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Resources contents - ILO report calls for bigger union role in safety - Vote with your feet and save your neck - Danger: Educated union member - Unions make workplaces safer - Unions protect both jobs and the environment - Union workplaces are safer workplaces - The impact of a worker health study on working conditions - Facts @ Your Fingertips - An Internet Research Manual - Health and safety as a recruitment issue - Sweden's regional safety reps - Regional safety reps in Sweden - Back to Basics: Jump-starting stalled health and safety committees |
UNION SAFETY EFFECT RESOURCES
Economic security for a better world says self-regulation and a weak workforce “voice” are bad for health and safety, adding that “strong voice representation is associated with strong protection of workers’ health and well-being.” An accompanying factsheet on work related ill-health says the report “identifies work-related stress as a 21st-century disease, due in part to labour intensification, competitive pressures, timesqueeze, modern technological innovations and lack of worker control in their jobs.” It adds: “Evidence abounds showing that more flexible labour relations, notably downsizing, contracting out types of labour and so on, are associated with a deterioration in work security, resulting in higher injury rates, hazard exposures, disease and work-related stress.”
ILO
news release • Factsheet
no.11: Work insecurity – work related ill-health, may be of particular
interest [pdf].
ILO
Socio-Economic Security website
UK: Vote with your feet and save your neck In his August 2000 paper, Adam Seth Litwin of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics concludes: "Strikes and slow-downs serve as efficacious union tools for reducing workplace injuries. labour possesses vital, tacit, shopfloor knowledge regarding health and safety, knowledge that is imperative for reducing accident rates." Adam Seth Litwin. Trade unions and industrial injury in Great Britain, Discussion Paper 468, August 2000. Abstract • Full paper [pdf format]
 Danger:
Educated union member
T-shirt design Northland Poster Collective
 Unions
make workplaces saferThe presence of a union creates a healthier and safer workplace. This is our job. This is what unions are for. This is not just our opinion, however. Even the World Bank agrees. And the Canadian Labour Congress has plenty of evidence, from Canada and worldwide. Canada
Unions protect both jobs and the environment New union strategies can project both jobs and the environment. Global union co-operation and policies like "just transition" can mean better, more sustainable work. Global. Trade Union World, ICFTU, March 2001
Union workplaces are safer workplaces Unionised workplaces in Australia are three times as likely to have likely to have a health and safety committee and twice as likely to have undergone a management occupational health and safety audit in the previous 12 months, a major government survey has found. Hawke, Anne & Wooden, Mark (1997), The 1995 Australian
Workplace Industrial Relations Survey., The Australian Economic Review
30 (3), 323-328, doi: 10.1111/1467-8462.00032. more  The
impact of a worker health study on working conditionsWorkers at 35 Las Vegas hotel-casinos have overwhelmingly approved union contracts that set new limits on housekeepers' workload. The workers' union, Hotel Employees/ Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 226, brought the workload issue into negotiations by citing preliminary results from a new workers' health study undertaken with the University of California at Berkeley's Labor Occupational Health Program. The findings were published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, vol.23, no.3, 2002
Facts @ Your Fingertips - An Internet Research Manual US public sector union AFSCME has produced a pretty impressive guide for union activists, Facts @ your fingertips. This includes a useful section on health and safety... although geared towards a US union audience, the resources on whole would be useful anywhere. AFSCME
• General
research • Health
and safety Health and safety as a recruitment issue Union health and safety services are a good selling point for the union, says UK print union GPMU. It adds that national, branch and workplace union officials all have a role to play in using health and safety issues to boost recruitment. Health and safety as a recruitment issue 10 good reasons why you're safer in the GPMU
 Sweden's
regional safety reps A major challenge facing unions is the problem of ensuring that workers employed in small and medium-sized enterprises or in certain important industrial sectors are properly represented as far as their health and safety is concerned. One model that has proved successful in Sweden is the system of Regional Safety Representatives. All Swedish workplaces with fewer than fifty employees have, since 1974, been given an opportunity to be included in trade union regional health and safety programmes. The Regional Safety Representatives have the same rights and powers as other safety representatives in Sweden. The only differences relate to the group of employees from which the representatives are appointed and the way of financing the activities. The local trade union has the right to appoint the Regional Safety Representative for a specific geographical area or for nominated companies where there are members belonging to the union. Sweden. Review by SIPTU, Ireland
Regional safety reps in Sweden How the Swedish system of regional union safety reps works in the Swedish transport industry. Sweden. TUTB
paper, August 2000 [pdf format] Back to Basics: Jump-starting stalled health and safety committees It's time to jump-start health and safety committees, ensuring they're part of the solution, not part of the problem. Canadian public service union CUPE has launched a "back to basics" initiative to train CUPE activists. The union says: "Too often health and safety committees have become complacent or too 'warm and fuzzy' between workers and employers - or both." Canada. CUPE, Canada. February 2001
Is organising enough? "Is organising enough? Race,gender and union culture" concludes the best of the new organising "takes place in locals that balance the organizing priority with the need to encourage members in the life of the union". One local union director notes: "Things were good for a number of years. We got contract after contract with improvements in wages, benefits, pensions, and better health and safety in the plants. We were good grievance administrators and good arbitrators, but everybody got lulled to sleep. We became bureaucrats." USA. New Labor Forum V6 2000 Spring/Summer Issue
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HAZARDS MAGAZINE • WORKERS' HEALTH INTERNATIONAL NEWS |
