The National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Accidents and Illnesses at Work is celebrated this Sunday (28). For this reason, the month of April is remembered as Green April, in a campaign by the Public Ministry of Labor (MPT), with the motto Illness is also an accident at work – know how to prevent it.
The national coordinator of the MPT for Workers’ Health, Cirlene Zimmermann, explains that the initiative aims to explain to society the importance of reporting workplace accidents to Social Security:
“In social security, labor and tax terms, both work-related illnesses and typical, traumatic accidents are considered work accidents”
The coordinator highlights that the most common workplace illnesses are muscle bone injuries and repetitive strain injuries, such as tendonitis and bursitis.
Cirlene also remembers work-related mental disorders. “We have depressions, work-related anxieties. We have post-traumatic stress situations. For example, a worker can be crushed by a machine, can be run over in the workplace. And colleagues who are in that environment, viewing that scene, They are often also exposed to the psychological impacts of this situation. This often causes post-traumatic stress and can become a disease with absence from other workers.”
Other factors, such as moral, sexual and electoral harassment, in addition to exhausting daily working hours, can lead to mental illness. But it is common for the employee himself to resist admitting the problem, due to social prejudice or embarrassment.
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On the other hand, companies hardly notify the INSS about work-related mental illnesses, according to the MPT coordinator.
“There are some specific sectors that have been studied, such as, for example, the meat-packing sector. In a period of five years, around 3,200 benefits were granted by the INSS to workers known to be victims of work-related mental illness. However, in In only two cases did companies recognize that the illness was related to work.”
When a work accident is not reported to the INSS, the employee is left without sickness benefits, and society is harmed.
“Public worker health policies can only be defined and implemented based on data. If the notification of illnesses and accidents does not occur, these data are precarious and public policies are either not implemented or are implemented inefficiently.”
To promote health in the workplace, the company needs to listen to employees and act. Not just to protect them from risks.
“Companies often prioritize the simple provision of PPE, personal protective equipment. For example: for a noise risk, a machine that makes a lot of noise, and providing a hearing protector. However, the priority is always it must be by measures that eliminate or neutralize that risk as much as possible. In the specific case of the machine, the enclosure of the machine could reduce the noise to tolerable levels.”
According to the INSS, from 2012 to 2022 more than 6 million work accidents were reported, resulting in more than 2 million absences and 25 thousand deaths.
In the same period, spending on sickness benefits, disability pensions, death pensions and work accident benefits reached R$136 billion.
*With reporting by Oussama El Ghouri
