The article is devoted to the analysis of legal norms, both directly and indirectly protecting the work capacity of employed citizens through ensuring the safety of their work. The labor legislation calls the principles of such provision the warning and prevention of hazards; minimization of damage to the health of workers. In this regard, labor law, not being an independent tool that ensures the prevention of diseases of citizens, acts as an element of the general legal mechanism of preventive medicine. The employer is obliged to implement such a mechanism through various control measures, including medical examinations of employees. At the same time, the authors emphasize that the goals of carrying out any preventive medicine measures lie in the private-public sphere, which makes it possible to maintain both the health of a particular citizen (individual health) and to identify patterns of development of public health, ways to maintain, protect and improve it. The analysis of labor-legal aspects of the correlation of private and public interests in the field of preventive medicine gives the authors the opportunity to identify two big issues. The first problem is related to the definition of the boundaries of responsibility of employers and the state (society) on issues of health protection of employees who are members of society as a whole. The second problem lies in the plane of the correlation of labor rights and obligations of employees in the field of preventive medicine with their personal rights. It is concluded that for an employer in the field of labor protection, the risk factors for the health/ill health of an employee are not general, but professional. Accordingly, the list of medical interventions (studies) carried out at the expense of the employer within the framework of mandatory medical examinations should correlate with such risks.