Health & Safety
Joint Health & Safety Committees
Their role is to raise awareness about health and safety issues in the workplace, recognize and identify workplace risks and develop recommendations for the employer to address these risks.
Supporting the Joint Health and Safety Committee (JHSC) is an important way that you can exercise your “right to participate” in workplace health and safety. The JHSC is made up of worker and management representatives and has the power to:
The JHSC is made up of union-selected members representing workers and management-selected members representing the employer. Together they aim to improve health and safety conditions in a workplace.
Your safety committee/co-chair has the power to write recommendations to your employer and the employer must respond in writing within 21 days. Tailor the templates below to help you get started.
This toolkit was developed to support health and safety leaders’ participation on their JHSCs.
We have three comprehensive guides that ONA’s Health and Safety Team has created for member use:
This fact-finding resource supports both ONA staff and leaders to efficiently gather the relevant facts required when pursuing a health and safety issue, whether through an OHSA appeal and/or grievance and to clearly identify the issues and remedies sought.
This tool helps JHSC representatives to track important duties the committee should be engaging in over the course of the year as well as the obligations employers must satisfy. It also contains a tab with relevant resources/legislation about these obligations. It is offered in both Excel and PDF.
This guide outlines the purpose of investigations under the OHSA, employer duties and the powers of the JHSC in these circumstances.
These tip sheets will assist JHSC members with a variety of issues.
This document can assist JHSC representatives when creating and/or updating their own terms of reference for their JHSC.
This at-a-glance document will help leaders to understand employers’ obligations to report under the Occupational Health and Safety Act and Ontario Regulation 420/21 Notices and Reports under Sections 51 to 53.1 of the Act. The regulation incorporates the critical injury definition and streamlines reporting requirements into a single regulation that applies to all workplaces covered by OHSA. This document provides a synopsis of the employers’ notice obligations in a succinct reference chart.
Examples of MLITSD orders and prosecutions can be found on our Ministry of Labour page.
Violence Aggression and Responsive Behaviour (VARB) Tools, released by the Public Service Health and Safety Association (PSHSA), are designed to help protect those most at risk of violence in health-care including nurses, community and social service workers, visiting homecare workers and all other health care professionals. As members of PSHSA’s Health Advisory Committee, ONA health and Safety specialists participate on a sub-committee that develops the VARB toolkits.
Find the toolkits at pshsa.ca/workplace-violence-in-healthcare
We use cookies to improve your experience on our website. To learn more, read our privacy policy.
