Iran Occupational Health

Background and aims: Planning to increase production and tends to increase the efficiency of human resources in productive organizations without estimating the economic costs imposed on the organization, cause the actual value of safety is ignored in workplaces. Among the financial cost of the productive organizations, the subject of safety promotion through decreasing the probable hazards will cause to impose the amount of extra costs to employers that are often faced them with the reluctance and therefore they will try to decrease these mentioned costs. The object of this study is to determine the numerical value of safety from the perspective of the refinery staff through computing the amount of money which the staff tend to receive to tolerate unsafe conditions in the workplace. This amount will be equivalent to the importance of preventing accidents and promoting the safety condition in the workplace from the perspective of the labor force.

 Methods: In this study, by applying Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) and determining the amount of willingness to accept (WTA) of employees in exchange for the waiver of improving safety in the workplace, the economic value of safety in Esfahan Oil Refining Company was estimated from the employee's perspective.

For this purpose, a questionnaire was provided and by creating a hypothetical market scenario for safety as a non-traded goods, data relating to the safety value were asked from the number of 140 operational employees and analyzed by applying 2-steps questionnaire including the pre-test and final test during 2014.

Results: Based on the results of this study, the mean of willingness to accept (WTA) a month for each employee at the refinery was estimated at 2 million and five hundred thousand rials. The total economic value estimated for the safety of the refinery personnel for 1,300 people employed in operational units, estimated 39 billion rails.

Considering the total annual cost of refinery safety that is 6,700,000,000 rials, it was clear from the employee's perspective, the economic value of safety is 5.8 times greater than the cost of refinery existing safety programs conditions in the workplace.

Conclusion: According to this point of view, the need to review the annual budget required to implement safety measures described and from an economic point focusing on the search for optimal conditions for market efficiency and cost effectiveness of the safety measures is important.