UCLA to offer safety courses for businesses
By Stephanie Hodge
Oct. 20, 2005 9:00 p.m.
UCLA will soon become the first institution to host Occupational
Safety and Health Administration training courses for business
professionals in the Los Angeles area.
UCLA’s Southern California Education and Research Center
announced its partnership with the OSHA Training Institute at UC
San Diego earlier this week, as well as its plans to begin holding
courses in February.
Courses on meeting the OSHA guidelines, requirements set by the
government for all business owners, will now be held on the UCLA
campus under the Education and Research Center in the School of
Public Health.
The OSHA guidelines promote worker safety and health by
enforcing better working environments, and the courses are open to
everyone in the business and labor industries, according to the
program’s Web site.
Four courses will be offered this year. The classes teach topics
ranging from introductory safety to pathogen exposure control, and
aim to provide knowledge on how to identify, correct and prevent
workplace hazards.
Previously, businesses in the Los Angeles area did not have
local access to courses to assist them in meeting OSHA
regulations.
“The courses have never been offered in the Los Angeles
area,” said Jeimy Gama, program assistant at SCERC.
“Supervisors had to travel down to the institute in San Diego
for this training.”
The main people who will benefit from these courses becoming
available are “the workers themselves,” Gama said, and
many students will likely be indirectly affected as well.
Because the training courses promote workers’ safety and
health, it will affect the “many UCLA students who work, both
in their potential future jobs or in their current jobs (as well
as) future business owners who are currently students,” Gama
said.
The initial courses will be held at various sites on campus and
are scheduled to conclude in August.
Gama said SCERC expects about 180 people to attend the courses
this year, and even more could enroll in the future.
“We expect that, if there is a good response, we will
repeat these courses and add others for future years,” said
program director Cass Ben-Levi. “There is a larger catalog of
courses to choose from, so we will probably expand.”
Gama said the courses will be a good resource for UCLA and the
community.
“It’s a small piece of making us more connected with
other campuses. It’s opening up more opportunity for people
to learn more about occupational health and safety,” she
said.
Though only UCLA and UCSD currently offer these courses, it is
possible the program will expand. Discussions are underway to offer
OSHA courses at UC Davis through its Extension program, Gama
said.
While SCERC is heading the project for the time being, it
anticipates that other groups on campus with occupational and labor
focuses could aid the project in the future.
Although the Labor Center and the Labor Occupational Safety and
Health program are not collaborating on this project yet, they
“may have a role in the future,” Ben-Levi said.
SCERC hopes to find a “way for the all three groups to do
something together, but it hasn’t been developed yet,”
she said.
The LOSH program tends to “work more with front-line
workers” said Laurie Kane Kominsky, associate director of
program administration, but “we will most definitely want to
collaborate in the future.”
