Safety in the workplace By Sveinn Eldon

Work Safety  The right to a safe workplace  The obligation of employers to provide a workplace free of recognized hazards  The right to survival  Without this right, other rights loose their significance

Direct Cause  Two factors enable employers to deny that their actions are a direct cause of accidents in the workplace:  1. Accidents are often caused by a combination of factors, often involving actions by workers themselves or co-workers, and it becomes difficult to assign blame.  2. It is not practical to reduce the probability of harm any futher, if risk is only slight.  But how slight is slight risk?

Direct cause  How riskfree is the workplace supposed to be?  Costs  How should the level of risk be determined?  Cost-benefit analysis

The voluntary assumption of risk  Employees voluntarily assume the risk inherent in work. The high accident rate in some jobs is well known, e.g. construction work. Premium is paid in these jobs on top of the pay for the high accident risk.  Do workers always know the level of risk?  Often the hazards are not even known to the employer.

Issuing a Threat...  What does it mean to threaten someone? A threat is a stated intention of making a person worse off. An example of this could e.g. be to threaten to withhold an expected promotion if the employee does not act as the employeer desires. Such a threat would not be ethically wrong if the actions the employeer desires the employee to perform can be regarded as normal duties that go with the job. A threat is a stated intention of making a person worse off. An example of this could e.g. be to threaten to withhold an expected promotion if the employee does not act as the employeer desires. Such a threat would not be ethically wrong if the actions the employeer desires the employee to perform can be regarded as normal duties that go with the job.

Risk and coercion  As workers have the right to a safe workplace, offering workers higher pay for doing dangerous work (and/or threatening dismissal for failing to carry it out) does not relieve the employer of his duty to provide a safe workplace to those workers. The employer cannot let workers assume all the risk, even if the risk is always shared to an extent.

The right to know and to refuse dangerous work  The employer has a duty to inform the employees and if he does not know, to find out.  Employees must obey all reasonable directives. If an order turns out not to have been reasonable, they should file a complaint afterwards.  But that may be too late!  If employees have a ”reasonable” belief that the work may cause serious harm to them, they have the right to refuse, unless the probability of harm can be significantly lowered.

Autonomy and the right to know  Workers have the right to know so they can excercise their autonomy to avoid dangerous work, to request higher pay for suck work or to get the employer to lower the risk of accidents.  Employers may have considerable costs from informing and it may involve loss of trade secrets (hazards from substances).  Training of workers to deal safely with hazardous chemicals and other dangers.

Hazards  Dangers in the workplace can best be lowered by cooperation of workers and employers. Trained and well equipped workers are less likely to have accidents than untrained badly informed ones. Workers should follow safety instructions and request proper equipment and inform the employer of spotted potential or actual hazards.