Safety at Work

Which of these is safety at work?

1.?????? A fundamental right

2.?????? A privilege

3.?????? A choice

Should workers be entitled to believe that a safe place of work is provided them? With all that it entails, safe processes, adequate consultation and communication, training and supervision. A place without any of the psychosocial hazards present. Would you expect that to be provided for you, and your loved ones? I have never met anyone who has answered no to this when I ask them. And if everyone believes this then isn’t this something that should be a universal human right?

But it’s not. Not at all. In fact, if you look at universal human rights article 23 that deals with work and workplaces and only covers the following:

·???????? Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

·???????? Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

·???????? Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

·???????? Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

(https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights)

Nothing at all to suggest that we should conclude that going to work and returning home safely is something we can all agree on.

So, is it indeed just a privilege that people expect? In western society we may tend to expect this a bit more than those in developing countries.? In a recent conversation I asked Dr Nayab Sultan who has worked extensively in developing countries if workplace safety was a socio – economic issue, with workers working in poorer countries being put more at risk than those in wealthier countries. He answered 100%. I would definitely say yes. He then went on describe the following scenario.

I remember the absolute worst job, and I still shudder when I think about this. I was In Afghanistan, several years ago, and there was a little canoe type thing, and there were two guys in it. Now, why that's, they weren't in the canoe, they were out of the canoe in the water. Why this is something that shocked me was that it was actually an open sewer.

And so, what was happening was that they were up to their necks in this raw sewage. And, they had a kind of this backward facing shovel and they would dive down and then they would scoop up the bottom of the canal and then they would throw the effluent into the canoe so they could remove it so that the canal could continue to flow.

And I remember thinking, my God, that has to be the absolute worst job ever because you could smell this thing from miles away. But this guy, these two individuals, young chaps, would dive underneath the sewage. To clean the canal. There's no, do you think that they had any protection in terms of occupational health and, you know, vaccinations and wearing PPE, you know, a safe system of work, you know, if they drowned in it, they drowned in it, you know, you couldn't get much worse than that.

To add to the point that workplace safety maybe a privilege rather than something we should expect Professor Andrew Hopkins when we chatted in 2023 stated:

I’m very interested in social inequality and it became clear to me fairly early on that workplace health and safety is one of those areas that's we see this very clearly. It's workers who are getting injured and killed. People further up the social scale are not, and that's what really, really bothered me and focused my attention on health and safety initially.

This kind of disconnect on workplace health and safety for those actually physically doing the work, from those who are reaping the larger rewards from their efforts was further illustrated to me when I spoke to Dr Simon Roberts earlier this year.

It was in 2016. It was post the BHP Vale Fundao Dam failure that resulted in 19 people being killed, significant environmental impact. You know, we're seeing further litigation on that as we speak, so years later, now, the CEO at the time got up, spoke at the AGM, provided updates, and then, as per normal proceedings the floor was open to comments, questions, and the analysts, you know, get to ask.

The very first question that was asked by a Deutsche Bank analyst and verbatim quoting, At Samarco, just focusing on the financial side, I appreciate the humanitarian element related to it, but away from the framework agreement, can you give us a little bit more visibility on the current cash burn on a monthly basis in terms of operating costs?

That was the very first question asked. So that basically kind of sums it up. And going forward and doing further analysis of institutional investors, analysts, there's not much talk around safety performance within an organization if something does go wrong.

Or is workplace safety a choice made by workers every day? Do workers make a conscience decision to put themselves at risk rather than work safely every day? Did the workers who lost their lives by staying as they were trained to in the galley for a rescue that never came, make a conscious choice to put their lives at risk? I still find workplaces today with stickers in bathroom mirrors with the message you are looking at the person responsible for your safety, despite the fact that clearly the individual worker has very limited control and influence over workplace safety where they work.

We still have messaging going out to workers on uniforms such as ‘work safely, have a safe day', and some transparent pockets where workers are encouraged to put photos of their loved ones in with the caption underneath, why I choose to work safely today. Do we really think that if workers don’t read these messages they will chose to work unsafely? Or that workers who don’t work safely, maybe even those who get injured or killed, somehow didn’t care about their loved ones? Still too often I hear people after an incident say the worker was complacent in doing their job. But is complacency a decision one can make? Can you choose to become complacent? If safety is a choice, is it just the workers who have made a choice regarding workplace safety or those with substantial more influence within the organization, a choice not to do everything reasonably practicable to manage risks?

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What’s your thoughts? I am keen to hear your opinion.