February 09, 2006

According to the legislation, the employer is required to protect the worker at the work place and is supposed to take measures to secure the health and the wellbeing of the workers. The 77th item in the Labor Law states, “The employers are required to take measures to ensure health and safety conditions and security at the work place and to provide all necessary equipment in perfect working condition. Workers are required to obey all measures taken for security at work.” The item 332 of the Law on Debts has also regulated the same responsibility. The high court documents show that the employer is not only obliged to provide materials for security in accordance with the work being done, but is also responsible to oversee that the measures taken are being practiced consistently and effectively.

It could be thought that due to these “positive” provisions tough measures at workplaces are been implemented. However, what makes every regulatory law meaningful is for it to have its counterpart in implementation, that is, for these laws to be implemented in real life. Unfortunately, at work we are facing serious issues on the health and the security of the workers. Employers avoid implementing the decree of the law thinking it will cost them extra expenses and unnecessary loss of time. Accidents are waiting to happen in places where work is intensive, heavy and require long working hours.

This problem is not specific to Turkey alone, but is a feature of capitalism. Because of this, every year 330 thousand workers lose their lives and another 160 million workers are injured as a result of 27 million occupational accidents. Without a doubt, this is nothing short of a massacre. Even in a war that lasted for three years, 1 million people did not die and 500 thousand people were not injured. The cost of work related accidents is heavier than such a war.

Because the employers do not implement measures that prevent such accidents, they are directly responsible for the deaths of the victims. When it is known in advance that these accidents will occur and the workers will lose their lives, failure to prevent these fatal accidents must indicate an act of murder. In Engels’ rightful terms, “When someone causes a harm that results in the death of another, we call this killing someone; when the assailant knows that the harm he will cause would be fatal, then we call this act murder.” Since the employers leave the workers unprotected from simple and preventable fatal work related accidents, this is called murder. This is not, as they call it, a death due to a simple accident. As Engels expresses, it is a murder because the employers deprive the workers from the necessities of life and push them into a situation where the workers can not live due to these accidents. This is a murder where the victims cannot defend themselves. It is a murder that does not look like a murder because nobody sees the perpetrator and so accepts it as “natural.” In these events, the crime is due to not doing rather than an action. Every employer who does not take the precautionary measures and who does not provide the workers with the security from these accidents is the perpetrator and is the murderer of those who died. The fatal accidents that the dockyard workers experience frequently in Tuzla area are these types of murders and the murderers are well known. Unfortunately, these murders and their crime scenes are not limited to Tuzla dockyards alone.

Most work related accidents occur in the following industries: coal mining, manufacturing of clay, soil, sand etc. , metal, machinery manufacturing, making transportation machinery, building, transportation, and retail and wholesale services. According to the data provided by the Social Security Institution, SSK, in the ten years between 1994 and 2003, on the average, every accident at work place in 82 resulted in death. This means, 10,084 workers lost their lives in the 831,248 work related accidents. When compared to the data from ILO, the International Labor Organization, the data shows the death rate in Turkey is very high. The ILO data shows that in the EU, with the exception of England and Holland, every 6 in 100 thousand workers lost their lives due to work related accidents. The same figure is, 7 in Australia, 7 in Canada, 4 in Japan, 7 in Switzerland, 6 in Austria, 7 in Belgium, 3 in Denmark, 5 in Germany, 4 in Greece, 3 in Holland, 6 in Portugal, 10 in Spain and 6 in Sweden. In contrast, 15 workers died due to work related accidents in Turkey.

The workers not only have the right to refuse to work in a plant where the safety measures have not been taken, but also have the right to demand their pay during this time. In addition, because they have left work due to a just cause, their seniority compensations cannot be reduced.

The business owners, in case of an accident due to not taking safety measures, are required to pay for the injuries received by the worker, and if the worker has died, the employers are required to pay to his inheritors due to loss of support. It is also possible in these situations to demand reparations due to emotional distress.

In the year 2002, the workdays lost due to work related accidents or occupational illnesses added up to 1,831,252. The days lost due to strikes in the same period were only 45,885. This means that when the capital front struggled to continue production by eliminating the strikes, workdays lost due to occupational accidents and illnesses were 50 times more than those lost due to the strikes were. A similar situation exists in a period when the strikes were widespread. Between 1990 and 1997, workdays lost due to strikes amounted to 19.3 million. However, in a period 3 years shorter than this, between 1993 and 1997, the number of workdays lost due to occupational accidents and illnesses was 46.6 million. These data show us that the capital can endure losses due to occupational safety but is not warm towards preventing occupational hazards because it requires additional expenses. The reason is that, the losses due to occupational hazards are not monetary but are the workers who can always be replaced with another.

Because of this, the murders under the guise of work related accidents will continue while the employers will prevent extra cost. But, is this the fate? What is the responsibility of occupational physicians here? We will discuss this in our next article.

Source: This article has been taken from Kızılbayrak magazine dated, February 4, 2006.