The future?
Interesting question.
From the point of view of the standard as it currently exists, my opinion is that if an auditor wanted to they can use clause 6 of the standard (or to be more exact clause 6.3 Infrastructure) if they want to raise a non-com/observation etc for health and safety reasons.
Our external auditor did exactly this at our surveillence audit in September. On his tour around our manufacturing site, he found a pallet with PC base units boxed up and ready to leave the factory. He insisted that they were too many stacked (8 boxes high) on a pallet and that (and to quote him) "The height shouldn't exceed 6 feet". Our production director was incandescant! He made the point to the auditor that it was up to him to decide what was safe working practice in his factory, not the auditor. The observation was raised anyway. The way we have answered the observation is by writing a risk assessment for the stacking of boxes which states "up to eight high"!
Our production directors main beef was that he objected to someone who is a quality auditor coming in and telling him that he is running his factory in an unsafe manner. Added to this was that the auditors justification was something that the production director (and I) considered to be a bit spurious - he couldn't tell us why 6 feet was significant or where he had got the guidance from. We came to the conclusion that he had given this us a observation as he was getting a bit desperate (it was only one of three things that he could raise as a observation in a whole day) and needed something to write on our report form to prove that he had actually audited us (or were we being a bit cynical!)
What is interesting about all of this is that during our closing meeting, the auditor informed us that by 2012 ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OAHS 18001 are all going to be combined and become a big super standard. Its sound to me like they are all practising for when this happens! More seriously, has anyone else heard about this combining of the management standards?
Cheers
Simon