More than 40 universities have petitioned the Ombudsman urging a probe on the effects of a draft ministerial regulation which seeks to allow university graduates of any field to work as occupational health safety officers.
Saravudh Sutummasa, health science lecturer at the School of Health Science at Sukhothai Thammarathirat Open University (STOU), said 42 universities which teach health science and occupational health and safety jointly lodged the petition last Friday.
The petition opposes the draft amendment to the labour ministerial regulation which proposes to "liberalise" the qualifications of safety officers mandated by the law to supervise occupational health and safety at specific workplaces.
The current regulation stipulates that the officers must hold a university degree in occupational health and safety.
The amendment, however, proposes that the job can be offered to anyone with a university degree in any field, provided they have had at least five years of experience in overseeing workplace safety and gone through a short training course in relevant areas.
Mr Saravudh said the 42 universities want to know if the proposed amendment will have any repercussions on the standard of workplace safety and whether it threatens the employment prospects of occupational health and safety graduates.
The new, broader qualification is contained in Section 13 (4) of the draft regulation. Mr Saravudh said the 42 universities had also met the labour minister to voice their opposition to the draft.
The universities insisted the country was not facing a shortage of safety officers. In fact, there are currently 20,577 certified safety officers nationwide with about half of them needed by workplaces.
In the next three years, the 42 universities will produce a combined 2,000 safety officers annually, Mr Saravudh said.
He said Section 13 (4) compromises workplace safety standards and goes against the labour ministry's objective of promoting labour protection.
The STOU was ready to work with employers who will allow their staff to take up long-distance study for a degree in occupational health and safety at the university.
Sasivimol Bootsikeaw, head of the occupational health and safety department at Phayao University, said the government should launch a survey to find out why some companies in the provinces were unable to recruit the safety officers.
She was responding to claims by the companies that they received few applications on account of their remote location far from Bangkok. Many tertiary institutions, including Phayao University, run courses on occupational health and safety and are scattered throughout the country.
Ms Sasivimol said the safety officers are a necessary part of the government's industrial promotion policies, and the courses were developed to meet the demands of companies. At the university the subject is based on scientific methods and the students are expected to be able to analyse risk factors which undermine occupational safety and act professionally in their jobs, she added.
"One cannot arrange a short training session and expect the participants to go back to their workplaces and practice effective safety procedures," Ms Sasivimol said.
She added some employers were reluctant to employ safety offices or invest in safety equipment despite being required to do so by law. The employers believed the officers were not the "money-making" personnel who could boost profits for them.
