OSH Blog
Governing the Agency: tripartism at work
Around this time each year, our Governing Board meets in Bilbao to review and give its opinion on the results achieved in the previous year, and to discuss and agree the main lines of the Agency’s work programme for the following year.
A visit from our Swedish partners
Last Thursday I was delighted to welcome a delegation from the Swedish Work Environment Authority (SWEA), led by its Director-General, Mr Mikael Sjöberg. We had an opportunity to learn about the excellent work being done at the SWEA, and to present to them some of the work we have planned for 2010.
How do you run the world’s largest campaign on safety and health at work?
How do you coordinate the world's largest occupational safety and health campaign? By getting key players together, which is what EU-OSHA did on 10-11 February 2010.
Labour is not a commodity
When we think of poverty, normally we associate it with developing countries and with a lack of things like food or clean water. Europe, however, is also affected by poverty.
Basic Human Right?
“Safety and Health at work is not only sound economic policy, it is a basic human right.” Kofi Annan, previous Secretary-General of the United Nations. Further quotes on occupational safety and health by Kofi Annan also in the African Newsletter.
Travelling is enriching!
Travelling is enriching! In recent weeks, I have had a fair amount of contacts and missions in Europe and here’s a round-up of some interesting discoveries...
New facts and figures
In my earlier blog “Latest news on the global and European burden of disease and injury at work” I had estimated that there could be some 18.7 million people suffering from health problems in the EU27. This was derived from my extrapolation based on the self-reported illness surveys in Finland and UK. This is also a reply to Steve’s question on European statistics.
Opinion, Plato once said, is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
It’s a few days since we launched the results of our first pan-European opinion poll of attitudes to occupational safety and health (OSH). And judging from the response we’ve had, we were not the only ones with an interest in knowing what people in the street think about OSH and its role in their lives.
Read the blog in any language
We have added a new service: the Google translation, which allows you to read the blog, in any language.
Latest news on the global and European burden of disease and injury at work
Next year we’ll be starting a project to collect and analyse the methodologies used to obtain estimations on the occupational burden of disease. The best European experts, as well as ILO and WHO, will advise us on the issue. A couple of months ago we also posted the latest numbers published in the Journal of Safety Research and based on the ILO study initiated by me while I was still at the ILO in Geneva.
Takala talks - EU-OSHA blog’s first post
I would like to welcome you to the launch of the EU-OSHA blog, and explain why we have decided to take this step and how we hope that you can get involved. From the very beginning of the Agency’s activities –back in 1996, when Internet access was far from widespread– we saw the World Wide Web as the fastest and most cost-effective channel for information dissemination. Not everyone believed that ‘this Web thing’ would go very far (we had to call it an “Experimental World Wide Web service”!), but we made every effort to turn it into an efficient communication channel.
