The Legal Position of Dockers and the Scope of the Law
If you are looking for information about longshore workers’ claims, one thing must be said honestly at the outset: Georgian law does not contain a separate compensation statute for port workers analogous to the special act in force in the United States. A docker in Georgia is an ordinary employee, and his claim rests on the Law of Georgia on Safety at Work and the general labour legislation. This law applies to all branches of economic activity in the sphere of safety at work, including labour relations regulated by the Organic Law of Georgia — the Labour Code of Georgia — and the Law of Georgia on Public Service.
Article 2 of the law also provides that, unless special legislation provides otherwise, the law applies to the persons defined by the Law of Georgia on the Labour of Seafarers — for those working in ports this underlines once more that safety-at-work standards fully cover them. At the same time, the law does not apply to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, the Special State Protection Service and the State Security Service, together with their subordinate agencies, in matters regulated by their special legislation, nor to labour activity during a state of emergency or martial law.
Obligations of the Employer
Under Article 5 of the law, the employer must ensure safety at work in the working space, taking into account the size of the enterprise, the number of employees, the working conditions and the corresponding risks. The employer must comply with the legal norms and rules in the sphere of safety at work; must ensure that no harm comes to the employee or to any other person present in the working space; must ensure that physical, chemical and biological hazardous factors do not create a danger to their safety or health; and must record accidents at work, cases of occupational disease and dangerous incidents and provide the relevant information to the employee or the employees’ representative on request.
For port work the training rules are particularly important: the employer must provide training and instruction to employees in a language they understand — at hiring, before work begins, on transfer to another workplace or change of work, before the introduction of a new technological process or new machinery, and repeatedly according to a plan. Training takes place during working hours; the days spent in training count as justified absence and are paid in proportion to working hours; and the training and instruction are free of charge for the employee. The employer must not employ a person under 18 years of age on work that may harm his health or safety, nor pregnant or breastfeeding women on work harmful or of particular risk to the mother or the child. At workplaces with increased danger, harmful and hazardous conditions, the employer must, at its own expense, insure the employee against accidents at work, and must bear all costs connected with safety at work and sanitary-hygienic measures. Engaging an external safety specialist or service does not release the employer from liability under the law, and the employer is released from liability only where the accident was caused by circumstances that could not have been foreseen or were beyond its control — with the burden of proving this resting on the employer itself.
Prevention and Risk Assessment
Article 6 obliges the employer to assess, at every stage of the work, the risk of harm to health, to update the risk assessment document and to take appropriate measures. The general principles of prevention are: avoiding existing risks; evaluating those risks that cannot be avoided; reducing the danger, including eliminating it at its source; substituting hazardous factors with safe or less dangerous ones where possible; developing a consistent policy of preventive measures and a written document containing the measures, their deadlines, the persons responsible and the resources required; giving collective protective measures priority over individual ones; training employees; and adapting the work to the employee.
The risk assessment document must be kept by the employer in the prescribed manner. The employer must also define in writing the duties and responsibilities of employees in the sphere of safety at work, allow only persons who have undergone appropriate training or instruction to work at risk-bearing workplaces, identify and record hazardous workplaces, ensure the continuous and proper functioning of protection and control systems, and equip employees free of charge with effective individual protective means wherever this is necessary to protect their life or health. A docker’s workplace — a port, a warehouse, a container terminal — is precisely such a risk-bearing environment, which is why these obligations are anything but formal for a port operator or a stevedoring company.