by Colin Hyde
Channel Five ran a story last week about an accident in which a man unfortunately lost his life at work, and the story included a comment by NTUCB president Luke Martinez “that while they wait with bated breath for a protective bill to pass into law [OSH], more people are dying because their employers are not held accountable to ensure occupational safety.”
It is taking a long time to pass the OSH (Occupational Safety and Health) Bill, and the story here is about cost. Our tax rates, our wages/salaries, our safety responsibilities, all add up in the cost of production. The world is brutal, and local producers have to compete with foreigners and their products. The sewing factory, Williamson’s, reportedly left Belize for countries where the cost of labor is cheaper. Belize is attractive to the BPO industry because our workers are good AND our cost of labor is competitive.
One time, in my own personal experience, land preparation on a rice farm had been completed late because the soils were heavy and the tractors didn’t have the horsepower to get the job done before the rains, so it was cloddy when the rice planting started. The seed hoses kept clogging up, and so two guys were put on the running board to observe the hoses. The problem for them was that the rice seed in the hopper was covered with Aldrin, an insecticide that is now banned in Belize. The Aldrin being used was a dust formulation, hence there was a little white cloud behind the planter.
The workers on the running board were borrowed from my gang, so I had more reason than usual to complain. The boss at that farm, a foreigner from a country that knows more poverty than Belize does, told me that Belizeans have to understand that they’re a developing country, and workers in developing countries will face more risks than workers in developed ones. There’s a huge story there, but at the end of it, it is about balancing the two sides. In pesticides we are guided by the saying, dose makes poison. In this instance, the guys’ exposure was “only” for a couple days. Okay, you can say I fell down, but my intervention was to get my guys to position themselves differently, for the purpose of reducing their exposure, and I got them a few cheap dust masks and advised them to put on new ones every couple hours.
Everyone understands the need for safety on the job. The cost of injuries or death is high, both from a human and a financial point of view. Everyone knows the OSH is necessary, but there is this difficulty on agreeing on what should be in it. It will be very interesting to see the finalized document that is taken to the House for debate and ratification.
I hope the Belize (Flour) Mills and BEL are fully engaged in the present discussions. They are contenders for the best safety track record in Belize. I have thought that maybe we should go piecemeal instead of the whole hog, one siddong. I say that because sometimes it takes more energy to get the 10 points between 90 and a hundred than it takes to get from 0 to 90.
Are we to pass a law that you can’t transport workers in the pan of a pickup? Or, are some safety features to be added to the pickup pan so that workers can be transported to/from the workplace in it?
What should be the speed limit for vehicles transporting people in the pan? Should there be a higher insurance? What kind of inspection must vehicles transporting workers pass, and how often are they to be inspected? What things can we agree on at this time.
Even without an OSH, all employers should be in on safety practices. Some of the workplace accidents we hear about indicate that not all employers are doing their best to reduce accidents.
Safety and the self-employed
Some jobs carry more physical risks than others. One risky place that I’m thinking of right now is the lot of those guys who work on fishing boats. I’m plenty familiar with these operations. Typically, a fishing boat carries a cook and 8 or so fishermen. Trips would be for a week, or how long the ice lasts. Every morning after breakfast, a fisherman gets in a dory and paddles off to areas far away, many times out of the sight of the others. In the evening they report in with their catch, and to get a meal. The boat would likely be owned by an individual, not collectively. The guys who fish pay a share to the cook and a share to the boat’s owner.
Those guys who go off in their dories are self-employed, responsible for taking care of themselves, so they wouldn’t fall directly under the OSH. If they get injured or worse, they or their survivors have nothing to get if they weren’t making weekly payments to SSB. The SSB web page says of “employment injury, death benefit”, that “a survivor (widow/widower, child or parent) of a deceased insured contributor”, is entitled if the deceased “died as a result of employment injury caused by an accident.”
What happens if the boat goes down on the journey home and a fisherman gets injured or drowns? Does “employment injury, death benefit” apply between home and the workplace? Thankfully, to operate in our waters the boat would have to be licensed, and to get a license you have to have necessary safety gear, and communication equipment to dial in to the Coast Guard. I’ll end here with the observation that the most risky place to be is in the pan of a pickup. Stop worrying about sharks. They don’t bite Belizeans either.
Clearly, the administrator’s loyalty must be to the mayor
Could you think of a more important time for a mayor to have a head administrator whom they can trust, than when there is a deputy or councilors who is/are making a power play? For that reason alone, it is a no-brainer for that mayor that they have a person they trust in that position. We’ve been through this discussion about administrator choice before. Former Belize City mayor, Darrell Bradley, went to school da foreign and came back with the idea that the head administrator’s job should be a position of continuity, a permanent job, like the permanent secretary in the public service.
Mr. Bradley made two up-front big mistakes there. Looking at permanent secretaries, they come from the ranks of career public servants, from messenger to clerk—classes 3, 2, and 1—and then to finance officer. They are people who have persevered in a system with strict guidelines. Still, Kathy Esquivel said that in 1984 PM Manuel found some PSs weren’t excited about working for a UDP government. That’s an opinion, but it is a fact that up to that change of government – because that George Price of the PUP won all the elections – our PSs, all, only knew about working for the blue.
For Bradley to have pulled that (continuity scheme) off, he would have to have found someone with impeccable credentials outside of the red and blue camps. Maybe if Mayor Bradley had hired a Patrick Rogers at City Hall, then incoming mayor Bernard Wagner and PUP party brass would have considered continuity. The story is that the talented young lady Bradley put at City Hall had campaigned for the party to which Bradley belonged.
Of course, the next area where Bradley fumbled the ball was his failure to realize how critical it is for the mayor to have an administrator who is loyal to him/her. Really, what an esteh it would be if the administrator had no loyalty to a mayor who is being challenged by a deputy or flexing councilors? I can tell you how that would work. The authority of the administrator would surpass that of all. Then the people in a city or town would ask why they went through the trouble of voting for a mayor.