Arbowet Verplichtingen Werkgever: A Practical Checklist

What the Arbowet actually asks of you

Most employers can name the Arbowet. Far fewer can show, on a normal Tuesday, that they are meeting it.

That gap is the whole subject. The Arbowet is a framework law: it sets out duties of care rather than a checklist, and it leaves the detail to the Arbobesluit and the Arboregeling. What it does say is unambiguous. As an employer you are responsible for a safe and healthy workplace, for the physical and the psychosocial side of it, and for showing that your policy exists in practice and not only on paper.

The obligations below apply to nearly every employer in the Netherlands, regardless of sector or size. A handful of them scale with headcount.

The obligations, in the order they bite

1. RI&E and plan van aanpak

The risico-inventarisatie en -evaluatie is the foundation. Without it, none of the other obligations have anything to sit on.

You inventory the risks your work creates, evaluate them, and attach a plan van aanpak: which measures, who owns them, by when. The plan van aanpak is not an appendix. It is the part the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie will actually read, because it shows whether the assessment led anywhere.

Two practical points get missed. The RI&E has to be kept current, which means a real change in the work is a trigger to revisit it, not something you park until the next review cycle. And in most cases the RI&E has to be checked by a certified expert, with a lighter route available to smaller employers using a recognised branche instrument. Check what applies to your size and sector before you assume you are exempt.

2. The basiscontract with your arbodienstverlener

Since 2017 every employer needs a basiscontract that sets out how the arbodienst or bedrijfsarts supports you. It has to cover a fixed set of things, including access to the bedrijfsarts through an open consultation hour, the bedrijfsarts being able to visit the workplace, a second opinion route, and a complaints procedure.

Employees need to know these exist. A right nobody has been told about is not a functioning arrangement.

3. Preventiemedewerker, BHV and emergency response

Every organisation needs at least one preventiemedewerker. With 25 employees or fewer the employer may take the role personally. Above that, someone in the organisation carries it, with the time and the mandate to do the work, and the works council or personeelsvertegenwoordiging has a say in who it is.

Bedrijfshulpverlening is separate: enough trained people, given the size of the site, the risks present and the number of people in the building, to handle first aid, fire and evacuation. The number is not prescribed. It follows from your own RI&E, which is exactly why the RI&E has to be defensible.

4. Instruction, supervision, equipment

Article 8 obliges you to inform and instruct employees about the risks of their work and the measures taken, and then to supervise that the instructions are followed. Both halves count. Handing out an instruction is not the obligation, seeing that it is applied is.

Alongside it: personal protective equipment provided free of charge, work equipment maintained and inspected where required, and workplaces set up so the work can be done without avoidable harm. Screen work has its own rules under the Arbobesluit, including an eye examination and, where needed, corrective glasses for screen use. We covered the reimbursement question separately in computer glasses and the Arbowet.

5. Psychosocial workload

Werkdruk, aggression, bullying, harassment and discrimination fall under psychosociale arbeidsbelasting, and the Arbowet requires you to include them in your RI&E and to take measures where the risk is real. This is the part employers most often treat as culture rather than compliance. The law treats it as a risk category like any other, with the same expectation of assessment, measures and follow-up.

6. Registering and reporting accidents

You keep a register of workplace accidents that led to sick leave, including what happened and how long the absence lasted. Serious accidents, meaning those involving hospital admission, permanent injury or death, must be reported to the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie immediately.

The register is also your own early warning system, if anyone reads it.

Where it usually goes wrong

Not in the absence of documents, but in the distance between the document and the work.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has sat through an inspection. The RI&E exists and is three years old. The plan van aanpak has actions without owners, or owners who left. Toolbox meetings happened but the attendance list is in someone's inbox. The inspection round was walked and the result was ticked on a printed sheet that now lives in a drawer. Nothing here is deliberate non-compliance. It is drift: policy, procedure and practice slowly sliding out of alignment while every individual document still looks fine.

Inspectors increasingly ask the organisational question rather than the technical one. Not only whether the measure exists, but whether you can show it was carried out, checked and adjusted. That is the same PDCA logic that has come to dominate inspection findings at the heavy end of the regulated spectrum, where generic safety management software tends to fall short.

Making it demonstrable

A few things that make the difference in practice:

• Give every action in the plan van aanpak an owner and a date. An action without both is a note, not a measure.
• Treat change as the trigger. New machine, new substance, new process, reorganisation, serious near miss: revisit the relevant part of the RI&E then, not at the next anniversary.
• Capture evidence where the work happens. An inspection round done on a phone, with photos and a timestamp, produces its own proof. A printed checklist does not.
• Route findings automatically. Most observations should be solved by the team that made them. Only the serious ones need a safety specialist. Deciding that by hand is where the backlog forms.
• Read your own accident register once a quarter. Repetition in that register is the cheapest signal you will ever get.
• Tell people what they are entitled to. The open consultation hour with the bedrijfsarts, the second opinion, the complaints route, who the preventiemedewerker is.

For a fuller walkthrough of the individual duties, see our longer piece on employer obligations under the Arbowet.

The honest version

Software does not make you compliant, and no tool takes ownership of your duty of care. What it can do is remove the search: keep the forms, the rounds, the findings and the corrective actions in one place, so the evidence is a by-product of the work instead of a project you run before every inspection.

If you want to see what that looks like against your own RI&E and plan van aanpak, we are happy to walk through it with you. Bring your actual documents. The more of your own material we see, the more useful the conversation is.