Evaluating the effectiveness of state regulatory enforcement and inspection activities in occupational safety: A sociological approach
Introducing risk-based approaches, as well as moving from chasing violations to managing risks, has become a key trend in reforming state regulatory enforcement and inspection activities both in the developed and in transition countries, including Russia. Occupational safety is one of the areas where risk-based approaches have been actively implemented. Traditionally the outcomes of this reform are measured based on statistical data which is prone to underreporting. Therefore, the authors propose to use a sociological approach for such evaluation. The objective of the article is to evaluate the effectiveness of state regulatory enforcement and inspection activities in occupational safety from the perspective of its final beneficiaries - citizens and businesses. The article is based on the results of representative citizen and business sociological surveys conducted by RANEPA in 2017-2021. Since the reform in occupational safety aims to minimize health risks, the key performance indicators from the citizen perspective include risk perceptions and risk cases' frequency. The results of the study demonstrate that while the percentage of respondents who encountered health risks in their workplaces during the 2 years preceding the survey has somewhat decreased (from 11.6 percent in 2018 to 8.1 percent in 2021), in most cases (64.8 percent in 2021) such risks were related to actual harm. Most of these cases remained unreported: only 16 percent of respondents who faced health risks related to occupational safety applied to the state authorities. The share of those applying to the state authorities has decreased compared to 2018 by 5.4 percentage points. Reluctance to apply to the state authorities is one of the reasons for a very significant gap between the risk frequency measured by the surveys and the one reported by official statistics with annual occupational injury rates of some 0.10-0.12 percent of the employed population. Such data gap suggests that the state regulatory enforcement bodies attempt to manage occupational safety risks that are significantly underestimated. This explains quite low perceptions of occupational safety among citizens (only some 41.1 percent of employed respondents rated the level of occupational safety in 2021 as very (rather) high). Business surveys reveal negative trends in evaluating the impact of state regulatory enforcement and inspection activities in occupational safety on reducing health risks. While in 2017 some 50.5 percent of respondents noted that such activities have a positive impact on reducing occupational health risks, in 2021 only some 28.6 percent shared this opinion. The article concludes that there is a need to revisit the current approaches to collecting and analyzing the data on occupational safety risk cases and professional diseases and broaden application of sociological methods for identifying and preventing occupational health risks.
Keywords
regulatory enforcement and inspection activities,
occupational safety,
industrial injuries,
risk assessment,
sociological surveyAuthors
| Dobrolyubova Elena I. | Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration | dobrolyubova-ei@ranepa.ru |
| Maslennikova Elena V. | Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; State University of Management | ev_maslennikova@guu.ru |
Всего: 2
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