New ILO push for health and safety compliance

Calling for “a culture of intolerance towards risks at work,” International Labour Organisation (ILO) director-general Guy Ryder has said safety and health will be an integral part of all the ILO’s work. He said: “Ebola and the tragedies it is causing are in the daily headlines – which is right. But work-related deaths are not. So, the task ahead is to establish a permanent culture of consciousness.”

Calling for “a culture of intolerance towards risks at work,” International Labour Organisation (ILO) director-general Guy Ryder has said safety and health will be an integral part of all the ILO’s work.

He told delegates to August’s World Congress on Safety and Health at Work in Frankfurt: “Ebola and the tragedies it is causing are in the daily headlines – which is right. But work-related deaths are not. So, the task ahead is to establish a permanent culture of consciousness.”

He made clear the failure to ensure a safe and healthy workplace constitutes an unacceptable form of work: “This puts safety and health alongside forced labour, child labour, freedom of association and discrimination, which were recognised in the ILO Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.”

Ryder added that safety and health will be an integral part of all of the ILO’s work, including a spotlight on invisible and vulnerable categories of workers in the informal economy, rural economy and migrant workers. He pointed out that investing in occupational safety and health is also good business, noting: “Every dollar that is invested pays in.”

The ILO director-general also underlined the critical need for good data. “We live in the Information Age where policy-makers have access to data on most issues,” he said. “But in relation to occupational safety and health we lack data to design and implement evidence-based policies and programmes. That’s a failure – also of political will.”

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