According to the International Labour Organisation, every 15 seconds a worker dies from a work-related accident or disease. Workplaces claim more than 2.3 million deaths per year, 350,000 of which are the result of accidents and close to two million due to work-related diseases.
The Occupational Health and Safety Authority has just announced that “penalties for those breaching health and safety laws are set to increase dramatically”. But will further punitive measures in fact ensure that health and safety standards will improve?
The OHSA was the first to acknowledge “the importance of establishing a culture of risk prevention through education”. But it then resorts to raising “maximum fines and imprisonment terms” for those breaching workers’ health and safety rights. While there is no doubt that better enforcement of health and safety regulations is an important priority, the OHSA needs to be more ambitious and comprehensive in its endeavours to make workplaces safer.
All businesses are in duty bound to offer decent workplaces for their employees, whether those engaged in building sites or office workers who spend their day looking at computer screens.
The emphasis on physically dangerous workplaces is understandable. Irresponsible contractors often expose workers, some of whom may not even be regularly employed, to take unnecessary risk by not wearing the right clothing, using proper tools or not having the right equipment to make working in a particular environment, like heights, safe.
The imposition of heavier penalties on contractors who expose their workers to excessive risk may discourage abuse. But ultimately there will always be the unscrupulous few who make cold calculations on what gives them better financial returns – exposing workers to the risk of fatal accidents to get a job done as fast and as cheaply as possible or risk paying hefty fines that dent some of their profit margin. Revocation of working licences by the OHSA or another competent authority may often be a better deterrent for those who are prepared to put their workers’ health and safety at risk because of their greed.
The OHSA also needs to look into the modern risks that office workers face on a daily basis. Some of these risks may look physically less dangerous than those to which construction workers are exposed but they are just as damaging.
Workers who use computers for long hours every day need to have proper workstations, regular eye tests and short periods of rest to preserve their eyesight and mental health. The long-term effects of working in an environmentally unhealthy workplace will not appear instantly but are just as devastating.
Another health and safety risk so often overlooked is bullying at the workplace which affects all workers.
Irregularly employed workers are perhaps at even greater risk of this phenomenon because they often have to put up with constant harassment for fear of losing their jobs.
It is a sad reality that the effects of mental health illnesses caused by bad working conditions are under-reported in health and safety literature.
When cultural changes are needed to improve working conditions, the best tool to bring about such changes is education. It may take longer to work but it is more effective in making our workplaces decent places where to earn a living.