Central American labour ministers meet in Belize
According to the latest figures, the most dangerous job in Belize is to work on a construction site, with employment in the sugar industry a close second. Occupational hazards are not unique to Belize and in an initiative spearheaded by the United States Department of Labour, this week, labour ministers from Central America, the Dominican Republic and Panama are meeting in Belize to discuss how workplace accidents can be prevented. The labour seminar is organised by the Regional Centre for Occupational Safety and Health and according to Belize’s Labour Minister Valdemar Castillo, it’s a situation that deserves the country’s attention.
Valdemar Castillo, Minister of Labour, Belize
“Last year, according to the Social Security people, they reported over two thousand and odd injuries. And this costs a lot of money because you would have to recompense, to the tune of about three million dollars or something like that. So there are reports on incidents, and I believe that once we get the mechanism in place we should have less injuries. And this is the whole idea, we need to protect our workers because when workers are injured it is not only the workers and their families that suffer, but also the employers, because they lose that productive sector.”
Paula Church, Department of Labour, United States
“We’ve seen a lot of interchange among the region. Today they’ll be presenting best practices. Each country will have something that has worked well in its country and share it with the others. So there’s a lot of interchange of really good ideas and people are learning from those. As well as I think that it helps to raise the profile of the issue in the region so that the people who are working on the issues feel a little more, this is something we’re doing and people are taking notice. And for us it also helps here how the project is going, get input from the people that are working on it, hear what’s working and what isn’t working and try to make it better.”
The three year project ends in 2003 and is financially supported by the United States Department of Labour at the cost of three point six million U.S. dollars.
