Minister calls for simplified Working Conditions Act

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In June 2004, Mark Rutte, the state secretary at the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, called for the number of health and safety regulations in the Working Conditions Act to be halved. Recent research has indicated that a large proportion of employers fail to comply with the Act's rules in areas such as assessing and addressing workplace risks.

At the request of Mark Rutte, the state secretary at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, the Institute of Applied Social Sciences (Instituut voor Toegepaste Sociale Wetenschappen, ITS) in Nijmegen recently conducted a study that found that as many as half of Dutch companies fail to comply with the Working Conditions Act (Arbo-wet), which regulates health and safety (NL9812112F). Based on this Act, employers are - amongst other requirements - obliged to compile an inventory of the most important occupational risks, and to draft a plan outlining how these risks can be limited. At 40% of the companies examined by ITS there was no risk inventory, while 50% had not drafted a plan. The percentages are higher for smaller companies, and the requirements of the Working Conditions Act appear to pose fewer problems for larger companies: risk inventories and plans were found to be particularly well organised at companies with more than 50 employees.

According to Mr Rutte, companies have difficulty complying with the Working Conditions Act mainly because its provisions are so detailed, and in many cases are not sufficiently geared to specific sectors. In June 2004, Mr Rutte thus called for the number of provisions in the Act to be halved, with a distinction drawn between 'high' and 'low' occupational risks. High occupational risks would include those that could lead to emergencies, illness or occupational disability, while the low occupational risk category would include matters related to toilets, office furniture etc. According to Mr Rutte, priority should be given to high occupational risks, which should be taken very seriously. However, rules related to low occupational risks may be counter-productive and cause considerable irritation, especially in smaller companies.

For its part, the Netherlands' largest trade union organisation, the Dutch Trade Union Federation (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging, FNV) is calling for stricter compliance with the rules. According to FNV, this could be achieved by imposing higher and swifter fines on firms breaching the law. Moreover, the fines should be made public. FNV is also in favour of more stringent standards concerning commonly occurring risks. The chair of social affairs at FNV, Ton Heerts, does not believe that it would be wise to halve the number of health and safety rules since 90% of such regulations relate to the compulsory implementation of EU legislation. Mr Heerts does believe that redundant or contradictory rules should be scrapped.

Non-compliance with the Working Conditions Act is especially rife in the metalworking sector. Studies conducted by the Labour Inspectorate (Arbeidsinspectie) at 320 companies found that 65% of these companies were in breach of the law, with 40% of these offences relating to unsafe machines. In 76 cases, work had to be halted because the Inspectorate considered the risks unacceptably high. When visiting for a second time 209 companies where non-compliance had been identified earlier, the situation had been rectified in 183 cases. Albert Roele, a spokesperson for FME-CWE, the employers’ organisation that represents large-scale metalworking companies, attributes the high level of non-compliance to the vast array of rules and regulations. According to Mr Roele, little can be done in practice based on some of the rules, while companies often appear to be poorly informed about increasingly stringent rules. FME-CWE will attempt to intensify information provision in this area.