by Annie Rice
Senior Specialist, Occupational Safety and Health
Decent work is safe work. Nowhere does this need to be spelled out more clearly than in South Eastern Europe (SEE). Unlike their cousins further north, most countries in the SEE region have not yet benefited from the EU accession process in the field of health and safety. The problems created by the rapid transformation to a market economy, years of political instability, high unemployment, the use of outdated machinery, and institutional legacies from the planned economy have left them seemingly helpless in the face of worsening working conditions.
Learning “the rules” of modern market economies and social partnerships has meant a variety of impacts on working conditions – often leading to a drastic degradation of the working environment and detrimental effects on health and safety. There seems to have been a tacit acceptance that this is an inevitable price to pay in the course of transition. With high unemployment rates in SEE of even 25–30%, it is understandable that the wage-earning population is more concerned about day-to-day questions of employment and wages (and retaining their bonuses for working in hazardous conditions) than about an improved working environment. Similarly, employers believe that health and safety improvements entail costs they can ill afford during transition.
There has been progress in recent years, as new legal frameworks and institutional arrangements have been set up in most SEE countries for safety and health at work. The legal framework is often very good, with key elements based on ILO Conventions and EU requirements. But the challenge of implementing and enforcing the law remains.
The ILO is presently working to elevate safety and health issues from their “second class” status by promoting awareness that they are part and parcel of human security and sound economic policy. In essence, we are looking at OSH as a factor in employability, because creating a safe and healthy working environment that prevents occupational diseases and accidents will keep people in the workforce who would otherwise be excluded due to disability, early retirement or even death.
One way the ILO is helping to promote awareness is through programmes to help modernize labour inspection services. The ILO has carried out several evaluation and advisory missions in the region – notably in Bulgaria, Serbia and Croatia – and has made practical recommendations to improve services. (A concise list of recommendations was produced by a conference on the reform and modernization of labour inspection services. Please read the “Cyprus Conclusions”
The evaluations have in some cases been followed up with full-scale modernization projects. For example, a project funded by the German government on training for an integrated inspection service has taken place in Bulgaria over the past five years. This has resulted in a prevention-oriented integrated approach, whereby each inspector is competent for inspections in safety, health and labour relations. This has led to more – and more efficient – inspections.
The experience gained by the Bulgarian labour inspectorate will now be put to use in a similar US-funded project carried out by ILOBudapest in Serbia. The Serbian project is now in its initial stages, but it aims to develop a modern service to increase compliance with health and safety laws. Key components will establish responsibility in practical terms for both safety and health inspections within the labour inspections services, while establishing procedures for cooperation between ministries and agencies dealing with various aspects of OSH. The large-scale training programme for various categories of managers and inspectors will result in more effective planning and monitoring of inspections, leading to targeted, preventionoriented interventions and campaigns. This is a process that needs to be developed in most countries of SEE.
The project will also establish modern training capacity, with qualified trainers, new tools and procedures for inspection, educational materials and a number of training programmes implemented. A further major part of the project will be the development of a strategy to increase compliance through education and outreach to employers and workers. There will be a shift from merely enforcing the law and punishing non-compliant employers to stimulating employers to protect employees. Workers and trade unions will be encouraged to play their part also, by providing information and guidance in order to better comply with the law.
The objective, in Serbia and elsewhere in the region, is to persuade employers to improve and use sanctions in a strategic manner – not as routine punishment which may cause fledging small and medium-sized enterprises to go under.
Working with employers and workers and their representatives to promote a safety culture, both nationally and at the workplace, is also part of the ILO’s regional strategy.
In most countries, legislation now places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the employer to provide a safe and healthy working environment.
Larger companies may have in-house occupational health services, but smaller companies will have to rely on external services. However, many of these are sadly in need of improvement themselves. Most are insufficiently prevention-oriented – the number of pre-employment and regular medical examinations leaves little time or resources for preventive occupational health work, especially risk assessments. Moreover, the present trend is for many licensed small services to be present on the market, but without any quality certification and no legislation defining minimum standards and tariffs. The result is poor services, price dumping and ignoring the needs of small companies.
While this is characteristic of most SEE countries, ILO-Budapest is presently working on a pilot project to help improve OSH services for newsletter the association of employers in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria. The lessons learned from this activity will hopefully be of use to employers’ organizations elsewhere in the region.
The importance of trade union capacity building in health and safety was also emphasized during an ILO-Budapest study aimed at developing the knowledge base on which trade unions could develop OSH priorities, policies and strategies. Although only Bulgarian trade unions from SEE actually participated in the study, unions from most countries participated in the follow-up exercises to actually develop strategies to develop their OSH policies and activities. One of the major conclusions of this exercise was that unions have to establish health and safety representation through delegates or committees at workplaces. Future activities for unions could therefore centre on training for effective participation in OSH management at the workplace. Such an activity was carried out in Macedonia, where trade union representatives joined with young safety professionals in a practical workshop designed to help them identify and evaluate hazards, and propose low-cost local solutions.
The biggest challenge for the development of an OSH culture in SEE countries is to change the attitudes of those who reason that accidents and diseases are part of the cost of transition, and to make the constituents aware of the high costs of the status quo. The present ILO-Budapest programme aimed at labour inspectors, employers and workers is about promoting this preventive approach.
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| ILO Film |
| Fully fit at work |
Film about the advantages of employing persons with disabilities. As this ILO film (Fully Fit at Work) shows, not only may people with disabilities be more productive, they may actually be more skilled in some jobs than non-disabled people. Produced for the ILO by the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing.
Watch the film online in Polish with English subtitles. Duration: 21 min 11 sec
If the video is not displayed, download the free RealPlayer™
Press release in English and
Polish |
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World Day Against Child Labour
12 June 2008
Education: The right response to child labour
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A package for social and economic progress
The Albanian pilot of the One UN Programme will make use of the experiences of the International Labour Organization (ILO) gained in the field. As the only tripartite organisation within the United Nations system, the ILO plays a key role in involving social partners in the recently launched UN reform process.
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