The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) – representing 45 million members from 89 trade union organisations in 39 European countries – is backing the “Healthy Workplaces for all ages” campaign coordinated by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) and launched today by European Commissioner Thyssen.
EU-OSHA’s campaign aims to promote sustainable work and healthy ageing from the beginning of people’s working lives and will run through to 2017 with a series of events, activities and publications.
“Europe has an ageing workforce and longer working lives, and working conditions need to take this into consideration” said Peter Scherrer, Deputy General Secretary of the ETUC, “Trade unions and employers have an obvious common interest in helping people to stay healthily employed all through their longer working lives. The ETUC will actively support this campaign to improve risk assessment and promote good practice to workers, employers, researchers and other actors.”
“Workers must be provided with safe and healthy work throughout their working lives” said Esther Lynch, ETUC Confederal Secretary. “The EU should be working on a broad approach that includes health, safety and wellbeing, through strong legislation and a smart OSH strategy in place. ““We need training to improve and update the skills of older workers. More attention should be paid to the gender dimension of health and safety.”
ETUC will contribute to EU-OSHA’s campaign and will regularly inform and encourage its members using the campaign as a preventive tool.
The ETUC’s health and safety legislative priorities include achieving binding workplace exposure limits for 50 of the common causes of occupational cancer (a substantial increase from the current 5 substances with workplace exposure limits), as well as regulation to deal with nanoparticles; psycho-social risks including stress, violence and harassment; and neck, back and elbow pain.
For more on the campaign see https://healthy-workplaces.eu/en
