Chemical Safety in Asia: Law and PracticeChapter 1Occupational Safety and Health: Past, Present, Future |
The Past
The International Labour Organization (ILO) was established in 1919 against a background of occupational injuries and diseases which was profoundly different to that of today. For example, 3,107 miners died in the coal mines of the United States in 1907. The rate dropped to an average of about 1,300 fatalities during the early 1940s. Event as recently as the 1970s when deaths were down to about 150 per year, disabling injuries were at about 11,000 per year. In Indian mines, at this time, the fatal accident rate was 0.55 per 1,000 miners per year. Also associated with these fatalities are permanently disabling injuries and many minor injuries. It is very easy to look at figures such as 0.55 per 1,000 and similar decimal fractions, for example, in relation to millions of tonnes of coal mines or man hours of work without really appreciating the human cost they are indicating. A death rate of 0.5 per 1,000 miners is telling us that over a 40-year working life there will be 20 fatalities per 1,000 miners and that one in 50 miners will not reach retirement. Another way of looking at it is to consider an office block employing a thousand workers among whom somebody is killed due to an accident every two years. In an even more dangerous job, such as logging, the fatal accident rate in the late eighties in the United States was about 123 per 100,000 workers; and in tropical logging the ILO estimated the rate at 300 per 100,000 workers for the year 1991. This reflects a fatality of 1.2 and 3.0 per 1,000 workers. Our office block now has one to three deaths per year. Would any of you in your office accept such a casualty rate? The answer is no.
Unfortunately the attitudes towards the acceptability of accidents in the early part of this century still lives on in parts of our industrial society, such as construction, transport and commercial diving. The health risks associated with silica dust were already known in the 1700s. Despite this knowledge, two hundred years later, crushed flint (almost pure silica) was introduced into the ceramics industry of the United Kingdom to support ceramics during the firing process. As a result, nearly all those who worked with the material died from silicosis. In the United States at the same time, around the 1930s, what was to become known as the Hawks Nest disaster was taking place as miners dug a three-mile hydro-electric tunnel into siliceous rock. Close to 800 miners died from acute silicosis.
As is now well known, the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century have been spent by societies around the world learning with great reluctance that the working environment must be respected, understood and controlled. The uncontrolled use of phosphorous, lead, arsenic, mercury, anthrax, silica and asbestos has taught societies that if it fails to recognize the health risks associated with materials and chemicals, the human and environmental cost can be immense. Here we are not talking of thousands of lives, but of millions on a global scale. But where did things go so tragically wrong ? And what are the lessons that have been learned ? There was one element that had not yet arrived: the ability to measure and quantify the working environment. For much of the time, the measuring instrument was the worker. The degree of degradation of his or her health indicated if there was a problem and the severity of it. The first measurements of the respirable dust fraction were not made until the early 1930s in the United Kingdom and the analysis of dusts and gases was by wet chemical methods. The ability to measure and understand what was going on in the working environment was limited, although the health consequences and the main methods of control, i.e. substitution, ventilation and control at source were well understood and used by the early years of this century.
Another element which is responsible for the reluctance to respect, understand and control the working environment was the management's failure to appreciate the value behind control measures. The company concerned with the Hawks Nest disaster is said to have claimed that water for suppressing dust, dust masks and ventilating techniques were available. Clearly the work progressed without them being used effectively due to poor managerial control.
A third element is the limited availability at the time of standards such as exposure limits to be adhered to. One example is asbestos for which the methods of measuring compliance were limited and expensive.
The Present
Big changes started to appear in the 1960s when sophisticated methods of analysis based on gas chromatography, atomic absorption and mass spectrophotometry were used and light-weight air sampling equipment became available. Not only could the relationship between exposure and clinical effects be studied on a large scale, but due to advances in physiology, psychology and biochemistry, many subclinical effects in relation to exposure could now be studied. Examples included the ability to measure nerve conduction velocity, changes in enzyme levels and also the relation between exposure and body burden. The situation has changed to one in which it was possible to measure practically anything at any concentration. Even what the worker was breathing in could be assessed with personal sampling techniques and biological monitoring. By the 1970s the role of management was beginning to be more fully understood. It was introduced into national legislation by the 1980s when it became clearly defined in terms of specific responsibilities, duties and the keeping of records to show that managers were in compliance with national legislation. In case this recognition of the role of management is regarded as a major intellectual leap forward, then it is pertinent to quote from the ILO Recommendation concerning the "General Principles for the Organization of Systems of Inspection to Secure the Enforcement of the Law and Regulations for the Protection of the Workers" ( 20) of 1923:
"17 (1) (a) That the principle should be laid down and maintained that the employer and the officials of the establishment are responsible for the observance of the law, and are liable to be proceeded against in the event of deliberate violation or of serious negligence in observing the law, without previous warning from the inspector, ...".
In other words, in the early part of the century the key role of the responsibility of the employer for protecting the safety and health of the workforce was recognized and stated in an international standard. The problem therefore lies with defining what the standards to be achieved were. It is not enough, for example, to show that an exhaust ventilation system is working. It is more important to find out whether or not it is controlling the exposure of workers to a safe limit, i.e. it is the actual exposure to risk that has to be controlled and assessed.
The end of the 20th century sees not only different parts of the world at different levels of safety and health development, but also levels of such difference within the same country. This is a feature of both developing and industrialized countries. For example, the fatal accident rate of 1.2 per 1,000 loggers in the United States occurs in a country that leads the world in the science and technology of occupational safety and health. Its construction and commercial diving, like in most other countries, have accident rates that are not to be tolerated in your offices. In the developing world, the use of chemicals such as pesticides is associated with high accident rates and presents environmental threats that are still poorly understood. Agriculture, which employs half of the world labour force, or an estimated 1.3 billion workers, remains to be one of the most hazardous occupations in both developed and developing countries. In the more developed regions, agriculture engages less that 10 % of the workforce, whilst the proportion of the workforce in developing countries is over 60 %. Mortality rates in agriculture have remained consistently high in the last decade. Workers in agriculture run at least twice the risk of dying on the job as workers in other sectors. At least 170,000 agricultural workers are killed each year. This fatality rate is higher than that of all branches of economic activity. In some countries in Africa, the fatality rate is seven times the average of that in all economic activities, four times in the United States and twice in Germany.
The situation regarding health is more confused. Asbestos and silica-related diseases will lead, on a global scale, to the premature death of millions of workers by the year 2030; and the scale and significance of musculoskeletal diseases is just beginning to be recognized.
The Future
In the early part of the century it may be claimed that lack of control of workplace hazards was due to ignorance of the scale of the problem of occupational safety and health, the culture of the time, the inability to measure and quantify the work environment, and the lack of understanding of management techniques and appreciation of their key role in achieving humanitarian as well as commercial objectives. This is no longer the case. Governments, employers' and workers' representatives and society itself tolerate these high accident and occupational disease rates in full knowledge that they are preventable and in many cases by inexpensive simple procedures. The ILO Recommendation concerning "Labour Inspection" ( 21), 1947, paragraph 2 states that: "Members should make arrangements under which plans for new establishments, plants, or processes of production may be submitted to the appropriate labour inspection service for an opinion as to whether the said plan would render difficult or impossible compliance with the laws and regulations concerning industrial health and safety or would be likely to constitute a threat to the health or safety of the workers". It is difficult to imagine logging operations, construction, commercial diving and mining going on without the competent authorities knowing about it and sanctioning it. It is with new projects that national policies on safety and health need to be continually re-affirmed so that industry and commerce are being continually reminded of the standards that the society requires in its workplace. The requirement to adopt a national occupational safety and health policy and to take actions needed at the national and at the enterprise levels to promote occupational safety and health and to improve the working environment is already outlined in the ILO Occupational Safety and Health Convention ( 155) and its accompanying Recommendation ( 164), 1981. The ILO Occupational Health Services Convention ( 161) and its accompanying Recommendation ( 171), 1985, provide for the establishment of occupational health services which will contribute to the implementation of the occupational safety and health policy and will perform their functions at the enterprise level. With existing workplaces there must be continuing cooperation between governments who are questioning more and more the failure to protect the workforce, the workers and the employers in order to bring the accident, injury and disease rates right down. One death or injury is now one too many. Of the more recent international standards which were also adopted by the international community are the ILO Convention concerning Safety in the Use of Chemicals at Work ( 170) and its accompanying Recommendation ( 177), 1990. The purpose of this Convention is to protect workers against the risks associated with the use of chemicals at their workplace. It applies to all branches of economic activity in which chemicals are used and covers all chemicals without exception, and provides for specific measures in respect of hazardous chemicals. States ratifying the Convention are required to work out a national policy for safety in the use of chemicals at work in accordance with the general principles it sets forth, adopt classification and labelling systems for all such substances and introduce chemical safety data sheets. The Convention specifies the responsibilities of suppliers in respect of labelling and data sheets and those of employers, which are to be discharged in cooperation with the workers and their representatives as regards the identification of substances, operational control, including monitoring of exposure to chemicals, waste disposal and the information and training of workers. The Convention also details the duties and rights of workers. Lastly, exporting States are responsible for supplying information to States importing their chemicals. The Recommendation gives additional details on the provisions together with guidelines on how the principles of the Convention should be translated into national legislation.
The importance and the use of information and its dissemination should not be undermined. The information is abundant and available in the form of posters, leaflets, safety data sheets, books, encyclopaedias and other forms of communication, but it too often stops on desks and does not reach those it is intended for. The cost involved in making workers aware of hazards and their controls is minimal but the workers do require people in governments, in enterprises and in workers' organizations who are ready to fight for them, making sure that their managers, supervisors and the government agencies are involved in safety and are communicating the necessary information to which they have the right of access. Too often workers are seen without dust masks and hearing protection, and without clean water and eye washes when handling chemicals and working at heights without adequate protection. Much higher standards can be achieved in this respect if governments, employers and workers work much more closely together and start monitoring what is getting to the worker and between them work to correct deficiencies. An important element of the future is therefore the monitoring of the workers' knowledge and skills in safety and health to determine if the good intentions of those concerned with safety and health (money and resources of government and industry), appear as hard safe operating procedures and protection at the front line.
That work with almost no accidents an be achieved has been demonstrated by some enterprises. The engineering standards and the administrative, supervisory and management procedures used have to be learnt by all workplaces through the world. The elevation of workplace standards will be motivated by the development of a safety culture at the enterprise and individual level, improvement in the design of tools, equipment and plant, the improving standards of management skills and the application of such skills to safety.
At the national level, the enforcing agencies will improve their techniques of enforcement. At the international level data collection will be done according to harmonized procedures which can be used for a global safety and health quality control system.
According to what Sigerist, a medical historian, said in 1943, the history of occupational health will help to reveal the factors that retard its development and those that accelerate it and so enable a modern society to act more intelligently in such matters.
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