Various external sources, such as chemical, biological, or physical hazards, can cause work-related injury. Hazards may also result from the interaction between worker and environment; these so-called ergonomic hazards can cause physiological or psychological stress.
Chemical hazards can arise from the presence of poisonous or
irritating gas, mist, or dust in the workplace. Hazard elimination may require
the use of alternative and less toxic materials, improved ventilation, leakage
control, or protective clothing. Biological hazards arise from
bacteria or viruses transmitted by animals or unclean equipment and tend to
occur primarily in the food-processing industry. The source of the
contamination must be eliminated or, when that is not possible, protective
equipment must be worn. Common physical hazards include ambient heat,
burns, noise, vibration, sudden pressure changes, radiation, and electric shock
If the physical, psychological, or environmental demands on
workers exceed their capabilities, ergonomic hazards arise. This type of hazard
frequently occurs in the area of materials handling, where workers must lift or
carry heavy loads. Poor working posture or improper design of the workplace
often results in muscle strains, sprains, fractures, bruises, and back pain.
These injuries account for 25 percent of all occupational injuries, and their
control requires designing the job so that workers can perform it without
overexerting themselves.
At any
workplace, the employer carries full responsibility for any failure of
compliance with the regulations pertaining to health and safety conditions in
their entirety. The Labour Inspectorate enjoys the right of access at all times and in
all places to work locations, to monitor the proper implementation of health
and safety regulations.
However in
practice, there are many examples of places where for purely material reasons,
the Inspectorate is unable to be present, such as oil platforms and logging in
the Far North. To overcome this problem, since late 1970s, Norway has developed
a policy of transferring the obligation to undertake preventive measures in the
field of health and safety at work to the firms themselves. As a result of this
step, the Inspectorate has been in a better position to target and adapt its
monitoring of firms in the light of their internal health and safety policies.
Under Norwegian legislation
concerning the work environment, it is incumbent on employers to take
systematic steps to improve the working environment of every work station. In
1992, regulations were introduced concerning internal monitoring of health and
safety at work by firms themselves. These new measures give priority to a
systematic approach to health and safety at work, in contrast to the
traditional approach based on monitoring visits by the Labour Inspectorate. The
1992 law renders this approach obligatory for employers.
This regulation was revised on
January 1, 1997 so as to facilitate the implementation of internal checks in
small and medium enterprises, which are less advanced in this field than the largest
firms. These texts are in their turn harmonised with EFTA's framework, which is
coordinated with European directives in the field of health and safety at work
in the frame of the European Economic Area-agreement.
The underlying requirement of the new
regulations gives emphasis to the responsibility of employers and this process
demands a democratic dialogue with the employees. The concept of
self-regulation of health and safety at work by firms is grounded in the
integration of these issues with the internal organisation of the firm,
converting it into a contribution to the firm's overall productivity and making
it a management issue rather than a problem of extra costs.
Its basic objective is to encourage
a shift away from a method of inspection led by the Labour Inspectorate which
becomes increasingly detailed and burdensome as a result of the growing
complexity in technology. It leads towards an assumption by the firm of
responsibility for the establishment of a self-regulating health and safety environment
at work.
This also brings with it the need
for a documentation comprising elements such as a description of the aims of a
firm's health and safety at work policy, a description of roles and
responsibilities in relation to health and safety at work, safeguards to be set
up on the basis of a risk assessment, routine procedures for an internal
self-monitoring system, and routine procedures for the undertaking of
corrective measures. The action is set in motion by the Labour Inspectorate,
but is implemented by the firms themselves.
In other words, the firms are
obliged to produce an outcome, for which they need to define their own the
means whereby they achieve that outcome. These means must however be explicitly
laid down in internal monitoring reference manuals. As a result of these
legislations, the relationship between Labour Inspection and the firms has
undergone a profound transformation over the years as Labour Inspectorate no
longer checks machines, but instead monitors a firm's health and safety at work
policy.
The implementation of this
conception brings about a significant change in the methods of labour
inspection; specifically the process of inspection begins with an examination
of the documentation prepared by the firm. Thus, in the chemical industry for example as in all sectors,
the law on workplace environment makes the employer responsible for the
organisation of health and safety at work policy. The employer must therefore
make it possible to assess risk factors at every work station and take the
corresponding technical preventive measures. It is also the duty of the
employer to inform his staff and worker representatives of the risks they face
and the preventive measures they should take in order to ensure health and
safety. Firms should restrict the amount of dangerous chemical products used at
any one work station, and provide health and safety at work training
specifically adapted to the work station.
For the Inspector's part, he or she,
by undertaking a systematic audit, would be able to ask questions concerning
the list of dangerous chemical products and the internal monitoring system. The
Labour Inspectorate therefore, as a matter of priority, examines the
documentation on the organisation's health and safety at work policy as defined
by the employers themselves. A certain amount of time is needed to set up this
newly established system of inspection, but firms have gradually been
incorporated into it.
This process of change has had
consequences for the planning of the monitoring activities of the Labour
Inspectorate, which is now in a better position to target its interventions in
accordance with extent to which firms are committed to an internal health and
safety policy.
Firms are categorised in four groups
according to the extent of their compliance with this new mechanism, and a
specific approach to intervention is defined for each category. The first
category embodies firms possessing the means and exhibiting effective
compliance with new guidelines. Such firms in principle are no longer in need
of technical monitoring. Firms falling into the second category are those which
are desirous to comply but, especially on account of their small size, lacking
the resources to do so. Such firms receive advice and assistance in the establishment
of inter-firm internal health and safety at work inspection services. Firms in
the third category are those having neither the desire nor the means to comply,
while those in the fourth category are the ones which possess the necessary
resources but have yet to embark on the process. Firms in the last category are
the subject of in-depth internal technical monitoring, and risk incurring
penalties amounting to twice the estimated cost of establishing a
self-monitoring system.
The procedure followed by the Labour
Inspectorate is very articulate and systematic. If a visit to a firm shows that
the internal health and safety monitoring system is not in place, or if a
systematic audit reveals deficiencies in the existing system, the Labour
Inspectorate notifies the firm that it must set one up or remedy the existing
defects. After each monitoring visit the firm receives a list of observations
and must remedy any defects within six months. The financial penalty for
non-compliance is calculated at least at double the cost of establishing the
self-monitoring system. However, there has been no change in the structure of
the Labour Inspectorate itself, although the training of Inspectors has been
devised so as to enable them to modify their monitoring methods.
Self-monitoring of health and safety
has had organisational effects in the larger firms because they have needed to
make it an internal objective of each department. The opportunity to recruit
inter-firm technicians in health and safety has been developed for the benefit
of small and medium enterprises. The information received by firms has been
changed.
Within firms, a condition for the
successful self-monitoring health and safety policy is the active participation
of the social actors. Workers are supposed to be kept informed of the risks
they can be subjected to, and of the procedures which enable them to avoid or
reduce those risks. They must adhere actively to these procedures since it is
they who will, at least in part, have to put them into practice.
The firms themselves have had to
release the resources needed to set up this policy, but it is believed that the
savings arising from the internalisation of monitoring procedures, especially
through a decline in work stoppages, are well in excess of the initial costs.
In 1996, sixty nine percent firms who had set the system up reckoned that the
implementation of the health and safety at work policy could save them
significant sums, while most firms expected to achieve positive economic
returns from a systematic approach to these issues.
The results of the establishment of
this integrated monitoring methodology into firm activity can be evaluated on
the basis of two principal indicators. The first being the development of the
preventive methodology in the field of health and safety at work, and of
working conditions within firms. Between 1993 and 1996 the number of firms
completing the adoption of this methodology grew from eight per cent to forty
five per cent. The second indicator is that the rate of workplace accidents
seems to be closely correlated to the adoption of the new methodology. Thus in
a firm which had established this procedure since 1988, days lost per year
through accidents at work declined from an average of eighty in 1981-87 to
twenty since 1991. The very small increase in recent years indicates that the
policy has doubtlessly been less aggressively pursued.
The fact that the internal
monitoring of risk to health and safety at work has mainly been applied by the
larger firms has led the authorities to reexamine the mechanisms of application
of the process. The changes introduced in January 1997 were based on the
principle of adaptation of the methodology to the size of a firm, so that the
efforts required of small and medium enterprises were only those which were
truly necessary and not the entire range more suitable to larger concerns.
The existence of a hardcore of
refractory firms, who have resisted the introduction of the self-monitoring
mechanism, has led the Labour Inspectorate to tighten up traditional monitoring
procedures on them after an initial period of tolerance. The approach described
here is a particularly innovative one, based on sustained commitment on the
part of employers and also on the ongoing involvement of the staff of the Labour
Inspectorate.
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