Sustainability website / Safety

We aim to operate a safe and healthy workplace, based on mutual respect, fairness and integrity. Our primary objective is to operate with no fatalities or injuries and we believe that every work-related illness and injury is preventable. We support initiatives to address major community health issues and enhance the wellbeing of employees. We value diversity and uphold the rights of our employees to collective bargaining and freedom of association and do not tolerate.

Safety is always the direct responsibility of senior management backed by a formal structure for implementation. We have a Board Health, Safety, Environment and Community (HSEC) Committee and in each of our commodity businesses the chief executive chairs its HSEC or SD committee. Health and safety is included in formal agreements with trade unions. At the local level these cover specifics of safety management and employee engagement. At commodity business level, agreements cover adherence to International Labour Organisation principles, performance standards and grievance procedures.

Our operations maintain comprehensive safety management systems aligned to established international standards OHSAS 18001 or AS/NZS 4801.

A particular feature of Xstrata’s approach is to learn from near-miss incidents. Since 2003, we have made strenuous efforts to embed our near-miss reporting system as a ‘leading indicator’ of safety performance. Investigating near-misses allows us to learn from an incident where no-one was injured and put preventative measures in place to prevent a recurrence.

Our businesses rely on contractors to provide additional labour and for specialist skills and services. We value the safety of contractors in exactly the same way as we do our own employees. Contractors are included in our safety data and must comply in full with our safety standards and procedures.

Our key safety challenges are:

• Eliminating fatalities and serious injuries from our business, in particular in South Africa;
• Understanding the root causes of near-misses and actual incidents to improve major hazard controls and continuously improve our systems and performance; and
• Continuing to reduce the frequency of injuries sustained, particularly in operations with an ageing workforce or that are already operating with very low frequency rates.