So Where Do You Work?
In 1980, I finally made it to Personnel, after being a Line Supervisor in a large iron foundry for four years. For the young people “Personnel” is what we called Human Resources in 1980. On my second day I was told I was also the “Safety Guy” or “Safety Manager” in addition to my official job as something called an “Employment Supervisor” (I had to maintain the employment level of 2500 employees for the foundry).
At that time OSHA was 8 years old. I was in Michigan, and MIOSHA had been created only six years before in 1974, while I was in college. My huge university had one course in industrial safety, “OSHA”. There might have been some college, somewhere, offering safety courses but I never heard of them. Safety was usually a function of Personnel back then. All different now.
In my former corporation it was Environmental, Health, & Safety or EHS. Now they added something called Sustainability, so it is EHSS. I like the term OHS (Occupational Health & Safety) which I feel I personally am more aligned, and I stay away from the “E”. I see some called HSE, but on LinkedIn in that term seems more European.
What do you call yourself? Where do you work? What Department? To whom do you report?
Comments (1)
I think it varies by organization. Many facilities use improper job titles that do not properly convey that person's duties.
When I worked for a chemical manufacturer (Dallas Group of America), I was their Global EHSS Manager (Environmental, Health, Safety, and Sustainability). I reported to the VP of Operations, and had 6 Safety Coordinators, 2 Environmental Coordinators, 4 Training Specialists, and a Regulatory/Compliance Manager that reported to me. We had around 2,500 employees globally across the US, Netherlands, and China.
When I worked for an "umbrella company" (Industrial Service Solutions) that acquired machine/fab shops, industrial construction companies, mining companies, and a slew of other companies across the US, I was their Corporate Director of Safety. I had Safety Managers at each site that reported directly to me (18 total), 2 safety coordinators that I could use at any of the OpCos, as well as a few HR Managers that had a "dotted line" to me and handled safety in addition to HR. Although my title was "Safety", I handled all health and environmental things, too. I reported directly to the CEO, but also had a "dotted line" to our Corporate Counsel (Attorney).
I also worked as an Assistant Safety Manager at JB Swift/JBS (pork slaughter house/processing facility). We had about 1,500 employees at our Louisville location and I reported to the Safety Manager. I only handled safety since we had an environmental department and several occupational nurses to handle the health side of things.
Other than that, I started out as an EHS Specialist for another consulting company in Louisville and worked there for about 5 or 6 years.
I'm like you - I prefer not to deal with environmental, but have handled Title V facilities and still do a little environmental work at Arrow Safety for a few of our O&G customers. However, environmental is not my forte by any means or what I enjoy doing.
The use of "HSE" is just a company thing, regardless of what country you're in. I'm doing work down here in San Antonio this week for Marathon Petroleum Company's HES professionals (they call them Health, Environment, and Safety professionals), but overall, same as EHS or HSE. I've seen a lot more people in North America referred to as "EHS", but see a lot of North American companies also use "HSE" or even "SHE". Marathon and a few others are the only ones I've seen call it "HES". At the end of the day, it's all generally the same responsibilities, though.