Each day claims a toll of twelve work-related deaths
According to the State Committee for Labor Supervision and Protection, 1024 persons were lethally injured at their workplaces in the first nine months of this year, with the total number of injuries amounting to 18,701. The Occupational Injuries Social Insurance Fund reports that about 1650 people are left disabled every month, with occupational diseases accounting for 40% of these cases. Every day claims an average of twelve occupational deaths. In most cases, Ukrainians had road accidents, fell from a height, or got their hands and feet caught in the rotating parts of mechanisms. Farming and coal mining unchangeably rank first in the incidence of injuries. At the moment, the fund caters for about 300,000 people — the injured and survivors of those who received a lethal industrial injury. In compliance with the law On Compulsory State Social Insurance, the organization provides the victims with first aid, medical treatment at specialized institutions, the required medicines, compensation for everyday services and retraining, etc. Conversely, fund employees lodge such traditional complaints as the gap between the work they do and the amounts they earn (although the fund has no insurance payment arrears), delays in and shortages of fee payments by enterprises (152.2 million today) as well as imperfect law. Instances of the latter abound. For example, the fund is supposed to increase injury benefits by 19%, but the benefit and the disability pension combined should not exceed the salary/wages that the individual earned at the moment he was injured. If you take into account that the latter could occur, say, in 1997... In other words, according to fund deputy manager Oleksandr Sitko, if the law were to be followed literally, none of the 300,000 disabled would be eligible for an allowance. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is the ambiguous wording of the law that allows indexing such 1997 wages. Fund executives also complain about the craftiness of our compatriots: although the law clearly says that a survivor’s benefit can only be claimed by the dead person’s next of kin, in some case the recipients are not even distant relatives. This allows, for example, the second wife’s 30-year-old son, who suddenly turns 20 (payment are made until the age of 23 if the child has been studying, not working, since he was 16), to be entitled to an allowance. It often happens that someone who is driving, say, to a wedding party has an accident. Later on, presenting a backdated bogus document that confirms his having been on a business trip, he tries to claim the occupational injury benefit.
According to private insurance companies, such cases would have been impossible if the state had not shouldered an onerous burden and had not taken the market away from the experts. The reason is simple: it is, naturally, not in the interests of insurance men to part with money, so such companies usually employ experts (including medicos) who carefully inquire into every case. The current amount of benefits — from 20 to 4,000 hryvnias — might also be increased.
Of course, an enterprise can turn to a private company and insure its employees against accidents for a higher amount of money — for compulsory insurance is confined to 0.84%-13% of the wages fund (depending on the variety of professional risk). But if compulsory insurance is part of the employer’s gross expenditures, “excessive” insurance is subject to additional taxes, such as VAT, etc. On the other hand, according to Halyna Tretiakova, Aska Insurance Company Board Chair, the national insurance market was prepared from the very outset to render accident-related services. Meanwhile, the mechanism of competition would have improved the condition of insurance. In truth, the problem lies in taxes and, of course, the traditionally low standards of labor safety. For the number of industrial casualties are comparable with those of a military conflict.
