The Healthy Workplaces Campaign for 2012-13, entitled Working together for risk prevention, is about helping businesses, workers and their representatives to co-operate, to manage the risks that Europe’s workers are facing.

Why do we need a campaign like this? Despite the progress made in occupational safety and health in the last few years, European workers are still dying needlessly. Every year in the EU over 3800 people die as a result of workplace accidents and there are over 2.8 million serious accidents at work.

And these deaths are only part of the story: millions more European workers are having to live with the effects of workplace accidents, or long-term damage to their health caused by their work.

We can try to calculate the economic impact that all this represents – we think workplace accidents and ill health are costing the EU as a whole around 4% of total GDP, or €490bn every year. But that isn’t taking account of the human cost, which we can’t put a figure on.

What we do know is that most of these accidents and cases of ill-health can be prevented, and the principles of risk prevention are clear and well known.

Indeed, risk prevention is central to the approach that we take, in Europe, to keeping workers safe and healthy. Look at European legislation on occupational safety and health (OSH), and you’ll see the importance of risk prevention, and the obligations that employers have to carry it out, emphasised again and again.

But it’s not enough just to pass laws telling people what they need to do. We need to make employers and employees more aware of their responsibilities, and to understand that risk prevention is done best when we work together. That’s why in our new campaign we’re focusing on risk prevention, and the benefits of co-operation in carrying it out.

European law makes managers, and the organisations they lead, primarily responsible for keeping workers safe. Good leadership in this area is vitally important. But we also know that risk prevention works best when managers engage their workforces in the process. Workers often have the best understanding of their workplaces, and the possible risks involved in working in them, and workers are generally the people who will implement any changes that need to be made.

We know from our research that whatever an organisation’s size, leadership and the active participation of workers are crucial to successful health and safety management. Our own European Enterprise Survey on New and Emerging Risks – or ESENER survey – involved interviewing some 36,000 managers and worker representatives, and it gives us a picture of how health and safety is currently being managed in European workplaces (www.esener.eu). ESENER shows clearly that enterprises where there is good commitment on OSH from management, and high levels of worker participation, are more likely to have proper health and safety policies in place – up to ten times more likely. We work much better when we work together. 

For a good example of how things can go well when employers and employees co-operate on OSH, just look at the construction of the Olympic Park and Stadium for the London 2012 Olympics. At the time this was the largest infrastructure construction project in Europe, involving some 36,000 employees, and with contractors ranging from big multinationals to small SMEs. But throughout the project there was a real emphasis on worker engagement and on worker feedback. This is the first Olympics in which the construction of the Olympic stadium has seen no fatalities. And overall, accident rates were broadly the same as those in all United Kingdom sectors, not just in construction. 

Several hundred companies of all sizes from 29 European countries competed in the 11th edition of the Good Practice Awards which rewarded the best examples of cooperation between managers and employees in risk prevention. EU-OSHA announced the ten winners during the European conference ‘Small business and workplace safety and health: the challenge; the opportunity’, organised just one day after the World Day for Safety and Health at Work (28 April) by the Irish Presidency of the European Union in Dublin. This was the first time EU-OSHA gave joint awards to both managers and workers.

In these difficult economic times, our Healthy Workplaces Campaign sends a strong message to organisations about the value of putting time and resources into risk prevention. The evidence is clear: investment in OSH pays off.