SOCIAL PROTECTION Occupational Safety & health

The key social protection issue is occupational health and safety. Every year, about 250 million workers suffer accidents in the course of their work, and over 300,000 are killed. Taking account of those who succumb to occupational diseases, the death toll is over 1 million people a year. Yet, international concern with awareness of health and safety at work remains surprisingly modest, and action is limited. Many developing and transition countries have little public information on this subject and need to reinforce their capacity to design and implement effective policies and programmes. Even today, many new investment decisions continue to ignore safety, health and environmental considerations.

ILO has always been concerned with occupational health and safety and has launched an InFocus Programme on this issue in 1999. It focuses on hazardous jobs and sectors and on groups of workers particularly exposed to occupational injuries and diseases, including those vulnerable on account of gender or age and those in the urban informal sector. The programme aims at creating alliances and partnerships around this issue, while providing technical assistance to support national action.

A number of new work-related health issues have arisen in recent years. There has been, for example, increasing alarm over burn-out, as a result of work-related stress, "workaholism" and overwork, especially among highly paid white-collar workers. ILO will prepare a special report, incorporating a gender analysis, to monitor these relatively new forms of occupational hazard and consider policies that might limit their incidence.