The revelation last week that Minister Simona Broomes met what was described as “atrocious” working conditions during an impromptu visit to the Linden bauxite operations run by the Chinese company Bosai is probably not as surprising as it may seem to those who have not kept abreast of issues of safety and health in the workplace. Indeed the Minister is certain to find other such anomalous situations were she to persist on dropping in on workplaces without notice.
One question that arises out of the conditions which the Minister met at Bosai is whether the Ministry’s Occupational Safety and Health Department (OSHD) ought not to be required to account for the extant conditions at the site, given its obligation under the law to carry out periodic inspections to satisfy itself that workplaces are meeting safety and health standards. Surely, such inspections ought to apply even more stringently at workplaces like Bosai’s Linden operations where the risk of workplace injury or illness is much greater than might apply at low-risk workplaces.
The immediate issue, of course, is whether the government will not only probe the seeming delinquency of the OSHD but whether it will demand that Bosai get its safety and health act together with due haste. As was stated earlier, it may well be that the conditions at Bosai mirror those that obtain elsewhere, so there may be good reason for a wider probe and a move in the direction of broader remedial action.
Granted, the new administration already has its hands filled with other equally pressing emergencies, though the continued expansion of the country’s economy into minerals and the impending advent of an energy sector makes it all the more important for us to create a professionally run and highly competent safety and health regime and to ensure that legislation, resources and skills keep pace with the country’s safety and healthy requirements.
The responsibilities of the OSHD, including its monitoring and oversight functions and the duties of the respective workplaces in both the public and private sectors are spelt out. That being said, the experience of this newspaper has been that the department has continually fallen well short in pursuit of its responsibilities. Our own discreet enquiries with a few prominent private sector workplaces reveal that obligatory safety and health inspections are not routinely carried out. But that is not all. We have found too that the OSHD can be vague to the point of being downright unhelpful in responding to enquiries relating to workplace accidents. Two recent occurrences come to mind.
The first concerns the accident several months ago at a Camp and Robb streets work site where, in response to this newspaper’s enquiry, the OSHD flatly denied that any accident had taken place. The second involved the recent incident at the Bauxite Company Guyana Inc Berbice River operations, during which a worker was badly burnt in an electrical explosion. Attempts to secure updates from the OSHD on this incident turned out to be exercises in utter frustration. Not even the most senior functionaries in the department appeared either willing or able to go much beyond stating that the accident had happened, a fact that we had long determined from workers at the site.
As an aside it should be stated that feedback received from workers employed by BCGI (the Russian company Rusal being its majority shareholder and the Government of Guyana being the minority shareholder) points to conditions of work which allegedly include safety and health transgressions that may well be worrying enough to warrant an official investigation. Workers have told this newspaper that BCGI enjoyed conditions bordering on immunity from compliance with safety and health and other worker welfare-related matters under the previous political administration.
To return to the subject of the OSHD we expect that the new Minister will – sooner rather than later – make enquiries regarding the status of the OSHD’s obligatory enquires into the various relatively recent workplace accidents and their outcomes. Those that come to mind include accidents at Giftland, BCGI, Caricom Rice Mills and two other incidents, one in which a sanitation worker’s leg was severed by the hydraulic door of a truck and the electrocution of a construction worker by a high-tension wire atop a building in the city. There were three resulting casualties from those workplace accidents. If for no other reason than to satisfy the public that the OSHD is embracing at least some of its obligations, the Minister must demand those reports.
Not only does the law dictate that such investigations be undertaken in a thorough, timely and transparent manner, but there are also implications here for culpability, penalties and compensation for victims and their families.
On the whole, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we have been confronted with a state of official indifference to safety and health for some time now. That indifference, we are told by Ministry of Labour insiders, reflects itself in a systematic under-resourcing of the department particularly through failure over the years to provide training for safety and health personnel. The department, we are told, has more or less been going through the motions in a manner that has made little if any positive difference to workplace safety and health standards.
One does not expect that the Minister will now embark on an endless succession of field visits in the hope of catching other workplaces out as far as issues of safety and health are concerned. That eventuality will be rendered altogether unnecessary if the department concerned can be better positioned to apply itself to workplace safety and health issues with a much greater measure of diligence and professionalism.
