Vietnam Cooperative Alliance with Occupational Safety and Health

A Cooperative of Rattan, Bamboo

Currently, Vietnam has 17,049 cooperatives and unions of cooperatives, over 300,000 cooperative groups, 1,500 handicraft villages (in which 30% households are involved in handicraft work earning more than 50% of the total income of the handicraft villages), which operate in most sectors of the national economy. In the past years, along with the process of socio-economic development, cooperatives have been restored, developed and sustained in the market economy. Many models of newly established cooperatives, cooperative groups, handicraft villages are operating in diversified and flexible forms depending on characteristics of each handicraft village or locality. Some handicraft villages are organised under the form of households, cooperative groups or cooperatives with the objective of developing house-hold business supporting each other same sex persons, among the same social groups for hunger alleviation and poverty reduction, and improving community spirit.

Apart from active contributions to the socio­ economic development, coope­ ratives and handicraft villages are facing a number of diffi­culties: increasingly polluted working environment; rising occupational accidents during use of machines and electricity; unsafe making-up, use and storage of chemicals ... harming the health and life of workers, of the surrounding persons and reducing labour productivity.

Reasons for the above situation include:

- Poor knowledge of workers,; who are mostly limited in capability of acqui­ring efentific and technical advances .. Awareness of occupational safety and health by heads of' cooperatives and workers in cooperatives and handicraft villages is still poor. Workers and people are yet to know about the hazards from uncontrolled waste in produc­tion sites, leading to neglect of labour protection. A lot of workers in handicraft villages are not provided with basic labour protection equipment such as gloves, glasses and comforters for self-protection.

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