New Law on Occupational Health and Safety Introducing Additional Obligations for Employers and Increased Jurisdiction of Inspectors

The new Draft Law on Occupational Health and Safety, which introduces a range of new solutions, and which has been adopted by the Government of the Republic of Serbia, is currently undergoing the parliamentary procedure, announced the Ministry of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Policy.

According to the ministry, the new features compared to the current law are: proscribing the obligation of the employer to send the employee, at their request, to a medical exam that matches the workplace risks in regular intervals, and no later than five years from the previous exam; the obligation of the employer to issue the labor permit in order to increase the protection of employees in doing certain high-risk jobs (working at great heights or depths, in small spaces, in spaces with potentially explosive atmospheres).

Also, increased jurisdiction of labor inspectors to ban the operations on temporary or mobile construction sites for three, or 15 to 30 days, depending on the number of times that the circumstances which lead to the jeopardization of health and safety at the construction site have been determined, when it is determined that the health and safety of the employee are directly jeopardized, is proscribed.

The labor inspector is obliged to publicly display the ban on works at the construction site and to visibly mark the construction site.

The maximum penalties have been increased from RSD 1,000,000 to 2,000,000.

– In order to improve the reporting of workplace injuries, the new occupational health and safety law introduces a unified register workplace injury, which will secure numerous positive effects: the electronic reporting of workplace injuries, reduction of costs, time saving for the employers, acceleration of the process of the realization of rights, availability of the data on the source and the cause of workplace injuries and systematic data processing and analysis – the press release says.

Ministarstvo za rad, zapošljavanje, boračka i socijalna pitanja Republike Srbije

Draft Law on Occupational Health and Safety

unified register of workplace injuries