trade unions around the world\u00a0<\/a>will be pressing governments and employers to agree to put that commitment into practice.<\/p>\nEvery year, 2.78 million working people die because of something that happens at work. Hundreds of thousands go to work and don\u2019t make it home in one piece.<\/p>\n
A grim occupational disease like mesothelioma, the cancer of the lining of the lung caused by asbestos.<\/p>\n
Being buried under tonnes of agricultural slurry because basic safety precautions were ignored to save money.<\/p>\n
And now, fighting for breath because inadequate sick pay provision and social protection mean that workers in the informal sector \u2014 two-thirds of the people at work around the world today \u2014 are being asked to choose between scraping a living at risk of catching Covid-19 and not putting food on their family table.<\/p>\n
Governments have left nurses, doctors, and hospital cleaners without suitable masks to protect them as they treat the dying, like in Brazil where tens of thousands of health workers have died.<\/p>\n
Employers have forced migrant workers in Australia to work at punishing paces in freezing conditions, crammed together in meatpacking factories, an ideal breeding ground for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.<\/p>\n
And health and safety inspectors in the UK haven\u2019t prosecuted a single employer for Covid-19 health and safety breaches in the whole year of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
These failures are just the latest in the decades-long disgrace of inadequate occupational health and safety provision. In workplaces where people matter less than profit, where budget cuts put safety on the line, where complaints are punished rather than listened to.<\/p>\n
Making occupational health and safety a fundamental right at work \u2014 on a par with the prohibition of child and forced labour, discrimination at work, and the right to join a union, bargain collectively and ultimately to take strike action \u2014 wouldn\u2019t solve every problem at work.<\/p>\n
But it would make employers and governments more accountable when they fall short and a working person suffers, often leaving grieving parents, children, wives or husbands.<\/p>\n
It would signal that workers have the right to refuse to take unnecessary risks at work. It would strengthen the hand of inspectors and health and safety professionals. It would drive better health and safety standards along the world\u2019s supply chains.<\/p>\n
And it would reaffirm the right of working people to be informed and consulted by their employers about the hazards in their workplaces \u2014 benefitting not just workers but the people they care for. In New York nursing homes, 30% fewer residents died where there was a union present.<\/p>\n
Health and safety worker representatives, joint management-union safety committees, stronger laws have all been proven, time and time again, to keep working people and the public safer and healthier.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re calling on Governments and employer representatives at the ILO Governing Body in March to set a firm date for inserting workplace health and safety in the ILO\u2019s fundamental principles and rights, and then deliver on it. Workers and their unions trusted it would happen this year. It just needs leaders committed to saving lives.<\/p>\n
People\u2019s lives matter more than money. With the Covid-19 pandemic raging in workplaces across the world, the time is now. We can\u2019t wait any longer.<\/p>\n
Medium, 5 Feb 2021<\/a><\/p>\n