The Swedish Work Environment and our EU work

Our advocacy work occurs mainly through participation in committees and groups that work with drafting or revising EU directives, the interpretation and application of directives and other overarching policy questions, standardisation and market surveillance among other things. Development work in its turn occurs, among other things, through participation in projects and other knowledge and experience exchange with staff from other countries.

Nordic Cooperation

Cooperation with our Nordic neighbours consists, among other things, of continuous cooperation about current EU questions and other matters of common interest. We carry out joint conferences, networks and other meetings. Some of the participation also takes place within the framework for the Nordic Council of Ministers.

Network on work environment questions within the EU

The European Union’s Occupational Safety and Health Agency (EU-OSHA) is an EU body that disseminates information about work environment questions, mainly within the EU countries. The Work Environment Authority is the EU-OSHA contact point in Sweden and coordinates representatives of the government, employers and employees in a network composed of the labour market partners. The EU’s Occupational Safety and Health Agency organises a supervision campaign annually with a certain theme.

Committees about Work Environment

We represent the Swedish government in the Advisory Committee on Safety and Health at Work, ACSH. The committee assists the European Commission by preparing, implementing and evaluating all work environment activities. The committee expresses opinions about, for example, proposals for new EU regulations and discusses and follows up how certain EU directives function in member states. We also participate in permanent and temporary working groups under the committee.

We participate in the Senior Labour Inspectors’ Committee, SLIC. This is an advisory committee under the European Commission and consists of high-level managers from the member states work environment authorities or the equivalent thereof. The committee handles questions dealing with European legislation in the work environment area and works for knowledge and experience exchange between work environment authorities, not just within the EU but also in the EU Candidate Countries.

ILO receives reports about how the regulations are observed

Sweden is one of the 178 countries that are members of the UN body ILO (International Labour Organization, headquarters in Genève). One of ILO’s tasks is to issue conventions and recommendations (regulations) and several of these deal with the Work Environment Authority’s competence area. At regular intervals reports are submitted to ILO about how the regulations are observed. An official channel for Sweden’s contacts with ILO is the Swedish ILO Committee, which has its secretariat at the Ministry of Employment. The Work Environment Authority has, at present, one of the three places as representatives for the government in the committee.