 (21). The UM/AIHA OHSMS received significant attention from various stakeholders and standards‐making organizations, and a companion generic OHSMS assessment instrument was developed and published in 1999 (22). As part of the development of the assessment instrument, a generic OHSMS model was created to support the instrument. This model has since been used widely throughout the world by private companies and by standards‐making bodies to assist their system development efforts (15, 23).
It was during ISO's failed OHSMS efforts in 1996, that standards‐making experts put forth the idea and recommendation that the ILO could be a more suitable organization to develop an international OHSMS standard. With this, in 1997, the ILO began to conduct background research on OH&S MS as a precursor to forming the tripartite group of experts that developed ILO‐OSH 2001 (23). The International Occupational Hygiene Association (IOHA) assisted the ILO with this research endeavor. The IOHA report to the ILO provided a comprehensive overview of many different management system approaches and suggested seed language and topics for the subsequent development of the ILO OHSMS (24).
While the ILO and IOHA were performing these background efforts, two developments occurred. First, ISO elected for a second time to not develop an ISO OSHMS. Second, the BSI published OHSAS 18001:1999, which generally followed the structure of ISO 14001:1996 (13, 19). This document was published specifically for use as an auditable standard. In its introduction, OHSAS 18001:1999 stated that the document was developed “in response to urgent customer demand for a recognizable occupational health and safety management system standard against which their management systems can be assessed and certified.”
In 2000, in the United States, the AIHA solicited the ANSI to form a committee to develop an ANSI standard for OHSMS. The Z10 committee held its first meeting in 2002 and issued a final standard in 2005 (15). This standard was revised in 2012, shortly after which the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) assumed the leadership of the Z10 standard activities. A revision of Z10 was underway at the time of this publication.
3.1 ISO and Standards Making
Management system standards and guidelines are developed and published by a range of organization types. These include: NGOs, such as ISO; national standards bodies, such as ANSI and BSI; professional organizations, such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the AIHA; and, national regulatory‐bodies, such as OSHA in the United States. The ILO is of course an international organization that is part of the United Nations structure; it has also been active in the OHSMS arena.
The dominant organization in the standards development space has been ISO which was formed in 1926 as the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations (ISA), and was later renamed ISO following a brief operating gap during WWII.
ISO is a voluntary organization whose members are recognized standard authorities, each representing one country. ISO standards are produced by volunteers who represent the national standards institutes of over 160 member national standards institutes (25). For example, ANSI is the United States representative to ISO. These volunteers participate on technical committees, subcommittees, and working groups each headed by a Secretariat from one of the member organizations. Each of these groups work to produce or update technical guidance in a specific area. Generally, a specific consensus standard is the ultimate work product, such as ISO 9001, 14001, and 45001.
The difference between standards and guidelines is important. The term standard,
