Today’s worldwide trade in goods and services has reached an unprecedented scale. Manufacturers and importers are subject to tougher competition and increasing pricing pressure. This leads to more and more low-price products on the European market and more and more discoveries of dangerous products which do not comply with the valid safety standards. Functioning market surveillance is thus necessary to protect both the consumers and thus the users at the workplace as well as reputable manufacturers.

Market surveillance is an instrument for monitoring whether goods placed on the market comply with EC directives. In Germany, this task is performed by the federal states’ OH&S authorities. Since EC directives only contain very basic safety requirements, in line with the New Approach, harmonized European standards have a crucial role to play in market surveillance.

There is one thing which technical products for the European market must guarantee consumers and employees: safety, with no ifs and buts. The task of the market surveillance authorities is to monitor observance of the safety requirements. What is lacking, however, is a powerful system for the exchange of information throughout Europe between authorities conducting inspections.

Searching for specific standards relating to occupational health and safety is hard work because there are so many standards and no way of searching by OH&S aspects. NoRA is intended to solve this problem by providing an easy-to-handle way of selecting the documents required.

Mobile cranes are equipped with rated capacity limiters, which are intended to prevent the cranes from lifting and moving excessively heavy loads. Once the capacity limiter has tripped, the crane is prevented from executing movements which further reduce its stability. In practice, this feature is sometimes regarded as a nuisance, and the temptation simply to disable the safety function is great. The result may be that a crane weighing several tons tips, causing a major accident.

Directive 73/23/EEC was adopted in 1973 and the only change since then related to the CE mark and was brought about by Directive 93/68/EEC. Now the European Commission is seeking to revise it. The Commission’s foremost concern is not to tighten the regulations in the Directive but to make its provisions clearer and to settle the issue of the scope covered by the directive as opposed to that of other directives. An ad-hoc working group from the Standing Committee for the Low Voltage Directive presented a preliminary discussion paper on the subject at the beginning of July.