Young municipal workers wear uniforms and other protective equipment while cutting the grass in the Praça Paris park in the Gloria neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The lack of training and the breach of safety requirements by their employers make young Latin Americans the most vulnerable to accidents at work. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 27 2018 (IPS)

Despite progress achieved in occupational safety in Latin America, the rates of work-related accidents and diseases are still worrying, especially among young people, more vulnerable in a context of labour flexibility and unemployment.

In 1971, a young labourer, Mário Carlini, died when he fell from the scaffolding during the construction of a building in Rio de Janeiro.

“He tied some boards and when he was going up, the steel sling opened because he had not put it on right. It was not his job, he was filling in for another worker one Saturday,” his widow Laurinda Meneghini, who was left to raise their six children on her own, told IPS.

Almost half a century later in Latin America “there has been a significant improvement in the protection of the safety and health of workers,” especially during this century, according to Nilton Freitas, regional representative of the International Federation of Building and Wood Workers (IFBWW).

Freitas, one of the authors of the book “The Dictionary on Workers’ Health and Safety,” attributes the improvement to better integration among the ministries concerned, such as Labour, Health and Social Security.

“This brought greater visibility to diseases and accidents and led to an increase in punishment for employers,” he told IPS from Panama City, where the Federation has its regional headquarters.

But the regional situation is still critical in terms of job security, according to Julio Fuentes, president of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Public Sector Workers (CLATE) and deputy secretary general of the Argentine Association of State Workers (ATE).

In his country, according to official data on registered workers, there is one work-related death every eight hours.

“The situation in Latin America in general is really tricky,” he said in an interview with IPS from Buenos Aires. “In the case of Argentina, there are no laws, regulations, or government agencies carrying out prevention efforts. There is no policy for that.”

“What there is, which is only partial and deficient,” according to Fuentes, are laws for reparations and compensation, a situation that is “aggravated” because the agency for workplace risk “is in the hands of private, mainly financial, entities.”

“There is no prevention and the business is to earn as much as possible and pay as little as possible,” he said.

The situation in numbers

According to the International Labor Organisation (ILO), 2.78 million workers die every year around the world due to occupational accidents and diseases. About 2.4 million of these deaths are due to occupational diseases, while just over 380,000 are due to workplace accidents.

Partial figures available indicate that in Latin America there are 11.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 workers in industry, 10.7 in agriculture, and 6.9 in the service sector. Some of the most important sectors for regional economies such as mining, construction, agriculture and fishing are also among the most risky.

It is worse in the case of workers between 15 and 24 years of age, according to the ILO.

April 28 is the World Day for Safety and Health at Work, which is focusing this year on “improving the safety and health of young workers.”

The 541 million workers between 15 and 24 years old (including 37 million children engaged in hazardous work), who represent more than 15 percent of the world’s workforce, suffer up to 40 percent more non-fatal occupational injuries than adults over 25, according to the ILO.

For Carmen Bueno, an expert from the ILO, that is due “in the first place, to their physical, psychological and emotional development which is still incomplete, generally leading to a lower perception of the dangers and risks at work. And in second place, young workers have fewer professional skills and less work experience, and lack adequate training in safety and health.”

In addition, “they have less knowledge of their labour rights and obligations. We cannot forget that there is a high incidence of young workers in precarious and/or informal jobs, which results in their exposure to greater risks,” the Occupational Safety and Health specialist from the ILO office for the Southern Cone of Latin America, based in Santiago, Chile, told IPS.

“Finally, other factors such as gender, disability and immigration status also contribute to this special vulnerability,” said Bueno.

According to Freitas, “young workers suffer the most serious accidents, at least in the construction and chemical industries.”

He attributes it to “exogenous factors” such as low educational level and professional qualification.

But “internal factors in the companies” also contribute to this situation, such as a lack of prior training and information on risks, mainly in informal activities and in small or medium-sized enterprises in service sectors such as commerce and transport.

And occupational diseases could be under-reported among young people because many ailments only become apparent when the workers get older, says the ILO.

That is the case of Saul Barrera, a Colombian mining worker for a company in Yumbo, a municipality in the western department of Valle de Cauca, who at the age of 56 suffers, among other effects, a “bilateral sensorineural hearing loss” caused by exposure from a young age to the deafening noises of the workshops and heavy machinery.

“I worked as a mechanic until 2005. Then I started operating a tractor that was very old and too noisy. That’s when I began with that health problem in my ears, which affected the rest of me,” he told IPS from his hometown.

“The machines damaged my shoulders, which in turn caused other medical conditions (rotator cuff, carpal tunnel and epicondylitis injuries), which since 2017 have been bothering me and causing most of my health problems today,” he added.

Barrera said everyone is exposed to the risks. But he said there are additional reasons among young people, as in the case of a co-worker who lost a finger in December.

“They are sent to fill in for other workers without experience or knowledge. They tell them ‘go in there’, and because they’re scared of the bosses, they go in,” he said, to illustrate.

The situation could get worse as a result of the labour reforms underway.

“The factor that most increases vulnerability and risk is the process that has been steadily taking place in Argentina and in the region, of outsourcing of production in factories,” said Fuentes.

In his opinion, “the greatest number of accidents, the least trained workforce, and the youngest workers are found in outsourced companies.”

In addition, “under neoliberal governments, the state reduces controls and inspections, including of work-related diseases and accidents,” he added.

In Brazil, where a labour reform has been implemented since 2017 making labour rights more flexible, Freitas sees “a rapid weakening of the (work safety) system,” because the government of Michel Temer “is undermining the political and institutional power of the Ministry of Labour, mainly with regard to its authority to carry out specialised audits.”

On the other hand, rising unemployment “represents in itself a threat to health. The lack of opportunities throws many young people into the informal sector and a social lifestyle quite dangerous to health and safety, associated with the growing consumption of antidepressants or alcohol and illegal drugs,” he said.

According to Freitas, other social protection systems are in “growing deterioration” in countries such as the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Peru, and “despite the strong resistance of the workers.”

The Andrade Gutierrez construction company is responsible for the works at the Arena da Amazônia stadium in the northern Brazilian city of Manaus, where four workers have died. Credit: Glauber Queiroz – Portal da Copa, Gobierno de Brasil

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 11 2014 (IPS)

The pressure to complete 12 football stadiums in Brazil in time for the FIFA World Cup in June has meant long, exhausting workdays of up to 18 hours, which has increased the risk of accidents and deaths.

Nine workers have already died on the work sites – seven in accidents and two from heart attacks.

The last fatal accident happened on Mar. 29 at the Arena Corinthians in the southern city of São Paulo, when 23-year-old Fábio Hamilton da Cruz fell to his death from scaffolding, eight metres up.

His death led to a partial suspension of the works by the justice authorities, who required proof from the company that it had corrected the safety violations.

But on Monday Apr. 7, the Labour Ministry authorised a resumption of the work, because the stadium has to be ready for the World Cup opening match on Jun. 12.

On Feb. 7, Portuguese worker Antônio José Pita Martins, 55, died after being struck on the head while dismantling a crane in the Arena da Amazônia stadium in the northern city of Manaus.

Marcleudo de Melo Ferreira, 22, was killed at the same construction site at 4 AM on Dec. 14 after falling from a height of 35 metres when a rope broke.

That same day, 49-year-old José Antônio da Silva Nascimento died of a heart attack while working on the site’s convention centre. The family complained about the harsh working conditions and the long workdays “from Sunday to Sunday”.

Another worker, Raimundo Nonato Lima da Costa, 49, had died from severe head injuries after falling from a height of five metres at the Arena da Amazônia construction site on Mar. 28, 2013.

In São Paulo, two workers – 42-year-old Fábio Luiz Pereira and 44-year-old Ronaldo Oliveira dos Santos – were killed when a crane collapsed Nov. 27, 2013 at the Corinthians club stadium, better known as “Itaquerão”.

And Abel de Oliveira, 55, died of heart failure on Jul. 19, 2012 while working at the Minas Arena, popularly known as “Mineirão”, in the south-central Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.

The first fatal accident in the preparations for the FIFA World Cup happened on Jun. 11, 2012, when 21-year-old José Afonso de Oliveira Rodrigues fell from a height of 30 metres at the Brasilia National Stadium.

Click on the image to enlarge.

“The government puts pressure on the companies, and they take it out on the workers, who are paying with their lives,” Antônio de Souza Ramalho, president of the Sintracon-SP civil construction workers union of São Paulo and a state legislator for the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, told IPS.

“It was irresponsible to delay the works and then, with the deadline looming, kill workers with exhausting workdays of up to 18 hours,” he said.

“The sins of the World Cup are going to have repercussions for years. We can’t accept accidents, they are criminal,” he said.More than 60 workers died in the construction works for the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, according to the Building and Wood Workers International (BWI). By contrast, no one was killed in the preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

According to the trade unionist, workers had already warned of the danger of a collapse of the crane that killed two labourers in São Paulo.

At the Corinthians stadium construction site, a quarry was hastily filled to hold a crane, instead of building a solid cement base, Ramalho said.

“The workers themselves and the safety engineers warned that it was unsafe. We know it was done hastily, because making a cement base takes 60 days, and would have cost more money. They preferred to improvise,” he said.

The results of the investigation into the deaths have not yet been made public.

In December, the Labour Ministry and Odebrecht, the contractor, signed an agreement stipulating that crane workers cannot do overtime or work at night.

And under the agreement, the workday for the rest of the workers must be seven and a half hours, with a one hour lunch break, and they can only work two hours overtime per day.

But according to Ramalho, the agreement is not being respected. “I filed a complaint for the police to investigate. But we have very little legal protection,” he said.

One of the biggest irregularities at the São Paulo work sites are contracts where the worker is paid for a specific job within a designated timeframe. “By paying for a completed task, labour laws that include the cost of social benefits are evaded. Everyone knows this, but there’s no way to prove it,” Ramalho complained.

The president of the Sinduscon-AM civil construction workers union in the northern state of Amazonas, Eduardo Lopes, told IPS that “risk is inherent in construction, but the race to complete projects quickly generates greater danger, without a doubt.”

However, “in the two fatal accidents [on the Arena da Amazônia] work site, the men were using safety equipment,” he said. “The problem was carelessness by the workers who failed to respect safety norms and went into restricted areas.”

What is clear is that when deadlines approach and time starts running out, prevention is pushed to the backburner, admitted mechanical engineer and workplace safety expert Jaques Sherique with the Rio de Janeiro engineering council.

In the remodelling of the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro, completed in April 2013, no one was killed, but several were injured, mainly due to inadequate disposal of materials, cuts from mishandling materials, and lengthy working days, including working nights.

“The work ends and the worker gets sick afterwards. When the stadium is shining and ready, the workers end up overwhelmed, exhausted and stressed out,” Sherique said.

Civil construction is the industry that generates the most jobs in Brazil: 3.12 million new jobs in 2013. But it is also the area where the number of work-related accidents is growing the most: from 55,000 in 2010 to 62,000 in 2012 – a 12 percent increase, according to the Labour Ministry.

In São Paulo, the number of workplace accidents in the construction industry rose fivefold in the last two years: from 1,386 in 2012 to 7,133 in 2013, according to statistics compiled by Sintracon-SP.

More than 60 workers died in the construction works for the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, according to the Building and Wood Workers International (BWI).

By contrast, no one was killed in the preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

“Workers are often glad when they have accidents because they are sent home to rest. And those who refuse to rest will develop injuries and ailments later on,” said Sherique.

He said it is strange but the labour-related ailments that are gaining ground in the construction industry are mental and psychological problems.

“It is a perverse and under-registered problem,” the invisible base of the “iceberg” of workplace safety, he said.

But this does not worry industry, especially in the construction of sports infrastructure, which involves an intense pace of work, heavy pressure and tight deadlines.

Under Brazilian law, workers exposed to unsafe, hazardous or unsanitary conditions must receive extra compensation amounting to six percent of their wages.

“This isn’t reasonable or right, but most of the time these health problems aren’t even reported,” said Sherique.

In 2011, the Superior Labour Court launched a national programme for the prevention of workplace accidents. But “it hasn’t provided concrete results,” the expert said.