Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) with the Point of View Employees

Abstract

Occupational diseases and accidents suffered by employees, cause many costs for the companies in direct and indirect ways. Instead of expanding their business by making new investments; companies spend their limited resources and power to cover these arising costs. Occupational diseases and accidents are social and economic wounds for the countries as well as the companies. For example, according to the reseach that Ministry of Labour and Social Security Training and Research Centre (Çalışma ve Sosyal Güvenlik Bakanlığı Eğitim ve Araştırma Merkezi - ÇASGEM) had made in 2010, annual cost of occupational accidents is 35 billion TL in Turkey.

Sole way to reduce these costs; creating company’s awareness on Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and to inspire their employees about this awareness. In this case, the actual practitioners of these rules, employees, have a very critical role. While managers demand from their employees to obey OHS rules and expect to bring it into a way of their life; most of the time employees may ignore OHS rules because of some reasons like finishing their job quickly, negligence and the view of protective equipments are limiting factors for their freedom and comfort. Especially the common view within Turkish people: “Nothing happens to me!”; causes unwillingness to use protective equipments.

The first aim of this paper is to examine what kind of costs that companies may face in the case of non-compliance to the OHS regulations on the overall dimensions. Another aim is to show how OHS regulations work in a packaging company named Amcor which operates in 43 countries around the world, and looking to OHS with the employees’ point of view by applying a survey research.