SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, March 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The President of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, signed today the Canary Islands Strategy for Safety and Health at Work 2023-2027 with the heads of the employers’ associations and the most representative unions in the autonomous community, within the framework of the General Table of the Social Agreement.
The Strategy has been signed by the representatives of the provincial employer associations CEOE-Tenerife, Pedro Alfonso; CCE of Las Palmas, Pedro Ortega; Workers Commissions, Ignacio González, and General Union of Workers, Manuel Navarro.
As those responsible for negotiating the document over twenty meetings over nine months, the Minister of Economy, Knowledge and Employment, Elena Máñez; the Deputy Minister of Employment, Gustavo Santana; and the general director of Labor, Alejandro Ramos, together with the director of the Canary Institute of Occupational Safety (Icasel), Elirerto Galván.
The Canarian Strategy for Safety and Health at Work has the purpose of establishing the six fundamental objectives, as many operational ones and 117 lines of action during the next five years in the working conditions of the archipelago.
“It is the third document resulting from the Social Concertation, thanks to the dialogue maintained between the autonomous administration, business confederations and union organizations throughout the X Legislature within the VI Concertación”, highlighted Ángel Víctor Torres, referring to both the Agreement on Equality Labor and Wage Gap in 2021 as well as the Canary Islands Dual Vocational Training Strategy 2022-2026 last year.
“In this way, the institutional unity of the different entities from both the public and private sectors offers Canary Islands society a new pact for joint action in the recovery and growth of the labor market during a difficult period,” continued the regional president. .
The president of CEOE-Tenerife, Pedro Alfonso, highlighted the work carried out by all parties to reach this goal, mentioning “the talent of the Minister of Economy”. In his opinion, it is a new success of the social dialogue in the Canary Islands and he considered that the new Strategy qualitatively and quantitatively increases the guarantees on safety in the workplace, which benefits not only workers and employers, but also administrations and society as a whole.
His counterpart in the province of Las Palmas, the president of the CCE, Pedro Ortega, indicated that the agreement responds to a “mature social dialogue” in the archipelago, in order to improve occupational health and safety, monitoring the objectives of the Strategy and to advance in prevention. Likewise, he stressed that it obeys the new business parameters and the Canary Islands 2030 Agenda. He was convinced that it will improve the accident rate figures.
On the union side, the general secretary of the CCOO in the Canary Islands, Inocencio González, valued the final result that this Strategy has brought for the next five years, “the third on the islands”. Although he recognized that the negotiations “have not been easy and the agreement took a year, the parties have been able to give in with the idea of reaching an agreement on something as essential as health and safety in the workplace. In this line, He stressed that in each work accident there is a collective failure and responsibilities that this agreement tries to mitigate through prevention and attending to areas in which there is increasing sensitivity, such as mental health and occupational diseases.
In addition, the general secretary of the UGT in the Canary Islands, Manuel Navarro, was pleased that the Canary Islands had been able to adapt, “immediately”, all the labor market regulations until approving this renewed Strategy until 2027. Navarro stressed that this Strategy is very important in search of the protection of workers, especially in sectors such as agriculture, services and construction, apart from reinforcing the recognition of certain occupational diseases in the archipelago”.
STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES
With the superior references of the strategic framework of the European Union on health and safety at work 2021-2027 and the Spanish Strategy for Safety and Health at Work 2023-2027, the new document adapts to the particularities of the socioeconomic fabric of the Canarian community and updates the previous text of regional competence after its positive conclusion during the period 2015-2020.
It is also aligned with other strategies in fundamental matters such as sexual equality, mental health, road safety, climate change or the Canary Islands 2030 Agenda for the progressive achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations Organization (UN), in addition ordering the various actions of the different agents in labor prevention (Labor and Social Security Inspectorate, Icasel, employers, unions and mutual collaborators), in a participatory task for greater efficiency.
For the ultimate goal of achieving safer and healthier work environments, the regulatory text sets out six strategic objectives: Improve the prevention of work accidents and occupational diseases; improve the safety and health conditions of people in the face of new forms of work (automation or teleworking), demographic and climatic changes; promote the management of occupational risk prevention in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and micro-SMEs; promote health at work and introduce the gender perspective in the prevention of occupational risks; strengthen the role of public administrations, social partners and the involvement of companies and the working population in improving safety and health at work; promote training and dissemination of knowledge in occupational risk prevention that allows a greater preventive culture.
In addition to the six strategic objectives, the 2023-2027 Occupational Health and Safety Strategy establishes 32 operational objectives and 117 lines of action, which will be developed through action plans on an annual basis over the next five years through Icasel, with the participation of employers and unions thanks to the annual contribution of one million euros (250,000 euros to each entity) from the regional administration for the concrete application of the various initiatives.
Despite the positive balance of the previous 2015-2020 Strategy, the new framework aims to consolidate the progressive decrease, never enough, of the occupational accident rate in the Canary Islands over the last few years.
Specifically, the Canary Islands decreased the number of work accidents with leave by more than a thousand during the past year compared to 2019 and the incidence rate (accidents per 100,000 workers) also decreased in the same period, when it improved from fifth community to third with the lowest figure in all of Spain.
