Responsibilities of Machine Makers and Users Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act
One Law, Two Roles
The Occupational Safety and Health Act (職業安全衛生法, OSH Act) is Taiwan's basic law for workplace safety; the current text found at the time of writing was last amended on December 19, 2025. When it comes to food machinery, the OSH Act governs two roles at once:
- Employers: Food plants or shops that buy machines and have employees operate them.
- Designers, manufacturers, or importers of machinery, equipment, and tools: Businesses that build machines or import them from abroad.
Under Article 2 of the OSH Act, an "employer" is the business owner or the person in charge of running the business; "workers" include not only employees but also self-employed workers and persons who work under direction and supervision.
Responsibilities of the Plant That Buys the Machine
Article 5, Paragraph 1: When having employees work, employers must, within what is reasonably practicable, take the necessary preventive equipment or measures to protect employees from occupational accidents.
Article 6, Paragraph 1: Employers must have the necessary safety and health equipment and measures, in compliance with the rules, to prevent hazards caused by machinery, equipment, or tools, hazards caused by electricity, hazards caused by noise, and so on. These "rules" are set out specifically in the Occupational Safety and Health Facilities Regulations (職業安全衛生設施規則), for example guards on hazardous parts of machinery, power cutoff devices, emergency brakes, and stopping and locking out machines during cleaning, oiling, and repair; see entanglement hazards and guarding and lockout rules.
Article 23: Employers must set up safety and health organizations and personnel according to the scale and nature of the business, establish an occupational safety and health management plan, and carry out safety and health management and self-inspections.
Article 32: Employers must provide employees with the safety and health training necessary for their work and for preventing accidents. Under Schedule 14 of the Rules for Occupational Safety and Health Education and Training (職業安全衛生教育訓練規則), general safety and health training for new hires or for current employees before changing jobs must be at least 3 hours; for those operating production machinery or equipment, an additional 3 hours must be added.
Article 34: Employers must establish safety and health work rules together with employee representatives, file them with the labor inspection agency, and then post and implement them.
Article 26, Paragraph 3: When a business rents or lends equipment to others, it must inform them in advance of the equipment's hazards and safety and health precautions.
Responsibilities of the Machine Maker
Article 5, Paragraph 2: Designers, manufacturers, or importers of machinery, equipment, tools, and other articles must carry out risk assessments at the design, manufacturing, and import stages, and strive to prevent occupational accidents when these articles are used.
In other words, the people who build machines must think during design: can a hand reach in, where are the pinch points, could it be started during cleaning, will it start turning on its own when power returns after an outage? The common steps of a risk assessment are:
- Define the machine's intended use, users, and foreseeable misuse.
- Identify hazards: entanglement, crushing, cutting, electric shock, heat, noise, slipping.
- Assess the severity and likelihood of each hazard.
- Apply reduction measures in order: first eliminate by design, then add protective devices, and only last use warning labels and the manual.
- Record the assessment results and residual risks, and write them into the manual to inform users.
Articles 7 to 9 are another layer: for machinery designated by the central competent authority, manufacturers, importers, suppliers, or employers may not produce and ship, import, lease, supply, or install machinery whose construction, performance, or protection doesn't meet the safety standards; compliant machinery must be registered on the information reporting website and bear a safety mark; machinery subject to type verification must pass verification and bear the conformity mark. For whether food machinery falls within the designated scope, see Does Food Machinery Need Type Verification or the TS Safety Mark?
Penalties
- Article 40: Violating Article 6, Paragraph 1 and causing a fatal accident is punishable by up to 5 years' imprisonment, detention, and/or a fine of up to NT$1.5 million.
- Article 41: Violating Article 6, Paragraph 1 and causing an accident with 3 or more victims is punishable by up to 3 years' imprisonment, detention, and/or a fine of up to NT$1 million.
- Article 43: Violating Article 6, Paragraph 1 and other provisions is punishable by a fine of NT$50,000 to NT$3 million.
- Article 44: Violating Article 7, Paragraph 1 or Article 8, Paragraph 1 is punishable by a fine of NT$200,000 to NT$2 million; failing to register under Article 7, Paragraph 3 is punishable by a fine of NT$30,000 to NT$150,000.
- Article 45: Violating Article 32, Paragraph 1 on training and other provisions, and failing to improve within the deadline after notice, is punishable by a fine of NT$30,000 to NT$750,000.
The risk assessment obligation in Article 5, Paragraph 2 of the OSH Act has no corresponding fine provision of its own; but if a machine is built unsafely, the user is liable for violating Article 6, and the manufacturer may face civil liability, so both sides should take it seriously.
FAQ
Q: What is the plant that buys the machine responsible for?
A: Articles 5 and 6 of the OSH Act require employers to take the necessary preventive equipment and measures against hazards from machinery, electricity, noise, and so on; Article 32 requires safety and health training, with employees who use production machinery receiving an additional 3 hours on top of the general 3 hours.
Q: What is the machine maker responsible for?
A: Article 5, Paragraph 2 of the OSH Act requires designers, manufacturers, or importers of machinery to carry out risk assessments at the design, manufacturing, and import stages; for designated machinery, they must also meet the safety standards, registration, or type verification in Articles 7 to 9.
Q: What is a design-stage risk assessment?
A: Defining the intended use and foreseeable misuse, identifying hazards such as entanglement, crushing, and electric shock, assessing severity and likelihood, reducing risk in the order "eliminate by design, add protection, then warn," and writing residual risks into the manual.
Q: When was the OSH Act last amended?
A: At the time of writing, the current text shown in Taiwan's Laws & Regulations Database was last amended on December 19, 2025.