Technological progress and intense competitive pressures bring rapid change in working conditions, work processes and organisation. Legislation is essential but insufficient on its own to address these changes or to keep pace with new hazards and risks. Organisations must be able to tackle occupational safety and health challenges continuously and to build effective responses into dynamic management strategies.
Different management systems in the field of occupational safety and health have been launched. On a national level, many standards and regulations exist. It has not been possible, however, to reach agreements on ISO or European standards for occupational safety and health management. ILO´s new "Guidelines on occupational safety and health management systems" are therefore very welcome.
The guidelines were prepared on the basis of a broad-based approach involving the ILO and its tripartite constituents and other stakeholders. They have also been shaped by internationally agreed occupational safety and health principles as defined in international labour standards. Consequently, they provide an instrument for the development of a sustainable safety culture within enterprises and beyond. The guidelines initially outline a national framework for occupational safety and health management systems.
The main part of the guidelines outline the occupational safety and health management system in the organisation:
The guidelines also include a useful glossary, and a bibliography including relevant ILO conventions and recommendations, and selected ILO codes of practice.
Positive programme is the title of a Trainers’ Manual for occupational safety and health, developed by Kazutaka Kogi and Tsuyoshi Kawakami at the Institute for Science of Labour in Japan. The second edition was published by the Japan International Labour Foundation this year.
The manual has been developed for trade unions in Asian developing countries. The programme is aimed at training trade union members about occupational safety and health. It focuses on group work for applying low-cost improvements that can be readily implemented in developing situations.
What kind of training manual is it? The well-oriented reader with good memory may associate this material with "Better work environment", a basically Swedish training material translated into many languages and promoted by ILO. And to ILO´s own "Higher productivity and a better place to work". Dr. Kogi was one of the authors of the ILO material, so it is natural that there are links.
It is easy to see that "Positive programme" has benefited from experiences gained through the use of the older materials. "Positive programme" is more focused, more to the point and structured in a more straightforward way.
It is a trainers´ manual generously providing photographic examples related to good solutions for materials handling, machine safety, workstation changes, physical environment, welfare facilities and environmental protection.
The design and running of two kinds of training activities for workers and trade union members are described: a one day seminar, and a four day training course. Detailed suggestions are given related to objectives, key activities and methodology. 44 of the manual's 163 pages are proposals for transparencies to be used during the training sessions. There is a 13 page illustrated "action checklist", which is an attractive, new version of such checklists seen before.
The material has been developed out of experiences from using a first version in Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Thailand and Nepal. The key concepts are: learning from good examples in local workplaces, active participation, action-oriented support and group work aiming at consensus.
Anyone involved in the development of OSH training, for all possible groups of trainees, is likely to learn a lot through studying "Positive programme". Hopefully, similar approaches will spread to many countries in development and encourage participatory activities.
Readers of "OSH & Development" are offered a free copy of "Positive programme" by contacting:
Kazutaka Kogi
Institute for Science of Labour
2-8-14 Sugao, Miyamae-ku
Kawasaki 216-8501, Japan
Tel:+81 44 977 2121
Fax:+81 44 977 7504
E-mail: k.kogi@isl.or.jp
As in many other countries, Swedish historical research on work environmental and work safety issues is a recent phenomenon and as yet not very extensive. With a few exceptions, the results have been published only in Swedish. The main reason for this anthology’s coming into being has therefore been to make Swedish re- search in this field more visible. The aim is to introduce Swedish historical research on this topic to an international readership, and try to integrate Swedish research in the international discourse. Furthermore, the purpose is to stimulate new research within the field. The articles have been written within various disciplines and from different theoretical points of departure. A common denominator, however, has been the treatment of the work environment and work safety as a multifaceted and complex social issue.
Taken together, the articles cover a long historical period ranging from the pre-industrial society up till today. The emphasis is however on the period following World War II. From the early 1940s, work safety was of major interest for the organised cooperation between the main parties in the Swedish labour market. During the latest decades of growing internationalisation and the dramatic changes in working life connected with this, the centralised Swedish model for negotiation and co-operation has been replaced by more decentralised labour market relations. Flexible production concepts with lean organisations and new company cultures, in their turn followed by a weakening of the trade unions, have altered the conditions for dealing with work environment issues.
Parallel to this, the social costs for work injuries, above all stress related occupational illness, have increased substantially. Against this background, there is a need for a historical perspective on today’s development. In this respect as well, this anthology may hopefully be of use.
In the first article in this book, Proletarian Writers, the Working Environment and the Struggle for Hegemony, Bill Sund applies an unusual but most fruitful perspective on the development of the work environment issue. He deals with the Swedish proletarian writers’ criticism of the development of industrial working conditions and working life in general during the period 1930-1975, which was the height of the industrial era in Sweden. Their opponents in the debate were intellectuals, who were often affiliated to the leading historical power bloc. How did they respond to these critics, who in different ways portrayed the shifting faces of power in working life?
A traditionally strong theme within historical research on working life has been the development of production, work and work processes, and its social implications. Maths Isacson and Annette Thörnquist both link up with this tradition. In his article, The Work Environment in the Swedish Iron and Steel Industry during the 20th Century, Isacson gives an overview of the work environment, the health problems and the improvements within this trade over the last hundred years. With the help of available statistics, reports and life histories, Isacson both paints a picture of the everchanging working conditions and health risks faced by those who worked in the iron and steel industry and suggests some plausible explanations for these conditions and changes.
Annette Thörnquist deals with The Silicosis Problem in the Swedish Iron and Steel Industry during the 20th Century. The main purpose of this article is to discuss how the state and the parties in the Swedish labour market at the central and local levels handled this problem. How did the silicosis problem arise and how did it affect the social relations in the plants? Which were the determinant factors and driving agents behind the development of worker’s protection against silicosis?
Several of the authors in this anthology apply a gender perspective on the historical development of the work environment and work safety. In this way, we are better able to understand the segregated division of labour and its development. In his article Changing Sex, Changing Gender. Lumber- jacks, Female Cooks and Occupational Safety, Bo Persson treats one interesting attempt in the inter-war years by the Swedish Forest Labour Inspectorate to change the construction of gender, by introducing female cooks in the forestry, in order to promote occupational safety and workers’ health and well-being. This attempt was successful and it also changed the old gender order in the forest region.
The special treatment and subjugation of women in working life has been thoroughly dealt with in historical working life research. That the basis for this special treatment partly was due to the safety legislation is shown in Lynn Karlsson’s and Annika Åkerblom’s respective articles. In, Perspectives on Gendered Labour Legislation in Sweden during the 20th Century, Lynn Karlsson shows how protective legislation has helped to define women and men as "different" types of workers. The foremost argument for protective legislation for women was that women were "family". Men were bread- winners, women secondary wage earners. This had implications for both sexes. The author deals specifically with the controversial night work prohibition for women workers, which was in effect between 1911 and 1962. Annika Åkerblom shows in
her article, Female Factory Inspectorate — protection for women in Swedish working life 1913-1948 that the Inspectorate was to improve the social conditions of female employees in general, including women workers as mothers and housekeepers. The main focus is on the activity directly related to the workplace. She also shows that the female factory inspectorate was a paradoxical institution, which on the one hand aimed at decreasing women’s subordination in their working life, but on the other hand reproduced this subordination.
Few Swedish studies within working life history have dealt with the development of work and working conditions for handicapped workers. In The Outer Boundaries Work. Creating Occupationally Handicapped Workers, Martha Blomqvist shows that the concept work handicap is a social construction, meaning of which is decided by demands within working life and which changes as the working life changes. For persons with a reduced working capacity, the excluding industrial organisation of work meant that their possibilities to earn their own livings gradually diminished. Increased demands for timely adaptation and regularity, increased control and discipline and a standardisation of the work process made it difficult for them to establish an employment relationship. The author discusses how this exclusion has developed up till today.
During the 1990s, the increasing workload for employees within the health care sector, most of them women, has been much discussed in the public debate. Gerd Lindgren deals with the changing work organisation within health care, and its consequences for the work environment, in her article Alone in the Team? A Sociological Perspective on New Organisational Models within Health Care. Today employees have to face new demands and working conditions as a result of the market-oriented and downsized public health care sector in Sweden. New forms of effective co-workership have been enforced and the former organisation based on spontaneously developed level differentiated cultures such as the collective cultures among assistant nurses are withering away.
In the last article in this book, The Future of Work Environment Reforms: Does the Concept of Work Environment Apply within the New Economy? Michael Allvin and Gunnar Aronsson argue that "work environment", as a conceptual framework for reforming working life, may not be readily transferred from the tangible conditions of the industrial context in which it was conceived to the more flexible conditions of modern labour. Rather than being a practical task of coordinating the different protective measures at the workplaces, the work environment reforms will be reduced to an argument within the ideologically motivated rejection of an increasingly polarised labour market.
Annette Thörnquist
National Institute for Working Life
Work and Culture
Laxholmen
SE-602 21 Norrköping, Sweden
Tel: +46 11 21 89 08
Fax: +46 11 21 89 20
E-mail:annette.thornquist@niwl.se