Paper short abstract:

This paper critically evaluates core assumptions and practices in dominant approaches to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) through an anthropological exploration of the everyday perceptions, experiences and practices related to OHS risks amongst Bolivian cooperative miners.

Paper long abstract:

It is generally agreed that knowledge on the causes and consequences of a particular risk influence the way people prepare for and respond to it. This rational-actor-paradigm logic is envisaged by dominant Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) approaches, according to which knowledge of what constitutes OHS risks together with an awareness of their consequences on workers will necessarily result in the establishment of appropriate and effective risk management strategies within workplaces. My 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst Bolivian cooperative miners working in Potosí shows however a much more complex scenario, in which miners simultaneously face a number of physical, geological, socio-political and economic risks as they go about their work and lives which must be carefully weighed against each other. In this context of overlapping risks and uncertainties, OHS risk perceptions and behaviours are governed by a different rationality; they are the result of risk-trade-offs in which the miners carefully balance the overlapping risks and uncertainties that affect them and their relatives together with the degree of control and choice they have over all these. Miners are well aware of potential losses of taking OHS risks, but also of the gains of the decision. This paper presents an ethnographic account of the uncertainties, negotiations, relationships and conflicts that shape how Bolivian cooperative miners conceptualise OHS risks and occupational safety. In so doing, I highlight the neglected political-economic dimensions of dominant approaches to OHS, the resulting conflictive encounters between miners and OHS experts and the shortcomings of current OHS interventions.