Safety and health committee

A single committee that an employer (事業者) required to set up both a safety committee (安全委員会) and a health committee (衛生委員会) may set up in place of the two (Industrial Safety and Health Act, Article 19, paragraph (1)). A safety committee investigates and deliberates on keeping workers from danger, and a health committee on preventing harm to workers' health and maintaining and improving it, and each gives the employer its opinion (Article 17, paragraph (1), and Article 18, paragraph (1)). Its members are one person the employer names from the general safety and health manager (総括安全衛生管理者) or others in overall charge of running the business at the workplace or in an equivalent position, who chairs it; safety managers (安全管理者), health managers (衛生管理者) and industrial physicians (産業医) the employer names; and workers at the workplace with experience of safety, and workers with experience of health matters, whom the employer names; the employer may also name a worker who is an expert in work environment monitoring (作業環境測定士) and does that monitoring at the workplace (Article 19, paragraphs (2) to (4), and Article 17, paragraph (3)). Half of the members other than the chair are named on the recommendation of the labor union (労働組合) organized by a majority of the workplace's workers or, where there is none, of the person representing a majority of them; this rule and the rule on who chairs give way so far as a collective agreement (労働協約) with such a union provides otherwise (Article 17, paragraphs (3) to (5), applied by Article 19, paragraph (4)). The employer must report an industrial physician's recommendations to the health committee or to this committee (Article 13, paragraph (6)).