Health and safety risk assessment in manufacturing Industry: a case study of Coca-Cola kwanza

The manufacturing industry in Tanzania remains relatively small, with most activities concentrating on the creation of simple consumer products such as soft drinks, food, text-tittles, and wood related products. Health and safety risk management is pronounced as the most problematic area within manufacturing and construction management. Despite its small size, the sector continues to be important. Regardless of its importance health and safety risk assessment in manufacturing industry has not yet been given a high priority as compared with production priorities. The general objective of this study was to examine health and safety risk assessment in the manufacturing industry,. Specifically, this study investigated the nature of health and safety risks assessment, determined levels of awareness of workers in safety and health risks as well as the factors that affect health and safety risk assessment. Using Normal Accident Theory, this study compared and investigated the interaction of individuals with workplaces. Also, how the equipment and other contributing factors lead to adverse effects on manufacturing industry work systems. The case study design was applied in this study to gather a variety of data in the manufacturing industry, Coca Cola Company in particular. Quantitative data was collected from the sample of 96% workers. Social survey and in-depth interviews were used as methods of data collection. Stratified sampling technique and purposive sampling technique were applied to sample the respondents. Nearly, three-quarter of the study sample (70%) revealed that there are physical and ill health risks in their work place. Findings, also demonstrate that 85% of workers asserted that the common health and safety risk assessment methodology in Coca –Cola Company is hazard identification and risk assessment (HIRA) and 70.5% findings showed reveled that they were satisfied with such methodology . Moreover, that 44.2% of workers mentioned factors that affect effective health and safety risks assessment. Most of the workers were aware of health and safety issues. Despite the fact that study findings indicated the presence of organization’s commitment, availability of OSH policies, guideline and procedure, awareness in safety training, availability of PPEs in the workplaces; incident are still reported because of non-adherence of the mentioned factors and improper implementation OSH policy. Therefore, health and safety risks assessment should be made as a safety culture in the manufacturing industry. Based on the findings it is recommended that health and safety risk assessment should be entrenched at lower level manufacturing industrial workers.