CESI partner of 2020-22 ‘Healthy Workplaces Campaign’ of EU-OSHA

In 2020-22, CESI will be a partner of EU-OSHA’s newest ‘Healthy workplaces’ awareness raising campaign. Having been involved in several previous ‘Healthy workplaces’ campaign editions in the past, CESI will now participate for the fifth time in Europe’s biggest awareness raising campaign on occupational health and safety. The 2020-22 edition is themed ‘Lighten the load: Tackling work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) improves the lives of workers and makes good business sense’.

Existing since 2000, EU-OSHA’s Healthy workplaces campaigns typically run for two years and are backed by the EU institutions and social partners such as CESI. At the national level, they are coordinated by a network of focal points of EU-OSHA.

The campaign aims to raise awareness of the risks posed by work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and to inform about how to tackle and prevent them. The specific objectives are:

• raise awareness of work-related MSDs
• promote risk assessment and management of MSDs
• demonstrate that MSDs are an issue for everyone – in all types of workplaces and sectors
• improve knowledge of new and emerging risks in relation to MSDs
• emphasise the need to reintegrate and retain workers with chronic MSDs and how this can be done
• encourage the exchange of information and good practices among relevant stakeholders.

CESI Secretary General Klaus Heeger said: “As a trade union confederation, CESI has for long worked to promote adequate health and safety measures for all workers. This concerns not only the management of occupational psychosocial risks or dangerous substances, but especially also the handling of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). At CESI, we believe that this Healthy Workplaces Campaign edition brings to the front an occupational hazard that is still underestimated, despite being a more and more common cause of disability, leave and early retirement – both among blue-collar and office workers.”

CESI will contribute to the success of the campaign by reaching out to -and working with- its extensive union network across Europe to raise awareness for a more preventative and effective curative handling of work-related MSDs, including through collective agreements.

More information about CESI’s involvement in the 2018-19 Healthy Workplaces Campaign is available here.

[Logos: EU-OSHA 2020]