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The study Social developments in the European Union 2006, recently published by the ETUI-REHS, the European Social Observatory and the Swedish SALTSA Programme, includes a separate chapter on health and safety at work.
Its author, Laurent Vogel, an ETUI-REHS Health and Safety Department researcher, puts the challenging question, “Is health and safety policy being hijacked by the drive for competitiveness?”
Laurent Vogel argues that, “The European Union’s activities have been hampered by a constant concern not to jeopardise these private interests, which for the purposes of the cause have been invested with a kind of public virtue dubbed ‘competitiveness’”.
The researcher supports his case with a string of examples. REACH, obviously, which was the target of unprecedented industry lobbying, but also a raft of less headline-grabbing issues, like the adoption of the Optical Radiation Directive which will not protect workers against the sun’s rays, a big cause of skin cancer; the freeze on the revision of the Carcinogens Directive and on the adoption of a Musculoskeletal Disorders Directive; the quagmire that is the revision of the Working Time Directive.
Laurent Vogel also highlights how protection for workers’ health is directly affected by ineffective policing of market rules, like the large numbers of CE-marked work equipment that does not meet Machinery Directive requirements, or the inadequate respiratory protective equipment allowed on the market by technical standards.
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