Which countries do the best job of protecting their workers? In general, developing countries like China have cruder workplace safety laws and enforcement regimes than industrialized states like the U.S. and Canada. But there must be a more scientific way to compare national occupational health and safety systems.

The ILO Approach of Comparing National Safety Systems

The closest thing I’ve seen to a benchmark comes from a 2006 International Labor Organization report outlining a method for evaluating national safety performance on the basis of the country’s labor inspection standards and systems.

The ILO found that lack of resources is a problem in just about all countries. Labor inspection agencies “are often understaffed, under-equipped, under-trained and underpaid,” according to the report. The ILO’s recommendation (contained in a document called Convention No. 81) is that each country provide for a “sufficient number” of inspectors.

The ILO doesn’t specify a “sufficient number.” The number of inspectors needed, it says, should be based on how many work establishments there are in the country, how big those establishments are and the size of the workforce.

But the ILO does suggest some general benchmarks. In industrialized states, there should be no fewer than 1 inspector per 10,000 workers; in industrializing states like Brazil and China, the ratio should be at least 1 per 15,000; and in less developed countries, the minimum should be 1 per 40,000.

The Global Inspector Ratio Scorecard

The ILO report includes actual ratios of about 50 member states from five continents (all except Australia and Antarctica.) The ILO found that, with a handful of exceptions, nations in every continent are running way behind their benchmarks. That includes the U.S. with a ratio of roughly 1 inspector per 45,000 workers. Most of the nations with the best ratios were in central and eastern Europe, including:

• Latvia: (roughly 1 to 5,000);
• Romania (1 to 7,500);
• Slovenia (1 to 9,000); and
• Germany (1 to 10,000).

(The nation with the lowest ratio was tiny Suriname at roughly 1 to 1,000.) Not surprisingly, Asian and African countries had the worst ratios, including:

• Bangladesh (roughly 1 per 3 million);
• Tanzania (1 per 750,000);
• Cambodia (1 per 390,000); and
• Uganda (1 per 185,000).

Conclusion

The ILO report isn’t scientifically proven truth. Disappointingly absent from the study are industrial powerhouses like Canada, Japan and the U.K. In addition, since the report came out in 2006, several nations including Brazil, China, France, Greece, Turkey and the U.S. have or are planning to add significant numbers of new inspectors.

Even so, if you accept the premise that effectiveness of a nation’s labor inspection system is a measure of how safe its workers are, the lesson of the ILO report is inescapable: The world is doing a lousy job of protecting its workers.

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