CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0     BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Labour is one of the vital resources required for high level productivity at both organizational and national level. Without labour, other factors of production like capital, machines and land may remain passive. This is so because it is labour that put other factors into effective use. Perhaps, this explains why labour is often held responsible for whatever goes wrong in the production process. Suffice it to say that without efficient labour, high level productivity particularly in the manufacturing sector may be elusive. It however requires a sound health and well safeguarded working environment to have an effective and efficient workforce that is highly productive and capable of accomplishing the corporate goals of organization.

In view of the central and critical role played by labour in the economic growth and survival of organizations. It becomes imperative for employer of labour especially in the organized private sector to ensure that the health and safety of their employees are given adequate attention.

It is however noteworthy that in Nigeria industrial relations practice, emphasis is placed almost exclusively on issues relating to the formation and functioning of trade unions, employers' association and the promotion and settlement of collective disputes, while the issues of safety and health of workers are relegated to the background and therefore regarded as peripheral to industrial relations practice (Yesufu, 2000)

The above perception of industrial relations practitioners in Nigeria is parochial because the issues of safety and health on the fundamental human element in the workplace, without which no organization or nation can grow or survive. For instance, the rate of industrial accident in an organization is often used as the index of its level of inefficiency; therefore, any organization which is prone to high industrial accident probably due to absence of adequate safety measure is likely to suffer high labour turnover, absenteeism, low productivity, high labour cost and reduced profitability.

In the same way, an organization that could not maintain the health of its workers is likely to face the problem of weak, feeble and unproductive workforce. It is therefore important that as a country advances in industrialization, issues of health and safety especially in the manufacturing sector, which is the real sector that determines the economic growth and development of a nation, should be given a priority. It is against this backdrop that this study investigated the influence of occupational health and safety on employee productivity in manufacturing sector in Ogun State, Nigeria.

1.1     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

It has been observed that majority of workers m the manufacturing sector are daily exposed to diverse occupational health and safety hazards. This has impaired their health status and adversely affected their productive capacity. In the same vein, their pruness to industrial accidents had equally incapacitated physically some of the factory workers, which in turn had caused a decline in their level of productivity. Therefore, there is need to investigate empirically the relationship between occupational health and safety and employee's productivity in the manufacturing sector using NESTLE PLC, Agbara as a case study.

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