Progress in the prevention of industrial accidents

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At the beginning of March 1998, the first data on developments in collective bargaining on health and safety were published. A report by the CC.OO trade union confederation analyses the clauses dealing with health and safety in agreements and states that significant progress is being made in the prevention of industrial accidents.

Spanish regulations on the prevention of risks at work underwent a major revision in 1997:

• the Law on Prevention of Labour Risks (LPLR) clearly defines employers' responsibilities and establishes mechanisms for the participation of workers' representatives. Safety delegates must be appointed, in proportion to the size of each company, and a health and safety committee, comprising the safety delegates and employer's representatives, must be set up in all companies with 50 or more workers. The duties of this committee are to plan risk prevention and to promote the training of workers in this field. This law was passed in 1995 but implementation of its detail was carried out in 1997; and

• in the intersectoral agreement on collective bargaining (one 1997's "April agreements" - ES9706211F), employers and unions agreed to promote the establishment of sectoral industrial health and safety committees with functions similar to the workplace committees, in order to extend the application of the LPLR to all small and medium-sized enterprises.

The fight against the high industrial accident rate (ES9708216F) has also been a priority of trade union action. In October 1997, with the slogan "industrial accidents can be avoided, comply with the law", the UGT and CC.OO union confederations began a combined campaign against the increase in industrial accidents and demanded the immediate application of the LPLR. One of the central planks of the campaign was to promote collective bargaining on health and safety and to promote the participation of the workers' representatives in risk prevention (ES9711132F).

The first results of this line of action were published in March 1998. According to a report by CC.OO analysing clauses dealing with health and safety in agreements, there has been clear progress in collective bargaining on health and safety at work:

• 55% of agreements already include clauses on health and safety - a total of 2,860 agreements covering a total of 3,974,354 workers. Such clauses feature in 2,277 company agreements, covering 702,945 workers. and 583 sector agreements covering 3,271,409 workers. In general these clauses regulate training and funding, establishing a minimum number of hours of training and a percentage of the wage bill for risk prevention; and

• several more general agreements recognise and establish the minimum of 40 hours' training on risk prevention. These are the tripartite agreements for training in the Basque Country and Navarre, the agreement between unions and Catalan Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (PIMEC), the agreement for Castile-La Mancha and the National Health Institute agreement in the public sector.

According to CC.OO, these agreements are of major importance because they facilitate the participation of workers' representatives in risk prevention. The clauses on funding and training guarantee the operation of the sectoral health and safety committees that are already beginning to bear fruit in this environment through the evaluation of "risk maps" and the training of safety delegates in small and medium-sized enterprises.