TU's play critical role in minimizing workers’ occupational health and safety risks

Inaugural speech from Dagmar Walter, Director ILO DWT South Asia and India, at the Refresher Training Programme on Promoting Health and Safety of Informal and Home Based Workers in Lower Tiers of Supply Chains including the Post COVID 19 Response For Trade Unions and Membership based Organizations.

Statement | New Delhi, India | 27 May 2020
Good Day to all of you.

I am very happy to see the presence of Central Trade Unions and Membership based organizations today to participate in the ‘Refresher Training Programme on Promoting Health and Safety of Informal and Home Based Workers in Lower Tiers of Supply Chains including the Post COVID 19 Response’, organized by ILO/Japan’s Sustainable Global Supply Chains Project.

As I am informed, today’s training is a refresher of the training of trainer programme held in July last year in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh.

We are going through the troubled times of COVID-19, which is not just a health crises, but a social and economic crises. It has affected almost 1.6 billion informal economy workers worldwide, who have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. The informal economy is the place where in fact six out of ten workers in the world make their living, and in India, this number increases to almost 9 out of 10 workers.

As countries ease their lockdown restrictions, it is of paramount importance to prevent and control COVID-19 in the workplace. Risk assessments need to be done to ensure that workplaces meet strict occupational safety and health criteria beforehand, to minimize the risk to workers of exposure to COVID-19. How we protect our workers now clearly dictates how safe our communities are and how resilient our businesses will be.

I hope you find this training programme useful, as you work with informal and supply chain workers who are in the lower tiers of the global and domestic supply chains. These workers are invisible and unaccounted, as they work for micro and homebased enterprises, or as homebased workers. They are the hardest hit in this pandemic.

These workers are also unaware of the severity of the risks and hazards and associated with their work. Poor incomes, weak bargaining capacity, as well as perception that their work is ‘safe’ as it is done in homebased enterprises or homes of workers, makes them more vulnerable to health and safety challenges.
Today’s programme will help refresh the understanding of the occupational safety and health challenges faced by home based and informal workers and practical methods for their prevention and protection. And the later part of the session will focus on OSH measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. There will also be a session where we discuss about OSH and Gender challenges, as women tend to get more affected by such issues.

The ILO Centenary Declaration adopted in June 2019 declared that "safe and healthy working conditions are fundamental to decent work”. Right to health and safety is every worker’s right.

All of you present here today and your respective organisations play a critical role in minimizing workers’ occupational health and safety risks, and prioritizing the issues and concerns of home based and informal workers in supply chains, who are the most unreached. So reaching out to them links to the UN SDGs agenda of ‘leaving no one behind’.

I hope that you have a meaningful session and you are able to benefit from it both as a means towards protecting health and safety and integrating it as part of your larger agenda for social dialogue on decent work.