Gerencia de Riesgos, nº 100

Nº100 ENERO/ABRIL 2008 Imprimir Histórico de publicaciones

Estudios

RISK MANAGEMENT, OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND HYGIENE AND THE ENVIRONMENT: The new paradigms

THE NUPAR-TAR DOCTRINE

HÉCTOR FERNÁNDEZ
Instituto Argentino de Seguridad

Ilustración artículo LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR In our opinion a clear harmonisation of a multidisciplinary character can be established in the trilogy Risk Management-Occupational Health and Hygiene-Environment, always accompanied by the functional idea furnished by «ethics» and «deontology».

Ethics in this sense, as a philosophical science, takes in not only –in the words of Alexy– «normative ethics» but also «metaethics» which analyses the meaning and use of moral language, to which must be added «deontic logic» and the «moral theory.¹».

For pedagogical and methodological reasons we have broken down this work into conceptual blocks, acknowledging that the criteria we set forth are not exhaustive and restrictive and call for permanent integration and harmonisation between them, as we have put forward in the «Risk Management Doctrine» (TAR)².

ETHICS AND HUMANWORK

In light of our professional conviction,we advocate any appreciation of «deontology» –attributed to Bentham, Jeremy– as: «the set of duties in any profession» (e.g., safety and health inspector, risk manager, occupational and environmental hygienist...).

That said, the idea of «moral and ethical» –through the prism of the educator Serrano– is reflected in the following ideas: «moral means the prevailing customs in any given time and place. It depends directly on the communal rules safeguarding harmonious coexistence: to preserve society. Morality is opposed to the law of the strongest, which focuses firmly on crime and avoiding the proliferation thereof. It is closely bound up with the concept of rightness, whether imposed by law or custom. Ethics is internal discipline and goes beyond the field of law, acting in its own right. Philosophers soon cottoned on to its perdurability and abidance, which marks it off from fickle morality and even opposes it to the latter’s point of view. Ethics is the basis of all morality or hems it in with its overarching, formally ideal structure. It impinges directly and rigorously on knowing, thinking, acting, doing³».

Edel saw ethical theory as structured in five main modes. One is analytic, which deals with terms and concepts and aims to establish their kinships, refining the methods.The second is descriptive; the phenomena are painstakingly described, classified and interpreted (e.g. moral situations and qualities).The third is the causalexplanatory; looking into the phenomena, their functional and deep-lying relationships.The fourth is evaluative; it addresses all cases with a critical sense and instantly seeks, establishes or applies rules.The fifth is the comparative; dealing with problems such as the variety of solutions proposed by the various methods⁴.

We define work as «the action and effect of working. It is human force applied to the creation of wealth...», and working as «...occupying oneself in any exercise, undertaking or ministry (...)⁵». .We therefore coincide with Vázquez Vialard in stressing the «work force» structure, pointing out that each community draws on the work of its members for constructing the system of provisions.Well-being, measured as the possibility of living conditions offered to society’s members, resides not only in the quantity but also in the quality of the work rendered⁶».

In light of the above, human behaviour in organisations can be broken down into the following features:

a) activity-oriented man
b) social man
c) man and his diverse needs
d) perceiving and evaluating man, and
e) man has a limited capacity of responses.

These core ideas prompt us to consider the «complex man» as the evolution of (...) homo: economicus, social, organisational, administrative and functional; bringing us closer to the patterns of perceptions, values and motives⁷.

We have also spoken of the nature of man in organisations and their structure, coinciding with the Grupo META about the «basic premises» called: individual differences; the total person; the motivation and dignity of the human person (...), interpreting this latter value as the conviction that persons should be treated differently from the other factors of production. All work, right down to the most simple, confers on the person performing itself respect and recognition of his/her aspirations and capacities⁸.

The ILO guide refers to the field of psychosocial conditions in working life and the person-environment fit.

A report by the Tavistock Institute of London, document T 813, laid down the following general guidelines for designing work stations:

the workstation should be minimally varied and set high standards over and above mere supportability;
workers should be able to learn in their work stations on a continual basis;
the work station should comprise some decision-taking sphere considered by the individual concerned to be personally his/hers;
there must be a certain degree of social support and recognition in the work station;
workers must be able to establish a relation between what they produce and social life; and
workers must be able to feel that the job leads to some sort of desirable future.

As regards the person-environment fit these guidelines stated the following «the subjective fit refers to the person’s perceptions and the worker’s environment, while the objective fit refers to evaluations that in principle present no subjective bias or error...⁹».

A special mention here must go to human relations vis-à-vis the company, internally in the sphere of labour relations and externally as the recognised community connection defined as public relations.

As regards integral development the Charter of the Organization of American States lays it down that: «Work is a right and a social duty, it gives dignity to the person who performs it, and it should be performed under conditions, including a system of fair wages, that ensure life, health, and a decent standard of living for the worker and his family, both during his working years and in his old age, or when any circumstance deprives him of the possibility of working¹⁰».

RISK MANAGEMENT (TAR). THE NEW RISK MANAGEMENT PARADIGM (NUPAR-TAR)

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR CThe Risk Management Tetrahedron (Tetraedro de la Administración de Riesgos,TAR) arises as a major science in this field with the conviction that risk management embraces more than the criterion of risk technique analysis, profits and the insuring thereof.

With a broad interpretation criterion we define risk management as the philosophy, science and ethics in the harmonization of the human being and his environment, comprising all diagnosis, preventive action, treatment, management systems and risk-benefit analysis (in the work, industry,municipal, state, federal and Community-international level) through the integrating and doctrinaire vision of the «base factors» and «nexus elements» of the Risk Management Tetrahedron (TAR)¹¹.

The «base factors» of Risk Management (Administración de Riesgos:AR) thus conceived are the evaluation-analysis criteria (human, legal, technical and interrelation).These factors are then harmonised with the working world by means of the «nexus elements» – coadjuvant – (semiology, organisation-communication interface and labour relations) working towards a dynamic and multidisciplinary system in all management ¹².

It should be pointed out here that AR-TAR is made up by defined systems such as: health and safety science, environment, quality of life, integrated management systems, new technologies, social-human sciences, legal plexus-international treatises and conventions (...) the whole tetrahedron is underpinned by the «human factor» in all its dimension (philosophy, ethics, deontology, sociology, economics, psychology, cultural, labour relations...).

But all these values of the human and social reality have to be shored up –as part of the legal base factor (TAR)– by the spheres making up the «legal world». These are:

a)the order of conduct (human behaviour): which have to be example-setting in the present order;
b) El orden de normas, que describe la voluntad del autor (...)
c)the order of value: which tends towards justice (justice’s duty to be ideal or pure is the duty to be dikeologic, because dikeology is the science of justice¹³.

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR Thus conceived, Risk Management calls for a constellation of analysis (restricted and broad based), with the sole object of embracing the whole human being, his/her living environment and perceptive relationships (subjective and objective) towards the common good.

From this viewpoint the pillar of each evaluative prism will be dictated by the national and international rules, the safeguard of the human being and his/her culture, the materialization of all trustworthy technology and, fundamentally, all prosperous social development.

These criteria prompt us to define the New Risk Management Paradigm (NUPAR-TAR in Spanish initials), made up by::

a) Risk management (TAR) with its «base factors» and «nexus elements»;
b) a conceptual level in the development of the Deontological-Ethical Level (NED in Spanish initials);
c) the integration of the new model of Occupational Hygiene and Safety (HSO, in Spanish initials), with its associated system (TAR,NED, CyMAT and CIDINOP) ant the conceptual components:: the preservation of life and goods, quality of life (quality of working life), environment (eco-management, sustai nable development), integrated management systems (ISMs) and the related environment (communityinstitutional relations, public relations, human resources, ergonomic and general working conditions), and
d) the Preventive Normative Dynamic Circle (CIDINOP), structured by: Risk Management (TAR), Occupational Hygiene and Safety (HSO) and the related environment (ER, all Spanish initials).

QUALITY OF LIFE AND QUALITY OFWORKING LIFE

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR According to an important ILO publication we detail the following guides: «work centres on analysis of the strategies designed to improve the quality of work and quality of life, the former geared towards development of the professional skills while the second refers to the workers’ condition in terms of industrial organisation and social stratification. It analyses how union and employer strategies differ and the conflict deriving therefrom. By «improvement of the quality of work» we understand the development of the professional skills in the technical production process; this would seem to be bound up with the technical work product and is related to the work situation.The problem of the dimensional relation of man with his environment is important, given the possibility of striking a dynamic nature-man-technology balance.This will occur only when man, at both individual and collective level, feels himself to be directly responsible for the effect of his actions on the environment and this can happen only if the dimension of the environment is kept on a humanising scale¹⁴».

The quality of life can likewise be defined as:

a) a social group’s capacity to satisfying its needs with the resources available in a given natural space, achieve a decent human life, commit itself to a development and measured use of the environment; and
b) a community’s set of spiritual, ethical and material conditions that are conducive to a healthy, happy and meaningful existence in fellow feeling with others¹⁵.

By «level of life» is to be understood «the degree of material well-being of a person, class or community to support itself and enjoy its existence, establishing the necessary conditions for a minimum, acceptable and decorous level of life in terms of food, clothes, accommodation, safety and essential services¹⁶».

We define the quality of working life as the set of systemic conditions emerging from a social group and its organisational climate, with suitable ethical, spiritual, psychological, cultural and material characteristics, with professional suitability of its members in the sphere of the Working Conditions and Environment (CyMAT in Spanish initials) and the labour relations.These conditions should ensure respect, dignity, happiness, satisfaction of their human needs, without implied risk and recognised and valued by the community.

OCCUPATIONAL HYGIENE AND SECURITY

Civilisation has evolved not only in terms of technological sciences but also the sciences of humanities, which have also undergone a sustained, sometimes partial development. It was in this context that, some decades ago now, the concept of unacceptable gap was coined as a sociological term to refer to the glaring inequalities between the diverse existing cultures (i.e., satisfaction of basic needs, available technology, equal and unwaivable right to labour protection, provision of pollution-free resources, prosperous quality of spiritually viable life, valuation of human rights...).

But within this local and trans-national reality a new model of occupational hygiene and safety has come to the fore as an imperative of hypermodernity.We call this health and safety science (Ciencia Prevencionista) with a multidisciplinary approach and an interpretation based on labour, institutional and assimilatedenvironment aspects, understanding the philosophy, science and management of risks in the preservation of life and goods, quality of life, environment, integrated management systems (quality, occupational health and safety, environmental management, applicable standards, codes and regulations) and their related environment.

This paradigm now needs an implementation framework, via the Preventive Normative Dynamic Circle (CIDINOP), comprising harmonisation of the fields of:

a) a core: risk management

b) a specific setting: preventive normative act, preservation of life and goods, quality of life, environment and integrated management systems, and

c) its related environment: i.e., the general working conditions, ergonomics, labour relations, institutional and public relations¹⁷...

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR Within the occupational hygiene and safety paradigm and the application thereof (CIDINOP), there are also very important inputs from ergonomics, understanding the latter according to the definition of the French Language Ergonomics Society (Société Ergonomique de Langue Française: SELF) as the «pooling of man-related scientific knowledge necessary for conceiving tools, machines and devices that can be used by the greatest number of people with the maximum comfort, safety and efficacy».

Along these lines we are bound to say that a better quality of life, a fundamental aspect of safety and hygiene and risk management, takes in not only first generation human rights (civil...) and second generation human rights (economic, social and cultural) but also spills over into the field of «third-generation human rights». This is why the integration of this knowledge and the necessary interpretation thereof urges us towards the «graduation and professional skills training of the health and safety officer» favouring a professional profile with a solid grounding in legal, social and technical sciences with far-reaching knowledge in labour relations, with the intention of achieving an appropriate educational plexus that is conducive to «the legal governance of human behaviour in risk management».

In a paper on the theory that investment in accident prevention produces dividends, Sherree, from the Inter-American Safety Council (Consejo Interamericano de Seguridad) (1991), made the following summary comments: «prudent managers now understand that safety investments can cut down many hidden costs.Accident prevention programmes allow employers to control losses, cut risks and improve quality and productivity». According to the National Safety Council, «good accident prevention programmes share several common denominators, including: management commitment, management and worker participation, suitable training and a shared sense of responsibility». Bucci, Bob argues that «accident prevention programmes can never be successful without the moral and financial support of management».A study conducted by the Center for Risk Management and Insurance Research of Georgia University claims that «safe working habits promote an improvement in cleanliness and tidiness, higher productivity, greater pride in the work and an increase in quality...».

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR From a legal viewpoint: a) Palomeque tells us that: «the employer is the keystone of work protection», claiming that «the key piece is the employer due to his/her responsibilities.These responsibilities are formulated institutionally in a threefold legal construction: the regulation of the workers’ subjective right to efficient protection; determination of the content of this right to protection and, lastly, the employer’s contribution to worker protection from occupational risks.This protection duty is legally configured as a general duty beholden on the employer to guarantee the health and safety of the workers at his/her service in all work-related aspects by adopting as many measures as may be necessary»; b) Herrero García tells us, in terms of «employer responsibility» that: «the employer has to keep a permanent watch over compliance with preventive measures, even in view of the admitted difficulty in delimiting the scope of these measures...»; and c) Arroyo Zapatero in his overview of the professional competence of prevention officers and auditors tells us that: «the economic order and the suitable application of accident-prevention rules calls for the utmost confidence in the safety officers’ and auditors’ competence, professionals who should be qualified for acting in safety matters and within the employer’s decision-taking sphere¹⁸».

We have also advocated the internal re-inclusion of the works doctor, here and now reminding readers that : «For the glory of the medical profession, occupational medicine as we now it today predates the 1833 law. In 1828 an English employer, keen to do something for the health of his workers, sought the advice of his close friend, Dr. Robert Baker, asking him what he should do to improve the health of his employees: Baker replied: set up your own doctor inside the factory (...), let him visit every workshop one by one to check whether the work is damaging their health (...). The employer’s response was to invite Baker to be his doctor, thus giving birth to the first medical service on work premises¹⁹».

Along these lines the seminal idea in this area was expressed in the following terms: «considering that it has been, is and always will be an aspiration of the human species to dignify the good works of man, particularly the productive and creative activity, as manifested by the act of work, and acknowledging that nothing is as important for the evolution of the species as the conservation of health and life (...),we do hereby declare that safety, in terms of delivering products free of contingencies and risks, is a moral duty of man towards other men, requiring each person and ipso facto each organisation to take such measures as may be conducive to that end (...), and is presented as a true humanistic imperative (...) Having been clearly demonstrated over the years that safety is a need and convenience and also one of the main contributing factors towards social peace and that the lack of prevention can no longer be tolerated in any form, on pain of shedding doubts on human intelligence itself, insofar as this would be to continue to accept the loss of life and goods (...), it is hereby recommended that the lack of responsibility should no longer be justified, whichever sector it may come from, and compliance with due obligations should hereby be demanded without exception to contribute towards the preservation of health and the life of men, eschewing procrastination or faint-heartedness of any type that might stand in the way of each individual taking on his or her own, unshirkable responsibility²⁰».

THE ENVIRONMENT. INTERPRETATION THEREOF

a)The definition and its conceptions

We understand the environment as the «set of circumstances surrounding living beings... the set of physical, cultural, economic, social circumstances... surrounding persons».

Cano considers the environment to be made up by three elements:

the physical assets of nature or natural resources;
the things created or induced by man, manufactured products and products of the farming culture if they are physical, or institutions if they are intangible;
the rest of mankind. Ecology is bound up with the first of these categories²¹.

In the interests of appreciating them in a conceptual and dynamic way we break down their study into eight paradigms, called conceptions, namely:

a) lexicological; b) scientific; c) philosophical; d) cultural, sociological and social psychology; e) ethical, deontological, pedagogical and propedeutic; f) city, town planning and the municipality; g) economics, insurance and risk management; and h) juridical²².

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR In the interests of environmental interpretation, preservation and appreciation,we have said elsewhere, from the sociological and social psychology viewpoint, that «human society is unique because it depends on culture. Culture involves tradition and as such it may vary from one group of society to another (...), the high value assigned by each group to its own modus operandi and its ignorance of and scorn for other manners (...). We take refuge in the cosy illusion that our way of doing things is the only sensible way if not the only possible way... one reason is the state of the organism in which corporal energy is mobilised and directed selectively towards parts of the environment» (e.g. the tendency towards the preservation, improvement and remediation of the environment and the goal of sustainable development).

From the juridical point of view we define the environment in terms of the harmonisation of man and his life setting, this criteria including the techniques of working forward from past experience and working backwards from future forecasts, the biosphere, quality of life, legal, ethical, spiritual, socio-cultural, psychological, pedagogic, economic, town-planning and riskmanagement aspects²³.

In a very interesting colloquium of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales: FARN) on «public-policy proposals for sustainable development», the following recommendations were made to the authorities:

a) access to public information: to sanction a framework law of free access to public information; promote the creation of regional, inter-sectoral and honorific councils and fortify existing ones;
b) education for a sustainable world: creation of multi-sectoral forums; promoting obligatory community work integrated with the training of future professionals;
c) overseas trade, environment and sustainable development: promoting sustainable development by encouraging technological reconversion policies through tax incentives and/or credits allowing firms to produce the technological change²⁴.

b) Economy and the environment

In relation to the state and evolution of environmental accounts, following Marcel Claude,we can make the following considerations ²⁵.

As regards the problem of the valuation of resources and the environment,we would suggest that the National Accounts System of Argentina (SCN in Spanish initials) is not the best way of making conventional evaluation methods easily graspable, in relation to natural resources and the environment, since it strays into the field of macro-economic accounting.To this must be added the intrinsic difficulties of the market mechanisms for establishing this valuation.

For this reason, among others, the concept of Total Economic Value (Valor Económico Total:VET) has been put forward, integrating into the valuation elements the services and functions of the environment and the values associated with the use of the resource, including the VET:

the value of present use: as part of the benefits implied in the use of a resource, valued at market prices;
value of direct use: use of a resource in a specific place (consumptive or non-consumptive use);
value of direct consumptive use: e.g., hunting, fishing, etc;
value of direct non-consumptive use: this refers to the contemplative use (scenic beauty, recreational);
value of indirect use: e.g. finding out about a resource by audiovisual material, conferences, others;
option value: this is the value of the environment as a potential benefit without establishing present consumption. It helps to reflect the irreversibility and uncertainty of the rational use of long-term resources;
value as intrinsic benefit: this is the intrinsic ecosystem value or ecological value;
existence value: altruistic value, concern about and responsibility for the environment;
ecological value: the laws of nature itself and conservation of natural capital; and
symbolic-historical cultural value: the cultural value refers to ideas, beliefs or preferences.

The SCN has the following drawbacks from the viewpoint of sustainable development:

a) exhaustion of natural resources is not considered as depreciation: unforeseeable obsolescence and exhaustion are not considered (...) consideration should be given to the net domestic product (NDP) –depreciation of natural capital– and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) –reduction of final services and goods obtained from the environment;
b) the costs of protecting and repairing the environment are not satisfactorily dealt with in the SCN: the SCN considers that only the general government and households carry out final consumption environment-related expenditure; it should be considered as fixed capital or stock, offsetting protection costs with the exhaustion or degradation of the environment; and
c) the degradation of the environment is not considered by the SCN: e.g., the intensive use of fertilisers, degrading the soil with associated GDP losses.

A suitable alternative is implementation of the Satellite Account System (Sistema de Cuentas Satélites: SCS) of the environment (approach adapted and recommended by the United Nations Statistics Office) whose aim is to offer detailed knowledge not only of the costs of «protection» or «repair» but also the costs of the damage caused to the environment, plus the macroeconomic impacts; this gives a new indicator on the basis of the existing GDP: Environmentally Adjusted Net Domestic Product or Eco-Domestic Product (EDP).

We should point out that the complete integration of environmental accounts with economic accounts is the Integrated Economic and Environmental Accounts System (Sistema de Contabilidad Económica y Ambiental Integrada: SEEA-CEAI), whose main objectives are:

separate, identify and draw up in traditional accounts the total environment-related flows and stocks;
establish links between the physical resource accounts, the monetary accounts of the environmental aspects and the balance sheets;
facilitate evaluation of the environment costbenefit ratio.

The exhaustion and degradation of environmental assets can be evaluated by means of the «net income» method (value of the natural resource corresponding to the difference between its use and exploitation costs); «user cost or the El Serafy Method» (resource exhaustion cost); and «maintenance costs and costs to ward off environmental deterioration» (desire to avoid or mitigate deterioration of resource quality, in accordance with standards deemed to be acceptable).

We should remember here what was said several decades ago by Malmgren on the control of the environment and international economy as «the possibility of choosing national policies and variations in the policies of diverse countries will lead to significant deviations in the production, investment and incentives and commercial opportunities. In general, the relative competitive position of industries and countries might be considerably altered by the existing differences in the requisites of each country, given that the efforts to clean up the environment involve heavy investments or different operating costs.The regions or countries applying less strict or cheaper control methods might become centres of pollution for the subsequent growth of certain industries at world level²⁶».

c) Law and the Environm

A brief foray should be made here into the sphere of Environmental Law as «the sector of the legal system that regulates human conduct that might impinge on processes underway between the human system and the environment, with effects on mankind’s quality of life²⁷».

We share the views of Goldenberg when he says: «it is essential to gear scientific work towards improvement of the human condition. Indeed, technical progress offers man the lure of comfort to subjugate him thereafter; in material terms it gives him no real well-being and it also sharpens his sense of uncertainty and disorientation about the sense of his existence²⁸».

Ghersi quite rightly defines damage, viewed as a scientific-ideological concept, as «the loss of governance of the prevention system, manifesting itself in its most diverse individual and social formulations. Each damaging event is a situation of crisis in the system, different and particular for each agent and the solution of the crisis has not only an individual aspect but also a transcendent social consequence²⁹».

We could say that «risky activities in terms of the circumstances in which they are carried out may not involve any regular or constant peril but can indeed be hazardous when funnelled through particular modalities, calling for special control and supervision and intrinsically risky activities by their very nature are those that are always hazardous in genere in any circumstance (i.e., that due to their own, ordinary and normal characteristics, generate hazards for third parties³⁰».

We believe that damage might be analysed on a multifaceted basis, with the following cases:

a) damage to the environment in its broadest sense (e.g. environmental impact);
b)damage to the human being in general;
c)damage affecting occupational health (the field of health and safety at work and risk management, as the major preventive science par excellence); and
d) community damage (e.g. collective business liability).

LA DOCTRINA NUPAR-TAR We need to give at least a brief mention here of the importance of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as «the environmental protection procedure», conceived by Martín Mateo as a «participative procedure for a previous weighing up of the environmental consequences of a planned public law decision³¹».

According to Jorissen, «in general the study of the environmental impact can be considered above all as a prior procedure to pave the way for decision taking. It serves to give a systematic overview of all the potential effects of a project with the aim of heading off any adverse effects on the environmen³²».

According to Lee, «it can be defined in its modern formulation as a process whereby an action that might have significant collateral effects on the environment is subjected to a systematic evaluation whose results are taken into account by the competent authority in deciding whether or not to approve the project³³».

In our opinion it is a procedure that takes into account the Man-Nature-Technology harmonisation procedure, evaluating in a preventive, systematic and integral way the possible impacts of projects and activities, as an ideal evaluative document in the field of risk management (TAR) for all environmental decisiontaking in the public order.

In sum, in the words of Munford, our civilisation might escape this fate if it drops its cult of mechanisation and gears technology towards higher human values.This process needs to be guided by other ideas to build up a spiritual heritage to underpin in the future a city for mankind completely different in essence from the soulless metropolis³⁴.

CONCLUSIONS

THE DEFINITIONS. THE NEW PARADIGMS

We consider human work to be: the new realisation of the being, whose result is social well-being and a balanced quality of life in the community, where the sense of belonging, respect and fellow feeling are a mark of recognition.

Following the tenets of post industrialism,we define Risk Management (TAR) –quite apart from the possible structured benefits on the analysis of risks, their insurance and accidental losses – through philosophy, science and ethics in the harmonisation of the human being and his environment, comprising all diagnosis, preventive action, treatment, management systems and risk-benefit analysis (in the work, industry,municipal, state, federal and Community-international level) through the integrating and doctrinaire vision of the «base factors» (human, legal, technical and interrelation) and the «nexus elements» – coadjuvant – (semiology, organisation-communication interface and labour relations) of the Risk Management Tetrahedron (TAR).

In this conceptual account we define the New Risk Management Paradigm (NUPAR-TAR) as the philosophy, science and doctrine in the integration of scientific models and their constellation of disciplines, including:TAR, NED, CIDINOP, HSO and CyMAT.

Defining the quality of working life in the conceptual system of the set of systemic conditions emerging from a social group and its organisational climate, with suitable ethical, spiritual, psychological, cultural and material characteristics, with professional suitability of its members in the sphere of the working conditions and environment (CyMAT) and the labour relations.These conditions should ensure respect, dignity, happiness, satisfaction of their human needs, without implied risk and recognised and valued by the community.

Health and safety at work is defined as an imperative of hypermodernity in terms of the philosophy, science and management of risks in the preservation of life and goods, quality of life, environment, integrated management systems (quality, occupational health and safety, environmental management, applicable standards, codes and regulations) and the related environment.

Understanding the environment under a general and legal criterion as the harmonisation of man and his life setting, this criteria including the techniques of working forward from past experience and working backwards from future forecasts, biosphere, quality of life, legal, ethical, spiritual, socio-cultural, psychological, pedagogic, economic, town-planning and risk-management aspects.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Human work since the dawn of mankind has conferred dignity and personal growth on the person performing it. In these recent decades this possibility has been cramped by the scourge of unemployment.

In this sense we concur with Keynes, «saving is a drag on the development of collective wealth and capital formation. It is the insufficiency of collective demand that fuels unemployment.And this insufficiency is due to saving».

In this context a stimulus should be given to economic policy, understood by Guasp, for instance, «as the set of measures used by the state to foment national wealth»; while Borght sees it as «the set of measures by means of which the state proposes to impinge directly on the economic life of its people to safeguard collective welfare3³⁵».

This situation structurally affects the trilogy of risk management-occupational health and hygieneenvironment. We need to bring its conceptual framework into line with a new vision of the new paradigms, where priority is given to the human being and his life setting by means of useful and efficient models, where man’s actions (technology) are subordinated to their possibilities, well-being and happiness in a path leading to the common good and social prosperity.

As regards the considerations on the Working Conditions and Environment (CyMAT) in the ILO guidelines and our own thought thereon (multidisciplinary test),we have established the following levels of conceptualisation:

a)communication-organisational level
b) participation models level
c) policy, budget and control level
d) work organisation, social services and well-being level
e) ethical-deontological level
f) juridical level and
g) core level: occupational hygiene and safety³⁶.

We believe that, within the materialisation of work, the personnel evaluation criterion needs to be rethought «consisting in predicting, for each professional category defined according to its function, coefficient increases for professional qualities. Said qualities have to be appreciated in the most objective way possible. Once a list of the important qualities has been drawn up, therefore (e.g., practical professional experience, understanding of the work, spirit of initiative, quality of work...), each quality is then measured according to a table with various degrees designed to gauge how far the worker possesses it³⁷».

To wind up, the master guide on «Work in the Subjective Sense: the Man, Subject of Work» laid it down that: «indeed there is no doubt that human work has an ethical value, completely and directly bound up with the fact that the performer thereof is a person, a sentient and free being, i.e., a subject who decides for him/herself.This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent gospel of work, which holds that the basis for determining the value of human work is not first and foremost the type of work carried out but the fact that the performer is a person.The sources of the dignity of work have to be sought above all in its subjective rather than objective dimension.True it is that man is destined and summoned to work; but, above all, work should be defined in terms of man rather than man in terms of work³⁸.

REFERENCIAS

⁽¹ALEXY, R., Teoría de la argumentación jurídica, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1989.

⁽²⁾ FERNÁNDEZ, HÉCTOR, El Tetraedro de la administración de riesgos (TAR). Su doctrina y sistema conceptual científico, R. de Janeiro, Ministerio de Trabajo del Brasil (FUNDACENTRO), Revista Brasileira de Saude Ocupacional, nº 77, 1993, vol. 21, págs. 32 a la 80.

⁽³⁾ SERRANO, MARISA, Relaciones humanas y educación, Estrada, 1969, págs. 171 y 172.

⁽⁴⁾EDEL, ABRAHAM, El método en la teoría ética, Madrid, Tecnos, 1968, pág. 16.

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⁽¹⁰⁾ Carta de la Organización de los Estados Americanos. «protocolo de Buenos Aires», 1967 y «protocolo de Cartagena de Indias», 1985. Serie sobre tratados 1. Secretaría General (OEA), W.D.C., 1992, art. 44-b), pág. 11.

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⁽³⁸⁾ JUAN PABLO II, Laborem Exercens, cit., El Trabajo y el Hombre, II. 6.

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