Protection of Health and Safety at Workplace: A comparative legal study of the European Union and China

Abstract

The objective of this research is to obtain a better view of and insight into the approaches adopted by the jurisdictions being researched by means of a comparative and critical analysis of the similarities and differences of the approaches concerned aiming at the protection of health and safety of the workers at the workplace. The main research question is: what are the differences and similarities in the main principles, the nature of the legislation, the role of the different actors and the enforcement of EU and Chinese occupational health and safety law? In order to answer this question, this research has presented four academic hypotheses regarding the core characteristics of the occupational health and safety legal systems under research. The first hypothesis is: China has a prescriptive and the EU has a goal oriented approach in occupational health and safety law. The second hypothesis is: although prevention is recognized in China as well in the EU/MS as a major principle, it has been historically developed in China differently from EU/MS, since the approach of prevention in China is rather recent and elaborated to a lower extent. The third hypothesis: the EU and EU Member States have a system in which the responsibilities for and the power of making legislation are distributed over various actors, whereas the Chinese system has a much stronger central role for the government even though it has many of the same actors as the EU system. The fourth hypothesis: Enforcement in China is directed on a central level: by the state and/or state authorities, while the EU and the Member States have a mixed system of enforcement - decentralizing it to lower levels and to the private actors, claiming that this approach is more effective. In order to deal with these hypotheses, Chapter 1 gives, among other things, some background information, including the objective of the study, the research question, and the methodologies (inter alia, the hypotheses, and the comparative law approaches). In addition to the introduction (Chapter 1) and conclusion (Chapter 9), this research is structured in three parts, which are further broken down into 7chapters. Part I (Chapter 2-3) provides the description of the Chinese occupational health and safety system. Part II (Chapter 4-7) presents the EU occupational health and safety system. After the analyses in these chapters, Part III (Chapter 8) explores how and to what extent the Chinese system is similar to and different from the EU system (and that of the three Member States). Based on the comparative law model, the similarities and differences between China and the EU are examined to show the essences of the systems’ approaches to regulate health and safety.