Safe working procedures, health protection and the protection of the environment are basic needs. For this reason, environmental, work, health, fire and corporate protection form a permanent cornerstone of our corporate culture.

Our specialist department HISS, which reports directly to the Executive Board member for HR, stands for “Health, Industrial Hygiene, Safety & Security”. With its protection standards, which apply across the entire Corporation, HISS sets the foundation for safety at work and secure production plants and processes, and reflects our responsibility to our employees and to the environment.

____________________________Our goal:

_____________________We go for Zero incidents

The integrated protection concept aims to avoid incidents of any kind. With regard to health protection, this means avoiding work-related health problems, with regard to work safety, the avoidance of accidents, and for corporate protection, uninterrupted operating processes.

With our “zero philosophy” goal, we are taking a consistent path, thereby closely involving the management structures from all levels, as well as all other employees, in our safety culture.

A series of measures and programs is designed to network all protection functions at our locations with one another, and is working towards achieving this goal. Safety standards at our manufacturing sites undergo constant further development as a result of internal and external audits, certifications and special safety programs. The health service promotes the well-being of all employees through a wide range of health and preventive care programs. Workstations are regularly inspected and evaluated, with industrial hygiene also being included.

The trends for sickness absences and accident rates reflect the success of our systematic efforts.

The number of accidents per million hours worked fell by 49% in the past six years to 5.7, and by 11% from 6.4 to 5.7 from 2007 to 2008 alone. The number of hours lost due to accidents decreased between 2003 and 2008 by 37% to 942.

Between 2007 and 2008, this figure increased by 7% from 884 to 942.

	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004	2003
Absences due to sickness1	4.0	4.1	4.0	4.3	4.6	5.0
Accident rate 2	5.7	6.4	7.3	9.3	11.2	11.1
Hours lost 3	942	884	950	1,223	1,412	1,506

1 Absences = paid and unpaid absences due to sickness in relation to the contractual working hours in percent

2 Accident rate = number of work-related accidents worldwide with one or more days lost per million hours worked

3 Hours lost = number of accident-related hours lost worldwide per million hours worked