Safety and Health at the Heart of the Past, Present, and Future of Work: A Perspective From the International Labour Organization

Every year, 2.78 million workers die from occupational accidents and work-related diseases, and an additional 374 million workers suffer from nonfatal occupational accidents.¹ Lost workdays represent almost 4% of the world’s gross domestic product, rising to 6% in some countries.²

For centuries, the workplace has posed risks and hazards for workers. In emphasizing the essential role of social justice in achieving lasting peace, the International Labour Organization (ILO) constitution calls on member states to improve working conditions, including “the protection of the worker against sickness, disease and injury arising out of his employment.”³

Although workers continued to experience risks to their safety and health, heightened global knowledge had a significant impact on how organizations such as the ILO tackled these challenges globally.⁴ Scientific and professional understanding of the nature of work and its relationship to the safety, health, and well-being of workers opened a venue for progress in industrialized nations. Occupational hygiene, along with occupational medicine, toxicology, and epidemiology, continued to grow rapidly, as did disciplines associated with safety design and engineering.

The exponential growth in the production of new substances from the mid-20th century onward generated an increased need for research into their possible harmful effects. Revelations concerning such effects, sometimes in relation to supposed harmless substances already in widespread use, such as vinyl chloride monomer, spurred the need for more research.⁵

Yet, the approach to controlling and regulating occupational safety and health (OSH) risks remained relatively the same, despite the burgeoning knowledge base concerning the science and engineering of prevention and control of OSH. In most countries, prescriptive measures continued to impose duties based on established legal employment relationships, in relation either to identified hazards and harmful substances or to entire industries such as mining and construction. Although in some countries the evolution of social protection measures improved the availability of financial compensation for injury and illness arising from work, access to this financial assistance remains an issue.

In addition to its normative role, the ILO focused on the development of codes of practice and guidelines on OSH. They have provided OSH guidance for various economic sectors and for the recording and notification of occupational accidents and work-related diseases. At the global level, the ILO also supported research into a range of OSH issues. Consequently, the ILO introduced a program of technical assistance, providing capacity building to help deliver policies at the national level and support for the development of national institutions and labor inspection systems.

More recently, changes in global production, developing technologies, shifting patterns of work and industry, changes in labor market demographics, and major industrial disasters began to demand a different approach to OSH policy. National-level challenges for both employers and workers showed that the traditional regulation of single OSH risks or single economic sectors had become too narrow; recognition grew of the need to establish a more holistic approach that could address increasingly divergent OSH challenges.

The ILO adapted to these changes by shifting to a culture of prevention. In 1981, for example, the organization adopted the Occupational Safety and Health Convention, no. 155, which states:

Each Member shall, in the light of national conditions and practice, and in consultation with the most representative organisations of employers and workers, formulate, implement and periodically review a coherent national policy on occupational safety, occupational health and the working environment. (Art. 4.1)

This is to “prevent accidents and injury” at the workplace “by minimising, so far as is reasonably practicable, the causes of hazards inherent in the working environment” (Art. 4.2). This pioneering approach to promoting a safe and healthy workplace culture was followed quickly by the Occupational Health Services Convention (no. 161) in 1985.

These developments led to an increasing policy focus on more systematic approaches, with the identification, assessment, and control of risks featuring prominently, both in the safe management of major hazardous industries and in more generic guidance for workplace practices everywhere.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

The ILO continued its emphasis on prevention as the new millennium began. In 2001, the ILO published the “Guidelines on Safety and Health Management Systems.” These guidelines helped embed the systems-based approach to OSH management in global OSH policies at the national and workforce levels. In 2006, it adopted the “Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 2006 (No. 187).”

The increasingly globalized nature of trade, including the proliferation of global supply chains, has continued to present challenges to effective OSH management. In 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which more than 1100 workers lost their lives and 2500 more were injured, demonstrated the continuing urgency of addressing fundamental safety and health issues in global supply chains through strong partnerships. The ILO’s flagship program, Safety + Health for All, brings a strategic compliance approach to global supply chains, including small and medium-sized enterprises. ILO programs such as Better Work and Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprise, which both provide technical assistance to factories along the supply chain, aim in part to create a culture of prevention, relying on dialogue between workers and employers at the factory level. The Vision Zero Fund, an initiative of the G7 (Group of Seven) implemented by the ILO, seeks to create shared responsibility for safer supply chains.

With the rise in temporary and part-time work (such as zero-hours contracts), the platform economy, and continued challenges to establishing adequate work–life balance, the ILO has paid increasing attention to the corresponding rise in psychosocial risks in the workplace. Noncommunicable diseases, such as occupational cancers, respiratory diseases, and work-related mental health disorders, require sustained vigilance. These challenges also bring improved opportunities for strategic compliance, for example by applying new technologies to risk assessment and dangerous jobs and by reshaping working schedules to create a better work–life balance.

MOVING FORWARD

The ILO’s centenary in 2019 presented an opportunity not only to reflect on the organization’s accomplishments but also to address challenges for the Future of Work. In June of this year, delegates to the Centenary International Labor Conference adopted the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work. The Declaration recognizes that “safe and healthy working conditions are fundamental to decent work.” Building on that recognition, delegates to the conference requested the ILO’s governing body “to consider, as soon as possible, proposals for including safe and healthy working conditions in the ILO’s framework of fundamental principles and rights at work.”⁶

Thus, although we have seen significant progress throughout the last century in advancing OSH, the need to create safe and healthy work for all remains pressing. New and emerging safety and health risks in an ever-changing world of work will create new challenges, as well as opportunities, for governments, employers, workers, and other key stakeholders to ensure safe and healthy working environments.