We happen to live in an era of change that affects each of us. Long-term experience in conducting workplace certification (hereinafter referred to as ARM) and special assessment of working conditions (hereinafter referred to as SOUT) has revealed many problems and issues that cannot be resolved through established assessment mechanisms but require immediate answers. Office work, open-space layouts, remote work, the use of LED lighting, digital data transmission via radio channels, errors caused by stress at work and home, joint and musculoskeletal disorders — these are just a few examples that lead to numerous disputes among occupational health professionals, for which ARM and SOUT, due to their narrow focus, have failed to provide clear answers.
The system for assessing working conditions is constantly evolving during different periods of social development, as we set specific goals and objectives for our system at certain points in time. While at the beginning of the 20th century, we could only talk about measures to prevent worker fatalities resulting from violations of obvious production environment and labor process factors, at the current stage of social development, we aim to preserve more than just the worker's life. Now, we can talk about implementing measures aimed at creating a production environment that maximizes the preservation of the life and health of all employees.
Scientific and technological progress offers new solutions for both various types of work and the people themselves who adopt all innovative developments and modern realities of life. New jobs are being created, professions are being modernized and automated, and human influence in some areas is becoming minimal. Yet, we continue to assess working conditions using tools developed during the Soviet era (the foundation of ARM and SOUT is still based on the Decree of the USSR Council of Ministers No. 783 "On the widespread certification of workplaces and their rationalization in industry and other sectors of the national economy" dated August 15, 1985!) and only slightly modernized in modern Russia.
In my opinion, modern SOUT is not only incapable of solving general workplace problems from a legal and practical standpoint but also prevents specialists from moving forward and identifying the real problems workers face in modern workplaces. Now is truly the time for people to turn their attention to new issues that are detrimental to the health of modern workers. To develop occupational health and move forward, we must first mentally distance ourselves from the regulatory documents and other documentation governing workplace requirements and try to understand why we so desperately need a new comprehensive approach to solving modern occupational health problems.
The primary task of ARM and SOUT was linked to the correct processing of early retirement and confirming potential compensation for work in harmful and (or) hazardous conditions. The situation began to spiral out of control when employers, seeking ways to reduce tax payments, realized that by using workplaces with harmful conditions, they could avoid paying the state in full and instead pay only the so-called "social" tax. Consequently, employers were in no hurry to rectify the situation at workplaces because they had no interest in doing so. Based on this example, it can be argued that the state has effectively stopped managing risks; risks have begun to manage us, dictating a policy that in no way concerned the protection of workers. The ideological foundation for protecting the working person was quickly destroyed and did not aim to preserve human life and health throughout their entire lifespan.
Returning to the creation stage of SOUT, the main goal of forming this law was to create a mechanism that would allow for the assessment of the "real" contribution of each employer to the deterioration of every worker's health, as occupational diseases and early pensions significantly reduced the labor potential of the Russian Federation, affected labor productivity, created additional budget expenditures for medical care, reduced the income of people who were frequently ill, and led to a decline in the income of families where a person became disabled due to hazardous conditions. Can SOUT really solve these issues?
Studies by major economists convincingly prove that the key factor in solving problems related to demographic changes is precisely the growth of production. Demographic changes bring about a reduction in production, which negatively impacts the pension system by narrowing the base for insurance contributions and through a corresponding reduction in pension payments. In this regard, we can speak of the obvious need to create a global assessment system capable of timely identifying initial pathological changes in a worker's body and preventing their development.
During the Soviet period, the state monitored the quality of ARM, which resulted in the objective identification of harmful and (or) hazardous production factors, even if there wasn't always a reaction to eliminate or minimize all health risks. Now, in a market economy, the state has practically withdrawn from monitoring working conditions, outsourcing this procedure to private laboratories, which has led to a decline in the quality and objectivity of identifying workplace non-conformities. Widespread price dumping by certifying organizations during procurement on open platforms allows us to conclude that the value of the existing assessment system is not tied to the cost of performing any work and is purely commercial. A so-called "conflict of interest" has emerged, where employers have the opportunity to document the correctness of diverting wages from taxation, as I described above, or to confirm the legality of reducing benefits they are legally required to provide to employees. These facts also suggest the need for recommended measures to transition to more transparent methods of assessing working conditions.
All the scientific and practical work on amending working condition assessment procedures, carried out by competent specialists and HSE experts for many years, unfortunately, did not withstand the onslaught from employers. In the early stages of discussing and preparing documents for SOUT back in 2012, a comprehensive nature of monitoring the production environment and labor process at all workplaces, regardless of economic activity and forms of ownership, was supported. As a result, we saw a document that introduced a certain presumption regarding some employers, allowing them to be exempt from labor duties and violating the rights of ordinary employees. Due to the approved innovations, even compared to the ambiguity of the ARM procedure, the system has deteriorated, so we are now completely unable to appreciate any positive outcomes we might have gained from the described procedure.
SOUT, if correct changes and clarifications are introduced into its procedure, will continue to be considered an important socio-economic measure for enterprises, but at the same time, it will only allow for the resolution of labor relations issues without going beyond legal norms and orders. At the same time, there are enough objective problems that are completely ignored within the current legal framework. By merging existing and established procedures with a progressive approach and research by occupational health specialists, we must form a new approach to assessing working conditions that meets modern realities.