It was in the year 2003 that the International Labor Organization officially recognized the calamitous and hostile work environment that millions of people face on a daily basis. It was then that ILO began to observe the World Day for Safety and Health at Office, stressing the need to prevent accidents and diseases and ensure a safe and sound environment for workers/employers. Essentially, this initiative forms an integral part of the Global Strategy on Occupational Safety and Health- ILO, and the foundation to this celebration were laid down in the concluding reports of ILO conference, in the summer of 2003. ILO uses advocacy as a medium of spreading awareness on how and why work environment needs to be more secure and is need of the hour.
28th April, on which the World Day on Safety and Health at Work is celebrated globally, also happens to be the day on which International Commemoration for Dead and Injured Workers organized worldwide by Trade Union Movement since 1996.
On this 28th of April, lets look closely upon what this day is all about and how it tries to enhance the existing working conditions of thousands and thousands. Basically an awareness-raising campaign, the annual World Day for Safety and Health on 28th April every year vows to promote occupational hazards and diseases or such issues, globally. The cornerstone of this promotional campaign is to emphasize upon the magnitude of problems and that spreading solution-oriented awareness shall help reduce the hostility rate of various jobs all across the world, thus bringing down work-related fatalities. The campaign further urges common people to come forward and share the responsibility of spreading the word on this issue. To all those who ask how can they spread this campaign and raise awareness; the one power common citizens possess and, in case of most democracies, are constitutionally protected to practice is the power to organize demonstration programs that shall force the government to come up with laws to, protected by the Judiciary, that can help ensure a better and safer workplace environment. Then there can be demonstration programs to mainly focus on the training of small or medium sized organization, constructively persuading them to utilize the better and modern learning knowledge for employees. Furthermore, introducing appraisals and establishing minimum quality standards of efficacy of existing worker training programs, would also be an active contributor to popularizing this campaign. Several work organizations need to come up and should come up with regulating policies for older, female, and minority employees, for example introducing a fair pattern of paid maternity and paternity leaves. To this example, another one can be adjoined that asks for organizations to provide for paid miscarriage leaves. This campaign pleads organizations to construct a platform that shall help in educating the workers of the infirmities and chronic diseases related to workplace and the ways in which these can be avoided. Propagating the knowledge on how to practice effective communication would further create a cooperate environment wherein minority employees and the less literate or illiterate workers would be able to convey their problems to the authorities, and shall understand the solutions at the same time. Most of all, this campaign urges organizations to maintain well documented records of past hazards, the casualties it caused if any, and the practices that led some or the other sort of life endangering issues. This shall help company authorities to beware of existing problems and on planning a blueprint that’ll help them to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.
Every year, the ILO on World Day for Safety and Health at work organizes their yearly campaign, coming with a new social issue surfacing and impacting the world in that particular time period. The year 2020 gave to the world one of the most peculiar and disturbing problems in the form of COVID-19, a virus that no one could trace the origin of , but the virus that has become the reason for endless number of health hazards all across the globe. The World Day on Safety and Health at Work, 2021, in the light of the COVID-19 Pandemic, has taken up ,”anticipate, prepare, and respond to crisis” as the theme of their promotional campaign. The theme aims to spread awareness regarding Investing in Resilient Occupational safety and health systems. It is not hidden from anyone that this pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to the world, pushed governments, employers, workers and the general masses to face problems, no one was as much prepared for. In several countries, which have called themselves blooming economies and highly developed democracies, people are suffering everyday because of the pandemic and the unpreparedness of their governments, not well equipped with the necessary technology and other sources. Most of all, frontline health workers are putting their lives on risk everyday to provide utmost services with very scarce resources available. They work in extremely unhygienic environments and are prone to getting infected themselves. Several other low wage workers are also working in the most unsafe of environments, exposed to the air-borne virus, and unable to afford any preventive aids. The World Day on Safety and Health at Work this year, thus, focusses on formulating strategies to boost national occupational safety and health systems, build resilience workforce that are well trained and organized to face the current crises. While focusing on making the present scenario more safe and prepared, the campaign this year shall also focus on raising a key point on urging governments and the masses to draw significant lessons from what is happening right now, learning from the experiences and working unconditionally on improving the job infrastructure, especially the health infrastructure that will lead to a better and more competent system at work. The campaign asks for the governments, in general, and the work organizations in particular to design policies ensuring preparedness in the times of critical emergencies, such as the COVID-19 Pandemic, and assure a structure that can be financially as well as health wise be relieving for their citizens and workers, respectively. The world day report will examine the current crisis and will demonstrate how several systems have collectively failed by asserting the future strengthening of occupational health services, at both national and undertaking level.
Lastly, the ILO, that directly handles this project, will utilize this opportunity to raise ample amount of awareness and stimulate dialogue on the importance of creating and investing in resilient OSH systems, drawing on both regional and country examples in mitigating and preventing the spread of COVID-19 at the workplace.
Moving further, the ILO, with the help of the World Day On Safety and Health at workplace, introduces to the world emerging risks at work. With the advancements that technology is achieving there comes a new list of occupational risks posed to workers. The list also contains set of dangers that can be caused because of social or organizational changes, to understand this, look at some examples-
New technologies bring to the picture use of even more number of chemicals, and such things. This becomes an issue to worry about because if the workers are not taught the correct methodologies to use these technologies, they can cause the kind of accidents and health hazards that no one will be able to recover from.
Furthermore, in several countries, new working conditions are emerging wherein, more-input -for-more-output criteria is being used. This leads to heavy workloads, work intensification, causing physical and mental health issues. Not to forget the poor conditions of facilities given for migration workers as well as the insecure and informal structure of casual workers industry. Self employment without the required legal and formal guidance is also another major issue that falls in the list of new risks emerging to surface.
Conclusively, the ILO with this World Day tries to convey to the people that workplaces are of vital importance, and can be used most effectively to prevent and control outbreaks. They can function to make things better in the times of crisis. However, the workplaces need to be equipped with safety and health measures, because only then can they work to contain the spread of any disease, while also ensuring safety of the workers , which by and large means the protection and well-being of the society in general. The list of factors posing danger to the workplace is endless and eternal, however with the right amount of knowledge and proper execution of policies and laws, a better scenario can be imagined. The World Day on Safety and Health at workplace enforces this ideology on a global level and asks for the Governments, employers and workers to be responsible on their respective parts, in raising awareness and ensuring better facilities at hand to deal with uncalled for events.
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Piece by-
Shambhavi Singh
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