Employers To Pay Price For Production Traumas
According to the report by the State Department For Labor Safety, about one hundred Ukrainians are injured at work daily, with a third becoming invalids for life and every twentieth dying. In the first eight month of 2001 alone, over 15,000 employees were involved in production accidents, 904 of them fatal.
“The analysis of the causes of such high production accidents rate has revealed that 80% of labor accidents are due to carelessness and negligence of elementary labor safety rules,” State Department For Labor Safety Chairman Serhiy Storchak told The Day. In his opinion, it is the managers of enterprises who are to blame for the present high accident rate. President Kuchma has recently issued a decree On Urgent Measures To Prevent Industrial Accidents and Professional Diseases, which is intended to urgently address the problem by sending a strong message to employers that it will be much more profitable for them to create safe labor environments than to pay fines.
“Currently Verkhovna Rada is considering a new priority version of the law On Labor Safety, Chairperson of Labor Safety Department of the State Department For Labor Safety Liliya Melnychuk told The Day. The bill, when enacted, will be binding on all types of enterprises, individual businesses included, and will impose more stringent labor safety standards. The bill for the first time includes provisions imposing personal and even criminal liability on employers for violations of industrial safety laws.
According to Ms. Melnychuk, such an approach toward industrial accidents is justified, being in conformity with the free market transformations in our industry and the need to adapt Ukrainian labor safety laws to the EU standards.
In fact, in most of the developed democratic countries there are volumes of various laws and decrees on labor safety. True, all these laws have been adopted through the centuries not in response to high accident rates but rather to the existing social and economic conditions. In civilized societies the relatively low industrial accidents rate is conditioned not so much by the fear of employers of strict safety standards as by the awareness of employers and employees, low unemployment, more efficient and safer production techniques, and, most importantly, employers’ ability to create of normal working environments.
Without denying the need to solve the problem of industrial accidents, we must point out, however, that during the primary accumulation of capital following the collapse of the command administrative system, imposing harsher control and laying responsibility for industrial traumas on Ukrainian businessmen could lead to unpredictable consequences. As one of the managers of an agricultural organization (in fact, a former collective farm) admitted to The Day, “We cannot afford to give up using our obsolete and technically unsafe machinery, for us it will be suicidal,” adding that for the incidence of work-related accidents his particular fiefdom has long outstripped the coal sector.
One should not ignore the fact, however, that many coal, steel, chemical, and automotive plants, most unsafe in labor safety terms, are owned by the state. It is quite obvious that to fine or prosecute their managers for flouting labor safety standards against the backdrop of inadequate budget funding would be unethical, to say the least. Speaking about commercial entities, Vyacheslav Kredisov, head of Nova Formatsiya, an All-Ukrainian association of entrepreneurs, told The Day that more stringent state oversight might provide another excuse for oversight agencies to check commercial companies. In this context, he said, it would be a good idea to impose similar fines for oversight agencies, for it is no secret that the working conditions of Ukraine’s businessmen is also hazardous to health.
