Health and safety ‘is good investment’

Date: 11/09/1997

By Simon Coss

ONE of the messages Europe's political leaders need to stress during their ongoing crusade to jump-start the Union's ailing jobs market is that providing employees with a decent working environment can actually sharpen a company's competitive edge, say health and safety experts.

“Health and safety pays, it really is an investment. It is not just a social issue. Bad working conditions cost firms money,” insisted Hans-Horst Konkolewsky, director of the European Agency For Health and Safety at Work (EAHSW).

To raise awareness of the positive aspects of laws traditionally viewed by most employers as cumbersome red tape, the agency is holding a top-level conference in the Spanish city of Bilbao next Monday (15 September). Speakers will include Luxembourg Premier Jean-Claude Juncker and Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn.

It is estimated that four days per EU-employee are lost every year through either accidents or absenteeism linked to sub-standard working environments. Insurance firms pay out about 20 billion ecu annually as a direct result of these losses and the total cost is estimated at between 2-3&percent; of the Union's gross domestic product.

Despite a raft of EU health and safety laws pushed through by Flynn's Directorate-General for social affairs (DGV) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the incidence of workplace accidents remains high.

Every year, about 6,000 employees die as a result of injuries sustained while working and nearly 10 million are forced to give up their jobs because of accidents or occupational diseases.

But Konkolewsky argues the way to reduce these statistics is not to introduce new legislation. “The general feeling is that we now have a very good basic framework in Europe. We need to implement the existing legislation and to ensure that rules are followed through to reality from the legal texts,” he said.

While this week's conference will concentrate primarily on the role 'traditional' employers - essentially large companies - have to play in the promotion of health and safety, delegates will also be looking at the problems facing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as 'teleworkers': people who use information technology - telephones, fax machines and e-mail - to work from home.

The role that SMEs play in generating jobs is stressed both by Europe's politicians and Commission officials at every available opportunity. But these firms rarely have the same resources to invest in health and safety measures as their big-business counterparts.