Labor safety refers to the prevention of accidents that endanger the personal safety of workers, such as poisoning, car accidents, electric shock, collapse, explosion, fire, falling from a height, mechanical trauma, etc.
Safety is the most basic requirement for human survival and development and the basic guarantee for life and health. Safe production is the basic condition for protecting the safety and health of workers and ensuring the sustainable development of the national economy. With the development of economy, accidents in production safety occur frequently, which not only causes great losses to national property and citizens' lives, but also seriously restricts the steady development of China's economy and runs counter to the current goal of building a harmonious society in China.
On the one hand, labor safety is restricted by production technology; On the other hand, through appropriate institutional norms and economic input, its harm can be effectively reduced. Whether workers can ensure their own safety in production activities depends on the conscious or spontaneous adjustment of enterprises, which is difficult to achieve most of the time. Due to the universality of externalities, information asymmetry and other factors, effective government supervision measures must be adopted to ensure it.
As long as people are engaged in labor production, the occurrence of labor safety problems is inevitable, especially when production is for profit, negative externalities and internalization lead to market failure, and government supervision of labor safety becomes inevitable. China's labor safety problems mainly focus on industrial and mining production, especially in many coal production enterprises.