Ensuring safe working conditions at work. Safe working conditions are ...

Any activity of a human being, even the most useful, can be a source of serious negative influences. The harm caused by it can consist in traumas, illnesses (including loss of ability to work) and even in a lethal outcome. To harm himself, a person can and during rest-leisure, and getting education, and even more so in the labor process.

That is, any, without exception, activity for us carries a potential threat to health. This statement is an axiom that is the basis of the issue of ensuring human security. What are the implications of this? The main one is: the absolute provision of safe working conditions at work is an unattainable ideal. In particular, there are no 100% reliable working processes or types of production equipment in this respect.

Safe working conditions - is it a myth or not?

First we will answer the question - what is the danger? This term denotes the totality of all phenomena, factors, processes and things that can affect the health and life of a person negatively. There is such an organization - the ILO (International Labor Organization). According to her, every year in our world, working people die in the amount of about two million people.

Classify the harmful and dangerous factors of production can be different. In our country it is customary to identify them by attesting jobs according to working conditions. Their influence on the body is broken, according to the corresponding GOST, by several factors:

• Physical;
• Chemical;
• Biological;
• Psychophysiological.

That is, safe working conditions are those in which the actions of all the above groups are absent or minimized.

What specifically threatens us?

The first of them (physical) can be attributed to everything that moves:

• Mechanisms and machines;
• Details of workshop equipment;
• Raw materials;
• Blanks;
• Working materials that can move in the production process;
• Structures that can collapse, or rocks susceptible to collapse.

It is also possible to classify here the air of a working space with increased gas content or dustiness, too high or low temperature of materials and work surfaces, as well as insufficient or too much heated air in the working area.

In addition, the list of physical factors includes too high or, conversely, low levels of vibration, noise, ultra- and infrasound, barometric pressure, humidity, ionization of air, as well as excessively large numbers of voltage in electrical circuits and ionizing radiation.

And what else is harmful?

The same applies to the levels of static electricity, increased tension of various fields - magnetic and electrical - lack of natural light or its complete absence. Such a factor may be too strong brightness of the light or its pulsation, reduced contrast, excessively high levels of radiation (infrared and ultraviolet), excess glossiness, etc.

Dangerous factors are sharp edges, burrs and all kinds of roughness on the surfaces of equipment, tools, workpieces, as well as the removal of a place of work to a considerable height from the level of the floor.

Not only mechanics

Another group - chemically dangerous and harmful factors - are those substances that are bad for our organism. Such an effect can be toxic, irritating, sensitizing, mutagenic or carcinogenic, and also depressing the reproductive function. They can penetrate into the body in many ways - through mucous membranes, skin, respiratory organs, or through the digestive tract.

Biological "harmfulness" refers to both pathogen-type microorganisms (viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, etc.), coupled with products of their own vital activity, and macroorganisms, that is, a variety of plants and animals.

Psychophysiological factors take place in the form of overloads of a physical nature (can be static or dynamic) and a neuro-psychological warehouse (expressed as mental overstrain, emotional "strains" or the usual monotony of labor).

It remains to add that safe working conditions are those in which the same factors are excluded from the composition of different subgroups.

Quality and quantity

The quantitative characteristics of the impact of a factor on an object is its probability and the scale of the damage it causes. The quantitative assessment includes the notion of an acceptable risk value, since the definition of safety adopted in domestic standards implies the absence of risks that are considered unacceptable.

And we are talking about those that are associated with causing damage to life or health of people, property of any persons (both physical and legal, municipal and state), as well as the environment.

Safe working conditions - definition

Thus, the safety of production activity is understood as the state of all labor processes such that the unacceptable risk of damage to all of the above factors is absent or minimal.

The term "safe working conditions" implies exactly such conditions under which the impact on workers of dangerous and harmful factors of production is either completely excluded or has a level not exceeding the established standard standard.

How to find out the level of danger?

To determine such conditions, there is a need for comprehensive risk assessment. As information for such a study, statistics on the nature and frequency of manifestation of harmful factors and the consequences (diseases, injuries) at different workplaces, in production units, etc. are used. In addition, the hygiene and labor protection standards adopted at the State level.

For each type of economic activity, safe working conditions are those that correspond to officially developed indicators of occupational injuries, considered to be basic.

How do they count these data in practice? Theoretically, the closest to the actual figure of injuries is the relative incidence of injury. This number is obtained by summing the number of all named cases for a certain period of working time. This period, for example, can be a year or a specified number of hours of work. For events whose frequency is relatively rare, the time period is more convenient to take longer - for example, equal to a decade.

Ensuring safe working conditions - how it is done

In our country there is the concept of the coefficient of gravity and the frequency of accidents. Of course, each concrete production has its own conditions and working conditions. But at the same time, ensuring safe working conditions in the workplace is a fairly typical process.

Its essence is in identifying harmful and dangerous factors of production, analyzing and assessing risks and managing the latter. Thus, the provision of such an important factor of production as labor safety is one of the fundamental and very complex technical, scientific and organizational problems that form part of the complex of labor protection measures.