Multidisciplinary Approach to Prevention and Health Protection by Monitoring: Role of Individual Disciplines. The Lawyer: Legal Aspects of Monitoring, Confidentiality and the Worker’s Right to Know I

Summary

The question of whether employees have any real right to be kept informed of the results of ambient and biological monitoring may seem a surprising one to the person of 1980, and even more so to those who attach any importance to improving the protection of workers’ health. Nevertheless, it is a question worth asking, for, in countries which practise a free economy, the point of departure is that no one — especially not the employer — is legally obliged to give explanations to those who are only in the firm to work because that is what they are paid for. The countless legal standards, amassed over more than a century, which aim to protect employees and to guarantee them a certain amount of information, are merely adjustments to the principles of a free economy, brought about by the combined efforts of workers’ demands, changes in prevailing attitudes and a better appreciation of the importance of personnel management.

That is to say that if the authorities in our countries are now, in their various ways, establishing what one might call a ‘workers’ right to information about their working environment; this prerogative will only be fully realised at some time in the future because the principles of the economic order are working against it. This basic tension underlines the confrontation between conflicting legal attitudes. In fact, certain principles accepted by contemporary social legislations encourage a broad acceptance of the right to information, while other legal standards impose a rule of silence on those who carry out monitoring tests or are aware of their results.

This paper therefore attempts to examine how, in the area we are considering, the right of the workers to information is established and strengthened and then to define the restrictions imposed on those in possession of information by the various obligations to secrecy.

In our arguments we shall take the example of French law, while taking care to bring out the problems and difficulties which no doubt arise in very similar terms in the other legal systems of the EEC, given the common legal attitudes which characterise the Community in one sphere — the social sphere — which is so closely linked to the economic sphere, attitudes based on principles which can only grow more similar as the integration of Europe progresses.