OSH and Childrens’ Safety and Health Rights

by: Rosanna M. Tubelonia

OSH Trainer and Accredited Safety Practitioner

I know I am supposed to write about occupational safety and health. But OSH is not a stand-alone topic- it must sometimes be inter-related with a few major concerns also in our society. Children’s safety and health issues, for one.

The urge was triggered off with a news clip of a pro-life group picketing a Reproductive Health Convention.

It made me go back to a scene I have witnessed way back in December of 2010. Back then, I was still employed with the DOLE’ s Occupational Safety and Health Center. My then-boss ( Executive Director Teresita S. Cucueco) and I had just come off a meeting at noon from the Main DOLE Building in Intramuros . We had to rush back to the OSHC office in Quezon City for another important meeting (a group of researchers from the academe) at 4pm of that day.

But the “trisikad” drivers of Intramuros declared a strike thereby blocking vehicles from going out of the area to take the usual Quiapo-Espana-Quezon Avenue route. We saw the traffic start to build up just as our service vehicle emerged from the DOLE Building. Quick-thinking Doc Tes instructed our driver to take the long route going to Quezon City – which means taking the South Pier road passing through the former ( and still ?) Smokey Mountain area.

It was in one of the intersections where we had to stop that I saw this image, now so deeply-embedded in my mind. The sight? A boy, about seven or older, throwing a pail of water over the feces of a much younger boy, most probably his brother, who was still then defecating. They were both small-framed probably from malnutrition. The older boy’s t-shirt was dirty and hang loosely over his frame. The younger boy was bald, bare-footed, naked, snot-nosed and with a bloated stomach. Probably and most surely to worms due to the very unsanitary conditions they were living in. I was not shocked at the crudity of it all. What I felt was anger. At the absence of parents or any adults supposedly to nurture, to guide them and give them the love and protection they need. We Filipinos pride ourselves on being family-oriented. But where are the parents of those two children? As it is, they will probably not reach adulthood in a healthy state. They are but few of the millions of children born to us whose chances of a quality life in their adulthood are already compromised given the conditions they were already born in.

At the beginning, I was angry with the parents. But then again, did they know that they will be subjecting their children to such miserable lives when they did the “act”? How old were they when they have borne these children? But wait a minute, did the parents knew they had a choice or even options? What have we done as a society to make sure that they have options? And ultimately and collectively, did we do something to make sure that the information reached them in time? Did we empower them to exercise their options? These were the thoughts that occupied my mind which made me dizzy for a time. After a while, I prayed for the safety and health of those two children and others like them. And if they ever come to adulthood and become workers themselves, will work safety and health be ever in their consciousness given the kind of childhood they have?

For those of us in the OSH community, this is just one of the challenges we face…….