Abstract
On a daily basis, there are 7,700 fatalities globally in the workplace. In order to protect the health and safety of workers in South Africa, the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHS Act) was passed into law in 1993. Under this Act, health and safety responsibilities for employers are outlined in section 8 and all workers too must be aware of five employee health and safety responsibilities outlined in section 14.
For many organisations, employees can broadly be categorised as skilled or unskilled workers. According to Investopedia (2017), unskilled workers have limited education and perform work without the need for specialised skills or experience. The aim of this study was to evaluate awareness levels amongst unskilled employees about their health and safety responsibilities which are outlined in section 14 of the OHS Act.
The research was a cross-sectional study. Cleaners employed by outsourced contract cleaning companies were selected as the study sample. Data was collected through a questionnaire that was distributed to 118 cleaners employed by five contract cleaning companies operating in Johannesburg.
The study established that cleaners were unskilled workers with high literacy but low skill levels and work experience. Cleaners were predominantly women and young workers aged between 20-30 years. Although cleaners had access, read and knew about the OHS Act, their level of awareness on health and safety responsibilities was low with cleaners largely aware of only one of the five responsibilities. Over 60% of cleaners received in-house training but 85% of them still wanted more training. Chemicals were the most common hazard but 67% of cleaners had never been injured. Common injuries that were encountered among cleaners were cuts, lacerations, sprains or strains and the frequency of injuries among them was almost equal among all age groups. The study also found no statistical association between awareness of the responsibilities to training, sex or level of education.
It was recommended that employers make use of interactive training methodologies to improve skill levels and awareness of the five health and safety responsibilities. Employers must monitor and measure the impact of the training, identify and control occupational hazards and look after the safety of all workers (young and elderly).
M.Tech. (Environmental Health)