Did you know your company has a legal and moral responsibility to provide the best systems, planning and management to mitigate the risk to your employees both at home and in high risk environments overseas? It’s not only a legal requirement but also plain good business to ensure, as best you can, the personal safety and security of your work sites and every employee working here or overseas.
Failure to provide for this responsibility can, if tested, result in significant corporate fines and findings of liability against company directors as case law such as Sargeant v Tyre Marketers and Pacific Access v Davies have shown. In these, and other, case examples the employer was found to be negligent by reasonable standards in that they did not protect their staff against foreseeable risks while travelling to and working overseas on business.
Simply put, this means you must prepare both your corporate travellers and your expatriate workers (and their families) to travel, stay, and work overseas. You must do everything you reasonably can to ensure they are aware of:
- Company policy and procedure supporting their trip or deployment,
- The political, religious and cultural milieu of the country they are to visit,
- Threats to their personal security and fundamental means to avoid those threats,
- Support systems (such as medical evacuation and general evacuation) they can call on and how and when they do this, and
- Personnel who, in certain situations, may accompany them as a security adviser to facilitate closer protection on the ground.
This is where A.C. Edwards & Associates comes in.