International Labor Organisation Director General Guy Ryder has promised his organisation is going to tackle safety in the workplace. He spoke at the World Congress on health and workplace safety tips, the world’s largest occupational safety event. Delegates from 141 countries including occupational health professionals, politicians and scientists heard as he promised to renew efforts to get health and safety compliance globally. The ILO is keen to tackle workers in the informal work economy such as rural and black market workers who are particularly vulnerable to workplace accidents.
Workplace deaths globally are staggering, an estimated 2.3 million people worldwide lose their lives in work. This includes both workplace accidents and diseases contracted as a result of work.
Although work-related deaths are not in the news as much as they should, they do claim more lives than all wars annually. ILO called for “a culture of intolerance towards risks at work”.
Ryder made clear the failure to ensure a safety in the workplace constitutes an unacceptable form of work: “This puts safety and health alongside forced labour, child labour, freedom of association and discrimination, which were recognized in the ILO Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.”
He also discussed the direct and indirect cost of occupational illness and accidents at work which is estimated at $2.8 trillion globally every year. Investment in orientation training and ongoing health and safety training is required and the return on this investment should make for “good business”, he suggested.
Ryder called for a better data collection and analysis regime by employers and government. “We live in the Information Age where policy-makers have access to data on most issues. But in relation to occupational health and safety, we lack data to design and implement evidence-based policies and programmes. That’s a failure – also of political will.” Building data collection into health and safety training and staff training is essential for future improvements. Also, employee feedback on how they feel about safety in the workplace is essential as they are the ones on the front-line and experiencing the difficulty of the work-site every day.
There is much to feel positive about for the future though according to Ryder. “The importance of efficient labour protection is moving up on global political agendas. At the G20 Leaders Summit held in St. Petersburg in 2013, leaders directed the G20 Task Force on Employment to partner with the ILO to consider how the G20 might contribute to safety in the workplace.”
Using technology and the online world to help create safer and better run work environments is very much on the agenda at the political level and the ILO being behind these efforts may be the impetus required for employers to begin to seek out better ways of hiring and training new staff and contractors.
