Chapter 4.2
A global perspective on standards
“Machinery and occupational safety around the world”
Machines must be safe all over the world
There is no industrialized country that does not have its own rules for occupational safety and health. But there are strong differences.
Thus, one of the most frequently asked questions of technicians and sales organizations is: “Can we market our product in this or that country? Or do we have to observe additional regulations and standards?” The answer to these questions often is no simple “yes” or “no” but requires careful research. To help with this, the following provides a rough overview of how standardization is organized worldwide.
In some regions – particularly in Europe (that is, the EU member states and countries aspiring to be included in the EU) – the responsibilities of machinery manufacturers and enterprises operating them are clearly differentiated. For either side, there are numerous regulations and standards that define details.
Other regions – such as the USA, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia – do not have such a clear distinction of obligations. In these countries, the regulations for occupational safety and health largely determine the rules to be followed when designing safe products for professional use. In the USA, for instance, OSHA regulations presented in the Code of Federal Regulations, CFR 1910, are most important for industrial safety.
But there is something that all industrialized countries have in common: international standards. The two primary international institutions are ISO, the International Standards Organization, and IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission. These cooperate closely with hundreds of national standardization bodies and the three European standardization institutions CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI.
The extent to which international standards are adopted as national standards varies considerably between the different regions and countries.
In Europe for instance, a European standard (EN) must be accepted by all members of the European standardization organizations. Quite differently, the members of ISO may decide whether they want to add an international standard to their list of national standards. This explains, for instance, why some international industrial safety standards are US-standards and Chinese standards, while others are not. To make things more complicated, international standards are sometimes adopted with national amendments and additions.
As an example, note that ISO 12100 is an American standard listed by ANSI (American National Standards Institute). At the same time, suppliers in the USA have to observe a separate machine safety standard, ANSI B11.0 and a very detailed one on safeguarding B11.19 as well as machine-specific B11 standards. These take priority over the ISO standards.
Another difference lies in the degree to which standards are binding. While technical standards are not normally legally binding in democratic countries, a standard is considered a law or part of a law in some authoritarian countries, like China for instance. But individual democratic countries and regions like the EU have also made the application of many technical standards mandatory. This is the case with most of the industrial safety standards, for instance. They are published in the Official Journal of the European Union and then bear what is called the “assumption of conformity”. That is, if a manufacturer makes his products in conformity with such published harmonised standards, his product is deemed to be in conformity with EU regulations.
