EU-OSHA's Healthy Workplace Campaign Grows to 17 Partners
Air Liquide, Baxter, CESI, EFNMS, Eli Lilly, EPSC, General Electric, and IMA-Europe are the latest organizations to sign up in support of the Healthy Workplaces campaign run by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, which is known as EU-OSHA. Their addition brings the number of official campaign partners to 17 for the campaign, which aims to reduce work-related injuries and illnesses by focusing on assessment of health and safety risks. EU-OSHA says this is vital because it estimates an EU worker dies from work-related causes every three and a half minutes.
Partners include European employers' and workers' federations, multinational companies, research groups, non-profit organizations, and NGOs. They commit to organizing events on risk assessment, disseminating campaign messages and material, producing workplace safety and health videos, and providing training sessions for clients, partners, and contractors.
"To have 17 official campaign partners on board even before we enter the second campaign year, this is well beyond our initial expectations," said Jukka Takala, director of EU-OSHA. "We are very proud that so many renowned organizations decided to help us raise awareness on risk assessment, and we are actually in touch with a number of other federations and multinationals, so this number will continue to grow in the future."
Representatives of the new partners included Frédéric Lamouroux, president of Air Liquide Welding; Art Gibson, vice president, Environment, Health & Safety for Baxter International; Helmut Müllers, general secretary of Confédération Européenne des Syndicats Indépendants (CESI); Christian Jochum, director of the European Process Safety Centre; John Lechleiter, president and CEO of Eli Lilly: and Ricardo Cordoba, president of General Electric Energy ofr West Europe and North Africa.
The campaign, taking place this year and in 2009, is supported by the EU Presidencies, the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European social partners. Visit the
EU-OSHA site for more information.