Posted By J Knight No, you are not correct, and you have to be careful. You should of course apply UK standards where it meets or exceeds local ones, but do enure that local standards are not better (or even entirely different) to UK ones. France for example has a very different H&S regime to the UK, and Scandinavian countries sometimes set higher standards than we do, John PS Can't remember right now where the EU directive which will apply source country standards to ex-pat employers got to, but even if it is already law (and I don't think it is) some of the states you mention are not in the EU.

Posted By Adam Jackson My last job was similar, we had sites in the USA, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Poland plus other wider-flung places such as Indonesia, Brazil and Venezuela. I adopted the policy of taking whichever country had the strictest legislation on a particular risk area and using that as the minimum corporate standard. Its not as easy as saying "x country is the strictest so we'll use that" as the leading country changed depending on the issue being looked at. And to complicate it further, there are cases where you need to exercise some judgement and occasionally allow differing standards. I don't mean expose someone to a life threatening situation in one country but not in another, but often smaller issues can hit cultural problems. For example, in the US if you use formaldehyde you have to put a "warning, cancer hazard" sign on the door to the room. If we'd done that in France nobody would have stepped foot in the room. Similarly, in the US if you have a microwave in a staff kitchen, you need to have a "danger, radiation hazard" sign on the canteen door - can you imaging putting that on a canteen door here? (Cue "h&s gone mad comments, etc.). We used the UK scaffolding standards, but oddly enough these didn't cover the Indonesian method of cutting some bamboo from the jungle and making a scaffold out of that - we had to permit that as there was no 'proper' alternative.