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PROGRAMME DIRECTOR AND PROTOCOL

Programme Director:

 Chief Executive Officer of the Federated Employers Mutual Assurance Company: Mr Nazeer Hoosen

Chief Inspector of the Department of Employment and Labour; Ms Milly Ruiters

Chief Medical Officer of FEM: Dr Lulama Magubane

 Chief Business Development Officer of FEM: Dr Sanjay Munnoo

Representatives of the National Institute for Occupational Health

Representatives of the International Labour Organisation;

Representatives of organised business and organised labour;

Leaders from the construction, mining and manufacturing sectors;

Occupational health and safety practitioners;

Ladies and gentlemen

Good morning and thank you for the warm welcome.

I am honoured to stand before you today. The Department of Labour is a proud participant in events of this nature.

I am honoured to address this Safetember Health and Safety Conference. Especially as the Federated Employers Mutual Assurance Company marks ninety remarkable years of service to South Africa's workers.

NINETY YEARS OF UBUNTU

In keeping with the theme, ninety years is not simply a milestone on a calendar. It is ninety years of standing behind employers and employees alike when the unthinkable happens, when a worker is injured on a construction site, when a family receives news no family wants to receive, when a claim must be honoured with dignity and without delay. The theme chosen for this conference, "90 Years of Ubuntu: Caring for Workers," could not be more fitting. Ubuntu teaches us that a person is a person through other persons, that my safety at work is bound up with your safety at work, and that an injury to one worker on a site diminishes the productivity, the morale and the humanity of the entire workforce.

On behalf of the Department of Employment and Labour, I extend our sincere congratulations to the Board, management and staff of FEM on reaching this milestone, and our appreciation for nine decades of partnership with government in giving practical effect to the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act. This has literally changed the lives of workers in the country for more than nine decades. Please join me as we salute FEM' efforts.

THE DEPARTMENT'S MANDATE AND THE STATE OF COMPLIANCE

The Department of Employment and Labour carries a constitutional and legislative responsibility to protect every worker's right to fair labour practices and to a safe working environment.

Through our Inspection and Enforcement Services Branch, our labour inspectors are mandated under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act, and related labour legislation to inspect workplaces, investigate incidents, and hold employers accountable where standards are not met.

I will not stand here and pretend that our work is done. Preventable injuries, occupational diseases and fatal incidents continue to occur across our economy, and the construction sector remains one of the highest-risk environments in the country. Every statistic represents a worker who left home in the morning and did not return the way they should have, if at all. That is the sobering reality that must anchor everything discussed at this conference.

Government's response has been to strengthen, not weaken, our regulatory footprint. We continue to expand the capacity and technical skill of our inspectorate, to modernise our compliance and enforcement systems, and to work more closely with Compensation Fund and the mutuals such as FEM, whose claims data gives us early warning of where the greatest risks lie. The Chief Inspector, Milly Ruiters, will take you deeper into the regulatory framework shortly, and I encourage you to engage her robustly.

THE NEW FRONTIER: PSYCHOSOCIAL RISK AT WORK

For much of our history, Occupational Health and Safety has been understood primarily in physical terms, guard rails, hard hats, harnesses, machine guarding etc. These remain non-negotiable. But this conference programme rightly places psychosocial risk at its centre, and I want to spend a few moments on why this matters as much as any physical hazard.

Work-related stress, harassment, bullying, excessive workload, job insecurity and poor organisational culture are now recognised internationally, including by the International Labour Organisation, as occupational hazards.

 They do not leave visible wounds, but their cost is measured in absenteeism, in impaired judgement that leads to physical incidents, in substance abuse, in broken families, and in South Africa's mental health burden. A worker who is psychologically unsafe is also more likely to be physically unsafe, fatigue and distress are precursors to the very accidents our inspectors are called to investigate.

The construction sector deserves particular attention. It combines physically hazardous work with job insecurity, migrant and transient labour arrangements, tight deadlines and, too often, workplace cultures where admitting psychological strain is seen as a weakness. The panel discussion later this morning on addressing psychosocial risk in construction is, in my view, one of the most important sessions on today's agenda, and I look forward to its recommendations.

The Department is alive to this shift. We are reviewing our regulatory and guidance framework to ensure that psychosocial hazards are assessed with the same rigour as physical hazards, and we welcome the technical partnership of the National Institute for Occupational Health, the ILO and industry bodies such as FEM in building the evidence base and the practical tools that employers need.

A CALL TO SHARED RESPONSIBILITY

Government cannot legislate a caring workplace culture into existence. Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. I therefore call on every employer in this room to move beyond the minimum standard of the law and to build workplaces where reporting a hazard, a physical or psychological one, is treated as an act of loyalty to the organisation, not an inconvenience to be managed.

I call on health and safety practitioners and professional bodies, including SACPCMP, to continue raising the bar on professional registration and competence, because the quality of a risk assessment is only as good as the professional who conducts it.

And I call on FEM, in this its ninetieth year, to continue using the depth of its claims experience not only to compensate workers after harm has occurred, but to feed that intelligence back into prevention agenda, and into the kind of medical surveillance and claims-experience insights you will hear about later this morning.

The Department, for its part, commits to continued and closer collaboration: sharper inspection targeting informed by claims and injury data, clearer guidance on psychosocial risk assessment, and an enforcement posture that is firm with those who cut corners and supportive of those who are genuinely striving to do better.

CLOSING REMARKS

Ninety years ago, FEM was established in the belief that workers who are injured in the course of duty deserve to be cared for with dignity. That founding belief remains as urgent today as it was then, perhaps more so, as we confront hazards our predecessors never had to name. Let this conference be remembered not merely as a commemoration of ninety years past, but as the moment our sector recommitted itself to the next ninety, to workplaces where every worker, whether on a scaffold or behind a desk, goes home whole in body and in mind.

I wish you a productive and thought-provoking conference. Let us continue to build, together, a country where Ubuntu is not only a conference theme, but the lived experience of every worker in South Africa.

I thank you.​