Whenever a major safety threat erupts in some part of the world, multinationals scramble to understand what duties they owe their employees working in harm's way. For example, when a coup erupted in Egypt in early 2011, multinationals had employees stuck in life-threatening situations-Google's regional marketing head Wael Ghonim was captured by Egyptian rioters and held for 10 days, and an Egyptian mob beat and sexually assaulted CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan. And in addition to this need to protect individual staff across borders, multinationals' workplace health and safety concerns increasingly transcend national boundaries: Proactive multinationals are taking steps to align, across their worldwide operations, those aspects of health and safety with a cross-border dimension, such as by launching global pandemic policies and global sets of cardinal safety rules.

Indeed, the cross-jurisdictional aspects to workplace health and safety compliance tend to cluster at the "micro" and the "macro" ends of the spectrum-the "micro" level of protecting individual expatriates and individual business travelers, such as staff sent into danger zones, and the "macro" level of propagating company-wide initiatives on basic workplace health and safety topics, such as global safety and pandemic policies.

This webinar will address both the "micro" and the "macro" levels of international workplace health and safety compliance, first by exploring multinationals' duty to protect individual employees overseas, in danger zones and otherwise, and then by addressing cross-border workplace health and safety initiatives, like global cardinal safety rules and global pandemic plans launched across a multinational's workforces worldwide.

Donald C. Dowling, Jr., Partner, White & Case LLP