Occupational Hazards and Labor Practices
Occupational Hazards and Control Techniques
To minimize occupational hazards and their consequences, several techniques are employed:
Training Techniques
These techniques involve instilling safe work practices in employees, creating a safety-conscious work environment. This can be achieved through various training stages, including academic, formal, occupational, or on-the-job training.
Scientific Techniques for Hazard Control
Workplace Safety
This scientific technique aims to protect workers from accidents and minimize consequences. It involves isolating workers from risk sources using guards, enclosures, and appropriate materials. Key characteristics of safety include:
- Universality: Affects everyone.
- Complexity: Maintaining 100% safety is difficult.
- Importance: High economic and personal costs associated with neglecting safety measures.
Safety measures can be collective (e.g., safety covers, beacons) or individual (e.g., Personal Protective Equipment [PPE] used when collective safety isn’t feasible). Safety also applies to buildings, machines, etc.
Industrial Hygiene
This technique focuses on maintaining a healthy work environment to prevent occupational diseases. Industrial hygiene comprises four branches:
- Analytical hygiene: Analyzes field data.
- Theoretical hygiene: Compares field data with theoretical values.
- Operational hygiene: Implements corrective actions if values deviate significantly.
Ergonomics
Ergonomics adapts work to the worker, prioritizing worker well-being. It involves scientific disciplines that optimize the fit between job and worker, encompassing factors like measurements, color, etc.
Social Psychology
This technique addresses job dissatisfaction by focusing on the social integration of work and the worker.
Social Policy
Social policy comprises rules that protect worker health and safety, including limitations on working hours, breaks, and prevention laws.
Costs of Workplace Accidents
The loss of a life due to a workplace accident is estimated to be equivalent to 6,000 working days (21 years). Costs are categorized as:
- Direct/Insured costs: Easily determined and typically insured (e.g., accident or occupational disease premiums).
- Indirect/Uninsured costs: Difficult to quantify and uninsurable, including:
- Production impact: Raw material loss, time lost assisting the injured, equipment loss.
- Market impact: Penalties, delays, damage to company reputation.
Working Hours
Working hours are the time an employee spends working. The 1990 law (data law) governs current regulations:
General Rules
- Maximum annual working time: 1826.827 hours (negotiable via collective bargaining, but not exceeding this limit).
- Maximum weekly working time: 40 hours.
- Shifts: Morning (6:00-14:00), Evening (14:00-22:00), Night (22:00-6:00).
- Breaks: Uninterrupted work requires at least a 15-minute rest period. Split shifts require at least a 1-hour break.
- Full-time/Part-time contracts: Based on whether the employee works the entire annual working time or a portion of it.
- Rest periods: At least 11 continuous hours between shifts.
- Maximum daily working time: 9 hours (including overtime).
Limitations and Extensions
Extensions
Working hours can be extended for specific needs, provided worker safety isn’t compromised. Examples include seasonal work in agriculture or livestock, work in isolated locations, and setup/closure tasks. Extra time is compensated as overtime or breaks.
Limitations
Even with safety measures, exposure time may be limited for hazardous conditions like extreme temperatures or underwater work.
Overtime
Overtime exceeds the annual working time. For part-time contracts, hours exceeding the contracted amount are considered additional hours. Maximum annual overtime is 80 hours. Overtime requires extra contributions (14% for structural overtime [agreed upon or due to exceptional circumstances], 28.7% for non-structural overtime). Employers propose overtime, and employees can accept or decline (unless previously agreed upon). Overtime increases the contribution base for professional contingencies.
Leaves, Permits, Breaks, and Holidays
These are paid periods of non-work:
- Marriage leave: 15 days
- Annual leave: 30 calendar days (expanding to working days)
- Family illness leave: 2 days (4 days if residing elsewhere)
- Personal tasks/duties: As required
- Annual holidays: 14 working days (2 local)
- Maternity leave: 16 weeks (plus 2 weeks per additional child)
- Paternity leave: Available without risk to mother or child, requested before the rest period.
Workplace Hazards II
Electrical Hazards
Electricity poses risks due to potential mismanagement, unintentional acts, or contact with live wires. Only qualified personnel should handle electrical systems. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is crucial in case of electrical shock.
Fire Hazards
Fire requires fuel, an oxidizer (usually oxygen), an ignition source, and a chain reaction. Firefighting methods involve targeting these elements (suffocation, inhibition, cooling). Fire extinguisher types (A, B, C, D, E) correspond to different fire classes (solids, liquids, gases, reactive chemicals, electrical).
Safety Signage
Safety signs use universally understood codes (colors, shapes, symbols) to warn of hazards. They are primarily visual (round for obligation/prohibition, triangular for hazard, square for warning) but can also be acoustic, olfactory, or tactile.
The Labor Market
The labor market is where labor supply (workers) and demand (companies) meet.
Labor Market Concepts
Key concepts for understanding the labor market include:
- Active population: People over 16 willing to work (employed, unemployed).
- Inactive population: People of working age not seeking employment.
Relationships derived from these concepts include the activity rate, employment rate, and unemployment rate.
Labor Market Structure
- Increased female participation: Driven by EU integration and measures supporting disadvantaged groups.
- International economic situation: Global economic conditions impact the labor market.
- Labor reforms: Adapt to societal needs.
Unemployment
Unemployment types include seasonal, cyclical, frictional, structural (technological), voluntary, and involuntary. Unemployment can lead to the rise of an informal economy.
Job Market Outlook
Current challenges include an oversupply of university degrees, underdeveloped vocational training, and the influence of the international economic situation.
The Job Search
The job search process varies in difficulty depending on the economic climate. There’s no guaranteed formula, but certain strategies can improve prospects.
Personal Potential
Candidates should critically self-assess and understand labor market demands.
- Self-assessment questions: Skills, experience, resources, desired job.
Job Search Methods
:
A variety of instruments and means to facilitate that are supply and demand, these media are classified into the following:
· · The autcandidatura: means that the worker is offered company by company, you can do in person, by letter, email, etc. This media is a tremendous wear for a candidate but is traditionally used in the constructions system. The downside is that staff wear the worker is submitted if after several attempts did not get a job.
· Press and media: the media used to tell us quein industry needs workers since it belongs.
· Friends, acquaintances and family: one of the problems that this means is that if things go wrong you lose that person, in fact many businesses under no circumstances are family contato.
· Opsiciones: published annually by all administrations called public job, becoming the first quarter of each calendar year. Opposition usually consists of several stages and there are several forms of oppositional, it can be by open competition, contest done / opposition or opposition restricted.
The basis with ocatoria is the basis of the opposition and when he confronts solectivo process must be careful to follow the rule that is based the selection process. The ways in which we can take are:
· ° Opposition freedom: it is one in which all enter the same puntucion 0.
· Contest / opposition: in this process there are two phases, phase one is the opposition and the opposition operates freely and the other is the competition phase, this will have to see how it affects the selection process as a whole and it can do follows:
· · We as the main tender phase and then adding the opposition.
• That the competition phase is not the primary but will adding to the opposition stage.
· · The opposition restricted, this form of opposition oppositional limits the possibility of people who were already interim to acquire the role of career officials.