Tragedy on grade crossing: driver failure or systemic fragility?

In 2010, an accident occurred in Americana-SP, Brazil, involving two trains and one bus on a Grade Crossing, when 10 people died and 17 were injured including workers. This paper aims to analyze the accident using the Model of Analysis and Prevention of Work Accidents (MAPA). The method provides observation of work, interviews and analysis of documents to understand precedents of the event in the following stages: to understand the usual work from the involved people, the changes occurred in the system, the operation of barriers, managerial and organizational aspects.

[Changes in workers' rehabilitation procedures under the Brazilian social security system: modernization or undermining of social protection?].

This article describes the changes in workers' rehabilitation practices under the Brazilian National Social Security Institute (INSS) in the 1990s, in the context of neoliberal economic adjustment measures, based on an analysis of INSS documents from 1992 to 1997. The INSS plan for "modernization" of workers' rehabilitation led to: (1) dismantling of multidisciplinary teams; (2) induction of workers to accept proportional retirement pensions and voluntary layoffs; (3) under-utilization of the remaining INSS professional staff; (4) elimination of treatment programs for workers' rehabilitation; and (5) dismantling of INSS rehabilitation centers and clinics. The changes in the Brazilian social security system undermined the county's social security project and hegemony and reduced social security reform to a mere management and fiscal issue.

[Evaluative research on occupational rehabilitation: the effectiveness of a health care service subject to dismantlement].

This article deals with the results obtained from 1995 to 1997 by an innovative occupational rehabilitation model for individuals with repetitive strain injury/work related musculoskeletal disorder (RSI/WRMD), developed by the Campinas Occupational Rehabilitation Center under the Brazilian National Institute for Social Security. The study had two objectives: 1) to reconstruct the program as a precondition for evaluation and 2) to evaluate the model's effectiveness in reestablishing the autonomy of individuals with RSI/WRMD. The methodology involved document analysis in order to reconstruct the program's background in terms of problem identification, organizational participation, awareness-raising, staff characteristics and responsibilities, and profile of the clientele.