SUPERVISION is the responsibility of management. It is their job to ensure safe and healthy standards of work. All employees should be trained to carry out their jobs safely. Training should be properly organised and updated. Employers like Rusal Mining Company are reluctant to put adequate resources into health and safety. Solutions implemented may be the cheapest, not the best. When their budgets are being cut, health and safety can become just another area where savings can cause death.
It is, however, regretted that Rusal could not find it convenient to offer Mr. Franklyn Reece a decent funeral and compensation to his family. There are many other sad stories what are important. However, there are still too many accidents and deaths of workers taking place at work places in Guyana, as the Rusal Mining Company of Linden attempts to grapple with the problems posed by structural adjustment programmes, based on market-oriented economies that foster the get-rich-quickly syndrome in the course of the need to acquire that competitive edge.
As I have previously stated, issues of occupational safety and health are challenges for today’s industries, for we cannot afford the omissions of the past. Important to note is that the definition speaks of protecting the workers of their work. Unfortunately, there are too many who have a restrictive interpretation of that important function of our unions, limiting it to just issues of rules and rule violations. And I must admit that, in pursuit of that objective, many of our unions have been able to establish effective industrial judicial systems at the level of the work-enterprise. Those systems are important, for they seek to ensure that justice is embodied.
The enormity of industrial deaths can be ascertained from a report issued by the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security in which it stated: “Statistics have revealed that, over the last five years, thousands of persons may have been injured on the job, including some 25 fatalities.” It therefore means that, on average, many persons are injured yearly. Unfortunately, the information does not state how serious the accidents were. What I can state, nonetheless, is that the accidents had caused the workers to be off their jobs for months without pay.
As it is so often said, as trade unionists, we want to prevent accidents and deaths, not just to be paid compensation, since accidents and ill-health can rob the worker of the many pleasures of life that money cannot buy.