…while ensuring workforce is healthy and safe

Date: 25/09/1997

By Simon Coss

AS IF the painful transition from centrally-planned to market economies was not hard enough in itself, the central and east European applicant states face the added challenge of bringing their national laws into line with the EU's tough health and safety legislation.

Most of the prospective Union members actually have very extensive laws governing working conditions, many of them based on old Soviet rules.

The problem is that the legislation has never really been independently enforced. The old industries were theoretically policed by trade unions and factory bosses, but both were directly answerable to the state - which also owned all businesses.

“There used to be very high levels of legislation at national level, but it was just Utopia,” said one expert.

In the past, national administrations tended to adhere to the principle of offering people more money to work in dangerous and unhealthy environments rather than making any real effort to improve conditions.

Furthermore, health and safety rules are often dealt with by two different government departments in the applicant countries.

Legislation concerning safety in the workplace, for example governing access to fire escapes or providing guards for dangerous machinery, usually comes under the authority of the labour ministry.

Rules on health, on the other hand - covering problems such as chronic illnesses contracted at work - are overseen by officials at the ministry of health. In many cases, the coordination between the two departments is not good.

Experts argue that one of the most pressing needs is to set up decent independent inspectorates which would bring the two tasks under one roof. These would then be able to carry out serious health and safety checks.

But for such inspectorates to be effective, changes also need to be made to the labour relations culture in many applicant countries. What is required, say health and safety experts, is an equivalent to the EU's 'social dialogue' system of formalised talks between employers and trade unions. This would allow health and safety issues to be continually reviewed.

But for the system to work, a country needs respected independent trade unions and well-organised employers' bodies.

Among employees, however, a certain amount of residual mistrust of trade unionism - dating from the days when shop stewards were seen as representing the state - is sometimes evident.

On the employers' side, business organisations along the lines of the UK's Confederation of British Industry or France's Conseil National du Patronat Français are still a very new phenomenon.

This lack of well-established channels becomes particularly apparent when trying to get the health and safety message across to the burgeoning small-business sector in many of the applicant states. While small and medium-sized enterprises are seen as a potential source of new jobs, it is currently difficult to verify employees' working conditions as the authorities have problems identifying whom they should be talking to.

Given these problems, it seems almost certain that the successful applicants will not be obliged to have all the Union's health and safety laws in place the day they join the club, but will be granted a change-over period.

Meeting EU standards within any sort of reasonable time frame will, nevertheless, be hard work.