Promoting a culture of health and safety at work: Safety - A permanent priority

Abstract

The human consequences of occupational accidents in Algeria are multiples of their action on the profitability and the added value, knowing that the company is the employee's home and the damage of each may affect the whole. Moreover, understanding and applying concepts of risk management in their Anglo-Saxon sense is completely absent in our companies. Preventive measures are still insufficient, especially for the protection of workers who are often left on their own. This results in an uneven maturity of companies, different strategies considered and dissimilar organizational choices. Of the more than 50,000 accidents/year that have been recorded in Algerian companies, between 750 and 800 of those accidents have caused deaths. The number of days lost that are automatically compensated is 14 105. These costs are exorbitant for the whole of society and even more so for the companies themselves (the continuing rise of absenteeism, disruption of ongoing work and lost production, etc...). Conscious of the importance of industrial safety control for the future of our industrial heritage, we covet raising employees' and employers' awareness on the importance of all issues raised by technological risks within companies. Everything has to be done in order to avoid an accident which breaks or handicaps a human life; the objective of this paper. Instantly, everything has to be done to ensure the means to provide occupational health and make the industrial action daily to ensure the safety of its personnel in different companies or even in each workplace. Thus, a permanent anticipation of work accidents and occupational diseases can therefore be reached and to develop a permanent and sustainable culture of prevention in companies. So we hope that prevention is on the agenda of each employer, each worker, all employers' associations, trade unions and professionals. Safety and health at work should be seen as a tool for productivity and an economic asset. Only in this way, individually and collectively, risks can be controlled and sources of danger can be eliminated for the health, safety and physical integrity of workers, while relying on the general principles of prevention: the health in the company is the health of the company. © 2012 WIT Press.