Cantuarias provides an overall view on safety and risk prevention in Chile.
When did this area become more important for Chilean companies? Has any event triggered it?
If we look back to the history of our country, it gained relevancy in 1968 when the law on occupational accidents and diseases insurance was enacted; one of its paragraphs pointed the need of having a risk prevention area according to the size of the company. Since then, it has been a slow and long road, but always, in my opinion, going upwards. There have been important impulses with the integration of other laws such as the labor code and mine safety. Several events have contributed to what we are today in this topic.
What are you based in, in order to achieve your prevention plan, in the case of Colbún?
We have a mixture of two fields. One is risk management based on the identification of hazards, and risk quantification that may affect our workers. The other, to what we are giving a strong boost, is process management. The difference among them is that the latter seeks that the worker, among others, develops work competencies to perform any task or activity assigned. The strongest scenario is that as long as there is better capacity to perform duties, with a good environment, good tools, instruction sheets and clear procedures, good training, the risks fall out on their own.
What are the main challenges on safety concerns?
At a national level, the main challenge is to modernize all the normative systems related to the protection of people, and the role of the safety cooperatives in this topic. We are discussing a law with few changes, but nowadays -with the inclusion of technologies, new processes, and industrial development of the country- it merits a quick and urgent revision.
At a particular level, companies should seek to increase worker participation. There is something key here: there are rights acquired as a worker, but also there are duties, and that sphere has been slowly claimed and not developed in a working environment.
