Unit - 6
Health, Safety and Welfare
For proper functioning of a company, the employer ought to make sure the safety and security of his workers. Safety and health are an integral part of the work atmosphere. Work atmosphere ought to enhance the well-being of workers and should be accident-free.
The terms health, safety and security are closely associated with one another. Health is that the general state of well-being which not only includes physical well-being, but additionally emotional as well as mental well-being. Safety refers to the act of protecting the physical well-being of an associate. It'll embody the chance of accidents caused because of machinery, hearth or diseases. Security refers to protective facilities and equipment from unauthorized access and protecting workers when they're on work.
Workplace Safety Programs
Effective designing and implementation of work safety programs will minimize the losses and injuries caused to persons and property by eliminating the chances of commercial accidents. Additional to that, the worker safety programs may result in substantial price savings, magnified productivity and establishing harmonious relations with the staff.
Safety Policy: It contains a declaration of the employer’s intent towards the security of workers and suggests that to understand it. It includes causes, extent and remedies for accidents at work. The policy specifies the company’s goals and responsibilities and caveats and sanctions for failing to meet them.
Provision of Physical Health Services: Several organizations render periodical physical health check-up services to their workers. Regular medical check-ups of workers facilitate to check the signs and symptoms of tension, stress, ulcers, depression and different diseases caused from the exposure to harmful gases or other irritants.
Mental Health Services: To cut back the chances of mental breakdowns due to tension, pressure and depression and psychological state, a mental state service is provided to the staff in several ways that like psychiatric counciling, co-operation and consultation with specialists, educating workers regarding the importance of mental state and institution, development and maintenance of harmonious human relations at work.
Employee help Programs: These are specially designed to address stress-related issues of the staff and facilitate in diagnosis, treatment, screening and to preventwork and non-work connected issues. These programs offer real help to professionals and don't carry any negative implications.
Fitness Programs: These programs concentrate on overall health of workers and embody sickness identification and lifestyle modification. The common programsare high blood pressure identification, fitness, exercise, nutrition, smoking and drinking surcease, diet management and private and work-related stress management.
- Meaning and concepts, objective
Social security refers to protection provided by the society to its members against providential mishaps on which an individual has no control. The underlying philosophy of social insurance is that the State will blame itself for guaranteeing a minimum standard of materialwelfare to any or all its people on a basis wide enough to hide all the most contingencies of life. In alternative sense, social security is primarily a means of social and economic justice.
William Beveridge has outlined social security as “a means of securing an income to take the place of earnings when they are interrupted by unemployment, sickness or accident to provide for the retirement through old age, to provide against loss of support by death of another person or to meet exceptional expenditure connected with birth, death, or marriage. The purpose of social security is to provide an income up to a minimum and also medical treatment to bring the interruption of earnings to an end as soon as possible”
Objectives of Social Security:
The objectives of social security can be categorized into:
a) Compensation:Compensation ensures security of finances. It is supported by the thought that in the tenure of contingency of risks, the individual and his/her family mustn't be subjected to a double catastrophe, i.e., poverty and loss of health, limb, life or work.
b) Restoration: It connote the cure of one’s illness, reemployment thus to ensure their reinstatement to their earlier condition. In a sense, it's an associate degree of compensation.
c) Prevention:These measures imply to avoid the loss of productive capability thanks to illness, state or illogicality to earn financial gain. In alternative words, these measures are designed with an objective to extend the material, intellectual and ethical well-being of the community by rendering obtainable resources that are spent by evitable illness and idleness.
Ii. Form of social security- social insurance &social assistance
Social security is an extensive term. The two important means of providing social security are social insurance and social assistance.
Social insurance
Social Insurance is one of the means that prevent an individual from falling in the hands of poverty, misery and to help him in the time of emergencies. Insurance involves the keeping some money in order to provide compensation against loss resulting from any particular emergency. Thus, social insurance is a co-operative device which aims at granting adequate benefits to the insured on the compulsory basis in time of unemployment, sickness and other emergencies.
This is based on the principles of compulsory mutual aid. The principal elements of social insurance are:
i) Social insurance are financed by contributions which are shared between employers and workers, sometimes with state participation in the form of a supplementary contribution or any other subsidy from the general revenue.
Ii) Participation is compulsory with few exceptions.
Iii) Contributions are accumulated in special funds out of which benefits are paid.
Iv) Surplus funds not needed to pay, current benefits are invested to earn further income.
v) A person’s right to benefit is secured with the help of his contribution record without any test of need or means.
Vi) Thebenefit rates and contribution are often related to the earning of the person.
Social assistance
Social assistance is the assistance rendered by the society to the needy and poor persons voluntarily without placing any obligation on them to make any contribution to be entitled to relief such as workmen’s compensation, maternity benefit and old age pension etc. Thus, one may say that a social assistance scheme provides benefits for persons of small means granted with an amount sufficient to meet a minimum standard of need and financed from taxation.
Social assistance represents the unilateral obligations of the community towards its dependant group. It is provided by the society or the government to the poor and needy individual.
The principal feature of social assistance are
(1) The whole cost of the program is met by the State and local units of Government
(2) Benefits are to be paid as a legal right in prescribed categories of need
(3) In assessing the need, a person’s other resources and incomeare taken into consideration.
(4) The grant benefit is designed to bring a person’s total income upto a community determined amount taking account of factors such as family size and unavoidable fixed obligations such as rent grants.
The social security problems of workers in the unorganised/informal sector may be divided into two sets of problems. The first one arises out of deficiency or capability deprivation in terms of inadequate employment, low earnings, low health and educational status and so on that are related to the generalised deprivation of poorer sections of the population. The second arises out of adversity in the sense of absence of adequate fallback mechanisms (safety nets) to meet such contingencies as ill health, accident, death, and old age. The fact that majority of workers from socially backward communities find themselves in the unorganised/informal sector imparts a certain social dimension to the characteristics of these workers. A measure of social security in that sense should also be seen as a form of social upliftment.
References:
1. Personal management by C.B.Memoria& G.V. Gankar- Himalaya
2. Personal management & industrial relation by P.C.Tripathi-S.chand
3. Industrial relation, Trade Union &Labour Relation by G.P.Sinha& PRN Sinha, Pearson.
