When it comes to workplace safety, we only know the half of it

“This health and safety has gone too far”, or “It’s health and safety gone mad.” They’re two clichéd, knee-jerk responses guaranteed to grind the gears of every health and safety professional and many others besides.

But, whenever this kind of nonsense gets trotted out, we know there is so much more to good health and safety management. And that the hearers might think to counter with just a couple of stats from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

• Around 2.78 million people worldwide – that’s right, nearly 3 million! – die from work-related accidents and diseases every year.
• Another 395 million workers globally – and I’ve checked the figure – sustain non-fatal injuries on an annual basis, with sectors like agriculture, construction, fishing and mining being the occupations most at risk.

That’s an awful lot of people who are either dying, or having their lives impacted and/or damaged by accident or illness, simply because of the way they earn a living.

You’d think these shocking statistics would be enough to focus our minds on finding ways to stop this happening. But you, we, would be wrong.

Report shines light

The ILO was one of many stakeholders consulted on the latest World Risk Poll from Lloyd’s Register Foundation: Engineering Safer Workplaces: Global trends in occupational safety and health. The report is based on 147,000 interviews conducted by Gallup in 142 countries during 2023. It shines a light on the extent of workplace harm, its reporting and relevant safety training taking place globally – by country, industrial sector and a range of demographic factors.

This report also gives an eye-opening insight into people’s attitude to risk and workplace harm. No, it’s more than ‘eye-opening’ – quite frankly, it’s shocking.

Since the World Risk Poll was started in 2019, the proportion of the global workforce who report being harmed by their work has stayed stubbornly high – just under 1 in 5 (18 per cent) say they have been harmed in the past two years (in line with 19 per cent in 2019 and 2021). At one in five, we’re talking 667 million people here, aren’t we?

Half of harm goes unreported

Yet latest poll data suggests around half (49 per cent) of all workplace harm goes unreported, with reporting rates being lower among part-time and self-employed workers. So, is there something here about the global lack of investment and action on good occupational safety and health being, in part, down to the fact we only know half the story?

The report also exposes a worryingly low level of health and safety training among workers. It’s worrying not only because of the deficit in technical knowledge, but also because of its accompanying lack of awareness of the importance of occupational health and safety (OSH).

Effective OSH training can not only contribute to reducing workplace accidents, incidents and ill-health but also nurture a safety-first culture. This better equips both employers and employees in terms of their hazard and risk awareness, and thus their ability to identify hazards, implement risk controls, report incidents and maintain productive, healthy and safe working environments.

It's human nature, isn’t it, that unless you have personal experience of something, there’s a tendency to compartmentalise it as ‘something that happens to other people.’ The poll’s findings reveal that those who have never been harmed at work are less likely to be worried about the dangers than those people who know someone who has been harmed. Also, those who haven’t personally been impacted by workplace harm are more likely to have worries over other risks, such as severe weather events and traffic accidents, at the front of their mind.

Training opportunity

Poll findings show that people who have had OSH training in the past two years are more than three times more likely to report harm at work than those who haven’t had the training.

Yet almost two-thirds of the global workforce have never had OSH training – this figure is even higher in agriculture (80 per cent) and fishing (73 per cent). Only 23 per cent of part-time workers have had recent safety training (compared to 41 per cent of full-time workers).

So, as the report states, if the opportunity to increase harm reporting is big, the opportunity to increase OSH training globally is even bigger.

With this report, the Lloyd Register Foundation has produced an invaluable aid for policy makers, businesses and international bodies working to improve and better target interventions to reduce workplace harm and protect the most vulnerable, whether their vulnerability is down to their location, demographic or work sector.

IOSH very much welcomes this report which makes a clear case for:

• more worker-friendly reporting tools – such as hotlines, chatbots and online forms – to be made available to strengthen risk management, but also foster stronger OSH and learning cultures
• ensuring regular inspections, risk assessments, audits and the engagement of every workforce in OSH policy and practice
• targeting safety training for part-time workers and the self-employed
• making OSH training more widely available, both to mitigate risks and help foster a positive health and safety culture that goes far beyond being a ‘tick-box’ exercise.