Several of the Chamber’s Proposals Approved Upon Amendment of the Occupational Health And Safety Act

The Ministry of Social Affairs has prepared a draft act amending the Occupational Health And Safety Act in order to create more flexible conditions for employers for ensuring the safety of the working environment. Already the intent to develop the draft contained several of the Chamber’s proposals, but we sent to the Ministry 10 additional proposals, many of which have been taken into account or are planned to be realised in any other manner.

The following of the additional proposals of the Chamber were approved:

• in case of remote work, the employee and not the employer should be responsible for occupational safety;
• the employee’s liability for the failure to fulfil the occupational safety requirements should be increased, for example in case of the employee fails to use a helmet at a construction site;
• the rules for working with a monitor should be reviewed and the outdated requirements should be omitted;
• the employee should be automatically informed of the start of the certificate of incapacity for work;
• the unnecessary requirements in the regulation for instructing and training employees should be omitted;
• a more paper-free working environment should be allowed, for example, the state could create a full solution for the electronic delivery of the medical examination results.

Although many of our proposals have been added to the draft already, we made a proposal to the Ministry to update the draft with two more issues:

• it should be possible that the medical examination of employees working in offices would be carried out by the family physicians;
• employers should be informed of the influence of chronic diseases and medicines, which could affect the performance pf work tasks.