Towards safer, healthier, decent work

TTUTA

IN OBSERVING International Workers’ Memorial Day on April 28, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) called for a greater will on the part of governments to ensure that workers have safer, healthier, and decent work.

Worldwide, poor working conditions kill a worker every 11 seconds. While all of these deaths are avoidable, the body count is increasing according to Sharan Burrow, ITUC general secretary. It is for this reason that global unions are launching a reinvigorated and urgent organising campaign to demand safety, justice, and accountability.

The new global order evaluates companies on their annual accounts and not their accident books. Corporate CEOs are rewarded for asset-stripping, job-slashing, outsourcing and profit-making. Unfortunately, it takes nothing short of a major disaster to see workers’ health and safety generate any concern in corporate boardrooms.

This lack of interest for workers’ safety comes at an economic cost. Estimates from the ILO released in September 2017 revealed that work-related fatal injuries and diseases worldwide have increased to 2.78 million a year, with most (2.4 million) deaths being the result of occupational diseases and not accidents.

While these statistics might seem alarming, the reality is that these figures are underestimates since very often work associations with diseases are missed either by accident or design and, for entire categories of conditions, no one is counting the bodies. The ILO puts this loss of life at 3.94 per cent of global GDP a year or US2.99 trillion.

While much of the burden of poor health and safety standards will be borne by workers in developing countries, the erosion of protective regulations and enforcement has seen disturbing changes in some of the richer industrialised nations.

An explosion in temporary work and subcontracting has created a workforce bearing all the risk with few of the benefits. As more technology permeates the workplace every aspect of performance is scrutinised, questioned, and prompted to improve. Privacy is history in the new digitised economy.

One consequence of the changes in the way people work is the emergence of new occupational epidemics caused by work-related despair. According to the ILO, studies in the United States, Australia, France, Japan, China, India, and Taiwan reveal a sharp rise in work suicides, linked to factors including job insecurity and work overload.

Studies done at the London School of Economics found that organisations working in partnership with local trade unions are more likely to succeed in addressing sexual harassment and violence. They indicated that global codes of conduct by comparison have proven ineffective, especially where legal protection is weak or absent, since they are harder to enforce.

Here in Trinidad and Tobago, there is a growing voice of anti-union sentiment and reluctance to collaborate with unions, despite the legislative protections of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The slow pace with which the authorities have approached the amendment of the Industrial Relations Act and other relevant pieces of legislation to protect workers is unsatisfactory.

Unions are demonised at every turn especially when they attempt to educate workers about their rights. Many workers are ignorant about their rights under the law and employers make no effort to educate them in this regard. Many workers are intimidated, disciplined or even terminated when they attempt to unionise. The recent ruling in favour of a financial institution preventing its workers from being unionised is yet another example of a concerted and coordinated campaign to discredit and weaken unions.

Unions and their members cannot remain silent. They represent an important check and balance in a capitalist economic system. They force employers to be held accountable as they seek to maximise profit.

Many of the rights that citizens currently take for granted were won by unions in their never ending quest to prevent exploitation and abuse of human rights. Workers cannot be complacent or fooled into thinking that their rights will not be compromised. They must ensure that they belong to unions as a means of self-protection.

This is why April 28, International Workers’ Memorial Day, the global union safety day of action, focused on the theme, “Union Workplaces are Safer Workplaces.” It is not just about asking for improvements, it is about having a collective voice and industrial power to demand them.

In its 2016 report the AFL-CIO noted that workers in states with anti-union “right to work laws” are at a 49 per cent greater risk of dying on the job while states with greater union density tended to have lower job fatality rates.