Eleven years after ratifying the ILO’s most modern OSH convention, Georgia has yet to build the integrated national OSH system C187 requires.
Georgia ratified ILO Convention No. 187 — the Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health — in 2013. The convention is among the ILO’s most ambitious instruments, requiring ratifying states to establish a coherent national OSH system, a national OSH programme with time-bound targets, and a tripartite consultative mechanism for setting OSH priorities. In 2024, eleven years after ratification, Georgia meets none of these requirements in full.
The gap between commitment and implementation is not unusual in the post-Soviet transition context. Georgia ratified eight ILO conventions in 2013 alone, largely as part of the negotiations preceding the EU Association Agreement signed in 2014. The ratification process was political — a signal of alignment with European standards — rather than the product of domestic policy reform. The enforcement infrastructure required to give these instruments practical effect was never built alongside the ratifications.
C187 requires, in the first instance, a national OSH policy — a formal document adopted through tripartite consultation that sets out the principles and objectives guiding state action on workplace safety. Georgia’s Labour Code contains provisions on employer duties for OSH, and the 2018 Law on Labour Safety (amended 2020) establishes a legal framework for inspection and liability. But the integrated national policy envisioned by C187 — with explicit time-bound targets, annual reporting, and parliamentary oversight — does not exist.
The statistics reflect this gap directly. The Labour Inspection Service of Georgia recorded 1,847 workplace accidents in 2023, of which 42 were fatal. Given that the service inspected approximately 4,200 workplaces — out of an estimated 180,000 registered employers — the true incidence of workplace injury is substantially higher than reported figures suggest. The construction sector, which accounts for approximately 12 percent of Georgian GDP and employs a largely informal workforce, is consistently the highest-risk sector with the lowest inspection coverage.
The Decent Work Country Programme 2024–2026 for Georgia, agreed between the ILO Country Office and the Government of Georgia, identifies OSH as a priority area. The programme commits to supporting development of a national OSH profile and action plan. This is a necessary step, but it places the impetus for implementation on international assistance rather than domestic legislative obligation — which is precisely what C187 was designed to reverse.
GILS Position: The Georgian Institute of Labour Studies considers the implementation gap on C187 to be one of the most consequential outstanding commitments in Georgia’s EU integration process. The EU Social Chapter of the Association Agreement explicitly requires harmonisation with EU OSH Directives, which in turn derive from the same ILO framework. Progress on paper ratification without enforcement infrastructure does not constitute compliance.
GILS recommends that the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Economy — which jointly oversee Labour Inspection — publish a public implementation roadmap for C187 with specific milestones, a tripartite consultative body for OSH policy, and annual reporting to parliament. The Labour Inspection Service requires a substantial staffing increase, from its current complement of approximately 120 inspectors to a minimum of 400, to achieve meaningful national coverage.
Workplace safety is not a technical compliance matter. It is a question of whether Georgian workers return home alive at the end of the working day. The convention that Georgia signed says they should. The institutions that could make this true have not been built.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/law-occupational-safety/