AMMAN — The Workers House issued its
annual report on Wednesday, on the occasion of the International Day for Safety
and Health in the Workplace. According to the report, the pandemic has revealed
wide legislative and regulatory gaps in the field of occupational safety and
health, and in terms of the extent to which legislation covers institutions and
workers, underlining the fact that large sectors of the workforce are not
covered.
اضافة اعلان
Quoting figures
issued by the
Social Security Corporation (SSC), the report shows that an
average of 14,000 work accidents occur annually, causing injuries and about 200
deaths, “at a rate of one work injury every 37 minutes, and one death every two
days”.
The manufacturing sector witnesses the highest
percentage of accidents, more than 30 percent of total injuries, according to
the report, followed by the wholesale and retail sector, with 18 percent, and
the construction sector with 13 percent.
Injuries caused by falling constitute the highest
percentage of work injuries, more than 30 percent of the total injuries,
followed by injuries resulting from falling objects, 14 percent, and by manual
tools, 12 percent. According to the report, 4 percent of the GDP is lost as a
result of the costs of injuries.
The report points out that these figures do not
reflect the actual number of work injuries in Jordan, “which is certainly much
higher, due to several reasons.”
Workers in the informal economy, who are estimated
to constitute approximately 48 percent of the total workforce in the Kingdom,
are not covered by
social security. The same goes for workers in the
agricultural sector, which, globally, has the highest rates of work injuries.
More than half a million workers do not have social
security or any kind of insurance, the report shows, and some facilities that
are covered do not report injuries and prefer to cover injury expenses through
insurance companies, in order to keep their file clean with the SSC.
The report pointed to a clear shortage, in the
Ministry of Labor, of personnel specialized in monitoring the extent of
compliance with occupational safety and health conditions at work sites. The
annual rate of visits by labor inspectors to check occupational safety and health
reaches about 5,000, while the number of establishments operating in the
Kingdom, according to the Department of Statistics, is 180,680.
At legislative level, the report indicates that
although the Labor Law has devoted a special chapter to the subject of
occupational safety and health, and issued a number of regulations and
instructions, especially with regard to the precautions needed to protect
institutions and employees from work hazards, Jordanian laws and regulations
need more comprehensive and technical texts that include specialized directives
to prevent risks in every sector.
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