Health and safety at work can get ridiculed in additional affluent countries as something nannyish and interfering - except for much of the developing world, it's a matter of life and death. Unsafe workplaces have the type of casualty rates more likely to be related to getting to war instead of earning a living. Every year there are 2.8 million deaths due to accidents at work or from work-related diseases. And every single day quite 1,000,000 people have a significant accident or injury at work - whether in falls on badly regulated building sites or from using dangerous machinery in factories. The figures are from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the UN's agency for working conditions, which in the week published a report asking why numerous of those accidents seemed to involve teenage workers. Guy Ryder, director-general of the ILO, says: "152 million children, who should be in class, are working. And almost half those children are engaged in hazardous work."
"For youth who are sufficiently old to enter the labor force, the available data shows that they experience a 40% greater incidence of injury on the work than their older counterparts."
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Can't say no
But why should young workers face such a better risk of injury compared with adults? Valentine Offenloch, a program officer for the ILO, has been in Myanmar working with the govt to enhance training and to form workers more conscious of safety.
Too often children don't feel they will refuse to try to something albeit they think it'd be dangerous, she says.
"Young people feel they need to simply accept any job." they could not have the experience or confidence to understand when the risks are too high.
The consequences for children who are badly hurt are often devastating.
It's a question of "survival", she says. "It's as fundamental as that."
If children are breadwinners and are injured, they'll not be ready to work and support their families.
"It's a really sobering experience," she says, to ascertain numerous people that are maimed and harmed by such work injuries.
Toxic materials
The type of industries where accidents typically occur in Myanmar, she says, are construction and agriculture. In agriculture, a standard problem is that the unsafe handling of pesticides, with children being pushed into using toxic materials.
"Farmers use Chinese or Thai pesticides and that they can't read the instructions," she says. It's often children, used as cheap casual labor, who might find themselves with the foremost dangerous work.
The international research from the ILO has identified a variety of things likely to push up the speed of accidents among young workers.
Risk factors
Young workers are more likely to be new employment. And the research indicates that in the primary month of employment workers are fourfold more likely to possess an accident. Youngsters structure a disproportionately high number of migrant workers, who might find themselves pushed into the foremost difficult and dangerous jobs, during a setting where they do not speak the local language.
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