Labour Inspectorate - ensuring health and safety

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.