Building workers, some without safety helmets, work at a Yangon construction site.

CONSTRUCTION workers in Myanmar are not being effectively protected from accidents, claim workers surveyed by the Myanmar Times.

The government has laws in place that provide for the safety of workers, but they are not being effectively followed due to a lack of knowledge about the rules, they said.

Many of those who do know about safety regulations pay no attention to them, they said.

U Win Htay, the chief executive officer of Myanmar Construction Entrepreneurs Association, said the law was important, but felt more could be done to protect workers.

“I think there should be a safety officer (who has been specially trained for the safety of the workers) at each project,” he said.

The Basic Rights and Duties of the Peoples’ Workers Act, which includes the Social Security Act and Compensation Act, was passed in 1964 to safeguard the rights of workers and to pay compensation for workers injured or killed at work.

An amendment to the law passed in 1975 says workers must be paid 100 per cent compensation while recovering from injury at the discretion of a qualified doctor.

“The purpose of the Compensation Act is to provide workers’ dependants with social welfare when injuries or deaths occur at work,” said an official from the Ministry of Labour.

U Min Sein, a lawyer of the Supreme Court, said that workers have the right to complain and claim for loss by addressing the employer, according to the Basic Rights and Duties of the Peoples’ Workers Law when accidents occur in the workplace.

As the building industry has boomed in the past 10 years, the number of construction workers has greatly increased. Most workers are contractors hired to work on construction sites for the duration of a project.

Ko Kyaw San is a painting contractor at the Pearl Condominium project site on Kaba Aye Pagoda Road in Yangon.

He said that when he works on the outside of a building, there is a high risk of accidents, and that he always maintains safe practices.

U Aung Soe Myint, a site manager at a construction project in downtown Yangon, said, “If workers have an accident at my site, it is the foreman who takes the responsibility for the injury.”

The project official at Pyay Garden construction site said his workers are required to wear helmets and safety boots.

U Ko Aung, who leads the labourers at the site, said that when there is an accident, he sends the workers to a clinic and then gives them money as compensation. But he feels this is not enough.

“We think that the problem is solved (by sending workers to the clinic and giving them financial compensation). I myself think there should be a law to protect them,” he said.

“Every group of workers has its own leader who takes that sort of responsibility. If the injury is serious we give them some money as compensation out of kindness, though we do not need to do it,” said U Ko Aung.

An engineer from a downtown construction said, “Last year, a worker at my site had an accident, hurt himself seriously and lost his hand but he only got K100,000 for it. I feel sorry for him but I cannot do anything about it. Workers here do not know that they can ask for money for their loss.”

He said that another accident at a friend’s site involved a worker who was killed by an electric shock.

As a result, an engineer was sentenced to five years in prison. He asked for people, including the authorities, to pay attention to the safety of the workers before another tragic accident happens.

An official from Department of Factory and General Labour Laws Inspection acknowledged there are laws to protect construction workers.

“But we have yet to enforce the laws for construction workers, though we inspect worker safety rules in the manufacturing sector,” he said.