The Pancyprian Federation of Labour (PEO) organised a protest event on six of November in Nicosia, demanding the safeguarding of the health and safety of workers.
The event was held with the occasion of the European Week for Safety and Health at Work.
Member and supporters of the union marched to the Ministry of Labour, where a memorandum was delivered, stating the positions and demands of PEO. The key speaker was Mr. Michalis Papanikolaou, who acts as PEO’s deputy general secretary, and as general secretary of the Builders’ Union.
Papanikolaou emphasised that the purpose of the event was for PEO to underscore the need for workers’ lives to take precedence over profits.
PEO demanded investments by employers in workspace safety and health and called for stringent controls and exemplary penalties.
Papanikolaou pointed out that in the first half of 2023, there were eight fatal workplace accidents, compared to five in the corresponding period last year. He stated, “Every time an accident happens in the workplace, every time a worker cannot return home or returns severely injured, a fundamental labour right is violated—the right to a safe workplace. This means that during the work process, the employer’s obligations regarding risk assessment and risk minimisation measures were not fulfilled.”
He further emphasised that PEO feels the obligation to highlight safety and health issues in the workplace more specifically and dedicatedly, being committed to resisting the downgrading of safety and health measures.
“The right to decent employment conditions, employment with rights, and Collective Labor Agreements is also the right to work with safety and health. We demand these rights, and we are entitled to them,” he stated.
PEO submitted the following recommendations to the Minister of Labour:
- It is imperative to launch a campaign for the creation and proper functioning of Safety and Health Committees in all workplaces, which the Department of Labour Inspection (DLI) should actively support so that their role is not merely decorative.
- All employers should, by legislation, be required to provide Health and Safety training to all new entrants to the workforce.
- Mandatory training for all workers in the construction industry and the issuing of a safe-pass as a condition of employment in the industry.
- Intensify controls to require employers to develop and implement risk assessment plans.
- Taking into account the experience of the pandemic period with the widespread use of digital technology and the fact that the work process and production methods are increasingly digitalised, a strategy for addressing and preventing health and safety issues in the digital age must be developed.
- Abolition of the fees charged by the Department of Labour (DLI) Inspection to workers for the provision of an accident investigation report for the purposes of legal recourse by the worker.
- Staff the DLI with a sufficient number of inspectors and modernise and simplify the procedures that take time away from the inspection itself.
- Promote measures to make the procedures for investigating accidents at work more transparent. To this end, we demand that the DLI inform the Pancyprian Health and Safety Council of the progress of workplace accident investigations and the measures taken in each case.
- The procedure for issuing orders for the surveillance of workers’ health needs to be amended in order to cover all workers, so that a system of health surveillance and prevention of occupational diseases can finally be established.
- Improve and speed up the procedures for examining applications for personal injury and invalidity allowances.
Establish the necessary mechanism for monitoring the implementation of the law on compulsory employer’s liability insurance.
(Photograph from PEO)
