Occupational health and safety in the trucking industry:current trends and future challenges

Abstract Professional truck drivers face various kinds of challenges during their workday. A high prevalence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders and high accident rates are associated with the trucking industry. In addition, various differ- ent psychosocial stressors affect truck drivers’ work ability. Accidents, disorders, and stressors all affect working careers. There is both a constant need for a skilled new workforce, but also a need for prolonging working careers. Some characteristics can be identified on truck drivers’ work; the drivers mainly work alone and their work contains static work postures while sitting and physical activities while working outside the cab. While working, the driver often faces opportunities for unethical and unsafe actions to ease the workload. This poses challenges to the occupational health and safety (OHS) management. This article provides a scoping review of the risks and hazards that the professional truck drivers face while working. Both driving and non-driving work activities are covered. Special attention is paid to selected new modes of transportation and a discussion is held on the possible OHS challenges that they may bring along. High capacity transports (HCT) are discussed as an emerging mode of road transportation that enables larger loads to be freighted and intermodal transportations (IMT) are used increase the efficiency of the transportations by combining different transportation modes. However, very little attention is being paid in the current OHS literature on the possible adverse OHS effects concerning the driver

Experienced and Novice Investors: Does Environmental Information Influence Investment Allocation Decisions?

This paper examines the effect of environmental information on investment decisions. The results are based on an experiment in which groups of investors (varied by experience) were asked to make short- and long-term investment allocation decisions based on financial information and on supplementary environmental information (varied between cases). The results suggest that environmental information disclosure influences investment allocation decisions. The results also suggest that potentially mitigating factors such as the investment horizon and the experience level of investors affect investment allocation decisions, but the predicted main effect of positive environmental information holds across different investment horizons and investor types. Hence, the results are not attributable to interaction effects. Interestingly, compared to other company information, environmental information is not rated as being very important by participating subjects even though the results suggest that it influences investment decisions.

Sustainability reporting and assurance: a historical analysis on a world-wide phenomenon

Sustainability reporting and assurance of sustainability reports have been used by organizations in an attempt to provide accountability to their stakeholders. A better understanding of current practices is important to provide a base for comparative and trend analyses. This paper aims to consolidate and provide information on sustainability reporting, assurance of sustainability reports and types of assurance providers. Another aim of this paper is to provide a descriptive analysis of these practices for a global sample, comparing results with previous studies, and suggesting opportunities for future research. To accomplish these objectives, a literature review was performed, an analysis of the organizations included in the Fortune Global 500 2010 was completed, and results were presented and consolidated by country. These results demonstrate that all organizations analysed provided some type of information in relation to their social or environmental performance in their official website. The percentage of organizations issuing a sustainability report has been increasing in the last few years. However, the percentage of organizations assuring their sustainability report has stagnated. Types of assurance engagements include those performed by accountants and non-accountants, and new practices have emerged, namely the 'mixed approach' and the 'stakeholder or specialist review'. The analysis also shows that the practices of issuing sustainability reports and having them assured have become a world-wide phenomenon, occurring in developed, and emerging economies around the world