Migration: A major challenge to health and safety at work

Migration creates a lot of diversity.  Key words are language, culture, value systems, skills, work and lifeexperience.  Zero Harm to People, the vision of health and safety at work, on the other hand requires a lot of conformity:  conform understanding of hazards, full compliance of standard operating procedures, shared values.  Workers need to go through four steps to keep safe at work.  They need to know, to understand, to accept and to do.  In the area of Safety at Work approaches have been developed for managers to teach workers, to coach, motivate and to mentor them.  Health at Work, however, presents still a huge challenge, since hazards are seldom visible, harm harms slowly and cohabits with harm for outside activities.  Migration adds more challenges: when migrants workers start work there is no health baseline and the migrant workforce is apt to change very frequently.  Management must establish an initial health check, must monitor frequently and also detect outside influences – which might be clashing with privacy laws.