SAFETY WEEK 2010 – SEPTEMBER 20-25-Health and safety ‘vital element of national agenda’ |23 September 2010

Occupational health and safety (OHS) in this present day and age should be a critical and important element of any national agenda.

It should not be restrained and confined to the meetings of boards of employment and labour stakeholders of a country, but it also needs to be the prime concern of politicians, policymakers, financial institutions, legislators and the public at large.

Research done by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has shown that national expenditure on OSH-related incidents accounts for an average of 5% of a country’s gross domestic product.

To any country – and Seychelles should not be an exception – such a figure has huge implications for all aspects of its national development. Countries that have benefited from this knowledge have made a big effort to systematically invest in OSH management and have gradually reduced OSH-related accidents at all levels.

The benefit of reducing wastage in OSH accidents and related diseases has then been used to further develop OSH in all its ramifications. National policymakers, therefore, have the strongest obligation to ensure that OSH is mainstreamed into socio-economic investment policies.

Such interventions, however, remain much at the level of “effect” rather than “cause”, and it will also require that the “cause” of OSH polemics is addressed in longer-term strategies.

It is generally accepted that behaviour can be changed through education and stimulation. Thus the attitude of people to OSH will also change once the education stakeholders introduce OSH into mainline schools’ curriculum in the same way as other matters of interest to the state such as patriotic or civic education, family life and culture etc.

Besides the academic curriculum, such programmes go to form and empower the civic and human “psychological elements” of the citizen. Therefore health and safety in the workplace or elsewhere becomes next to second nature for the individual, similar to the patriotic and cultural ownership of one’s identity.

It is on the basis of the points addressed in this article that OSH is contained as one pillar of the ILO’s “decent work” agenda, also known as a strategic objective of decent work. OSH is no longer an issue for individual countries alone but an international and common issue of the planet.

For this reason the ILO has adopted many international OSH standards, which cover vast sectors and all classifications of hazards. Prevention is normally the focus of these conventions for occupational safety and health, for example Convention 187 and Recommendation 197, both promoting a health and safety culture and system management approaches.

Seychelles is yet to ratify this comprehensive convention, though by the ratification of the C155 occupational safety and health convention the parameters of national policy have been set in motion and it remains for its adoption and efficient application to be carried out.

The strength of all OSH standards, though, remains with the power to enforce legislation and regulations which is the prerogative of the labour inspectorate authority of employment and labour ministries.

Enforcement alone will be the catalyst to ensure employers apply OSH standards and regulations and do not use the excuse that workers are not complying, as employees will have no option but to abide by OSH regulations or face tough consequences.

The Seychelles Federation of Workers Union, as a concerned social partner, is of the very strong opinion and conviction that the ILO core conventions in this day and age will show strategic fatigue in the years to come if the ILO does not incorporate one comprehensive OSH convention to the existing list of eight core conventions.

It may also be time that all OHS conventions are consolidated into one instrument (law), as was the case with the consolidated maritime convention.