This year’s summit in San Antonio was our best-attended in a number of years.  Members and guests heard Brian Beaulieu on the economy; Mara Liasson on the Presidential race; API’s John Felmy on energy production, consumption and policy; Sanjiv Bhaskar on megatrends and their effect on PPE markets, and Henk Vanhoutte on changes coming to PPE regulation in the EU.

You can read summaries of their presentations on our Web site.

ISEA, like other standards developing organizations, sells its standards.  There is a standards store on the ISEA Web site, and they’re also available through resellers – ANSI, ASSE, TechStreet and IHS/Global. 

If you look around the Web, you can also find sites selling ISEA standards, and the standards of many other organizations, at deep discounts.  One of them even claims to be “powered by the American National Standards Institute.”  It’s not, of course.  And the standards developers get nothing for the pirated documents this site provides. 

Before you click through a purchase from one of these discount sites, consider what you’re doing.  You’re buying stolen property.  And consider who you might be dealing with.  It’s nearly impossible to track down who’s behind these sites, but the one mentioned in this post is hosted by a Web service in Iran.  Do you really want to provide them your contact information? 

Think about it.

QSSP is short for Qualified Safety Sales Professional.  It’s the designation awarded to sales and marketing personnel from safety equipment manufacturers and distributors who have completed a rigorous week-long training course in the technical and regulatory fundamentals of workplace safety and health.

The 29 new QSSP’s (here’s the list) from around the US and five foreign countries completed the course on April 20.  They received classroom instruction from a faculty of safety experts on how to identify and evaluate hazards, manage health and safety in an organization, and how all the parts of the safety and health program have to work together.  They studied air sampling and exposure levels, respiratory and fall protection basics, electrical safety, confined spaces, capabilities and limitations of PPE, and lots more. 

What this means to the customer is that their PPE vendors can be their partners in prevention.  QSSP’s learn what safety directors and employers face as they try to control hazards, protect workers and manage compliance with a host of regulations.  They also learn how to explain the true cost of an injury on the job, how that injury affects the whole enterprise, and how deeply it cuts into profits.  Then they can sell solutions and sustainability.

Don’t take our word for it: Read what Bob Ennamorato says about QSSP in his PPE Forum blog.  Check out the QSSP Web site to learn more about the program, search for QSSP’s in your area, and learn how a QSSP can help your business.

Outside the front door of the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington today there was a small group of demonstrators, one holding a sign that said “Lobbyists are hazardous to workers’ safety.” 

Really? 

When I got back to the office I opened a newsletter and found an article about the lobbying campaign from a coalition called Friends of NIOSH to preserve part of that agency’s funding.  A few pages later there was an item about Public Citizen’s call for legislation to require government agencies to reject bids from companies with bad safety and health records.  Now let’s see … organized efforts to get a legislative result are called lobbying, right? 

Sure, there are businesses and interest groups that lobby for less safety and health regulation.  The Chamber occupies a big building a block from the White House, and it’s surely full of lobbyists.  But just a block away there’s an equally big building that’s just as full of lobbyists – the headquarters of the AFL-CIO.  And there are plenty of other groups out there — ISEA being one of them – that lobby for safety and health in the workplace.  Call it advocacy, lobbying, whatever – it’s all the same, and it’s an important part of the deliberative process of government.

Just don’t call it hazardous.

Just reading an article from one of the trade magazines on PPE selection.  Like most of the articles like this one in the trades, on blogs, etc., it’s good.  It has solid guidance on hazard identification, product selection, management, training, maintenance and more.  But there was no mention anywhere in the article of the product standard to which this PPE is designed, tested and made.

Maybe it’s because the standard – in this case, ANSI/ISEA Z87.1 for eye and face protection – is well known, almost universally specified, and referenced in the OSHA regulations.  Still, not even mentioning it in an article on vision protection selection raises some concerns.  All glasses are not safety glasses, and even some that look the part haven’t been subject to the rigorous testing that the standard requires.   Standards provide a convenient shorthand: you specify Z87.1 so that you don’t have to use a long list of requirements.  But don’t think that everyone knows about a standard.  When you’re telling people how to specify PPE, don’t forget the standard.