With a general election pending, the Hazards Campaign wants union safety reps to promote a 13-point plan of action.
 1. Good laws protect us – so the new government should reverse the erosion of safety laws, and make sure the safety criminals fear being nabbed. That means a prospect of official safety inspections at all workplaces, legal health and safety protection for all workers and an official safety regulator with the resources and the teeth to make bad employers listen. |
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 2. Bury the burdens lie – safety and its regulation aren’t a burden on business. Mismanagement of safety is mismanagement full stop. If you want a flourishing economy, the answer is to keep the workforce healthy and productive. The alternative is hurting the workforce and hurting the economy. |
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 3. Get the count right – deaths at work aren’t counted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) if they happen at sea, on the roads or in the air. Most work-related disease deaths go unrecognised – and that includes thousands of cancers, heart attacks and strokes and fatal lung diseases. Bad work can drive you to suicide, but you’d not know it from the stats. Count the bodies or, when it comes to setting workplace safety policies, the bodies don’t count. |
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 4. Action is key – it is workers who get injured or get sick in poorly managed workplaces. They need a say at work – and that means more rights for union safety reps, better protection for whistleblowers and extended and enforceable rights to take the time necessary for union safety training and to inspect and investigation problems. |
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 5. Help the vulnerable – migrant workers, temporary workers and the low paid are more likely to be at risk and less likely to have union protection. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority should have its powers reinstated and its scope extended to all sectors where temporary workers are exploited. A new breed of roving union reps could extend the union safety effect to these workplaces too. |
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 6. Sort health problems – worker-oriented occupational health services within the NHS should be available to all workers and should focus on prevention, support for workers injured or made ill, and the provision of treatment and rehabilitation. Being ill or disabled because of your job should never result in you being subject to punitive sickness absence regimes or hounded by government ‘welfare’ and ‘fit for work’ agencies. |
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 7. Make compensation fair – the dysfunctional Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit system needs reforming so anyone suffering hardship as a result of being injured or made ill by their work can receive help. Government imposed barriers to common law compensation payouts from negligent employers should be removed. |
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 8. Safety whistleblowers need protection – HSE should, like its US counterpart, see itself as the protector of those victimised for raising safety concerns and should be able to require redress for those suffering and reinstatement for those sacked. Costly employment tribunal charges should be removed entirely – workers should not be priced out of justice. |
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 9. Get real – HSE’s a safety watchdog bred for a bygone age. It needs to get its teeth into modern workplace perils, like job insecurity, shiftwork, long hours and the risks from faster, more intensified work. The worse your job, the less likely HSE is going to have anything to say. What’s HSE do in industries dominated by women, like health and social care, catering and cleaning? Not enough. How many prosecutions does it take on stress, the single biggest problem in modern workplaces? None (Hazards 128). Where’s the clampdown on cancer risks at work or a push to remove toxins from workplaces? Nowhere (Hazards 120). The watchdog needs to step up and act up. |
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 10. Make work better – HSE lacks ambition. It doesn’t want to compel, it wants to coax. It doesn’t have prevention of harm to workers as a core value. And it sees business and not workers as its primary constituency. Well, it is workers who get injured and workers who get sick. First and foremost, it should be workers that HSE aims to protect, not the profits or interests of those that would harm them. And when the government gets it wrong, the HSE leadership should have the integrity and the guts to stand up and say so, publicly |
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 11. Don’t sit there waiting – only bad things will happen if you do nothing. If you are not a union safety rep, become one. If you are not properly trained, get on a course. Speak to your members, do an inspection, try out body mapping or risk mapping. Or get in touch with the Hazards Campaign. If your union is campaigning on safety, join in. If it is not, act locally and think about getting your branch to raise your safety concerns nationally. |
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 12. Build union organisation – workers don’t want to be ground down and spat out. Unions prove their worth when they fight for health and safety and improve working conditions. It is one of the best issues around for recruiting new members and retaining members. |
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 13. Get political - none of the political parties have properly informed, creative and protective policies on workplace health and safety. The current government is committed to make matters worse. With an election looming, it’s the time to press for commitments to improve conditions and rights at work. You won’t get them from Cameron, but you might achieve something by exposing his government’s wilful ignorance and deadly neglect. |
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The great deregulation lie
David Cameron’s frantic rush to ‘boost business’ by removing safety regulations has come at a cost. And while you pay with your health already as a result of his government’s deregulation obsession, the effect is about to be amplified by European and international moves on the same remove-the-protection theme.
The government announced in January 2015 that “84 per cent of health and safety rules will have been scrapped or improved in this parliament, freeing employers from unnecessary red tape.” It said under its ‘One in Two Out’ approach, regulations covering health and safety had been halved “without compromising or diluting health and protection for workers.”
New safety minister Lord Freud said by simplifying regulations and removing unnecessary requirements, “businesses have been boosted and workers have never been safer. By making it easier for businesses to understand what they need to do on health and safety, they can protect their staff and concentrate on prospering rather than pointless box-ticking.”
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) chair Judith Hackitt obligingly backed up the minister, saying HSE had “delivered a substantial package of reforms and reduced the regulatory burden – all without compromising or diluting protection for workers.”
It would be good if it was true. But telling business that regulation is a burden and that any chance of enforcement is unlikely sends out an unhealthy message. While workplace fatalities recorded by HSE – a small fraction of the total - have fallen, work-related health problems kill at least 100 times as many people each year as work-related injuries. And these conditions are on the rise.
Europe’s role in developing protective workplace safety legislation has stalled and could be set to be reversed, with the appointment in December 2014 of the deregulation-obsessed German right wing politician Edmund Stoiber as a European Commission special adviser on ‘better regulation.’
The appointment came two months after the European Commission’s Stoiber-chaired High Level Group on Administrative Burdens published a deregulatory template described by TUC’s Hugh Robertson as “pretty dangerous” and “totally absurd and will make it virtually impossible to get any new regulation on health and safety” (Hazards 128).
A trade agreement being negotiated behind closed doors between the US and EU could make matters worse still. Health advocates believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’s (TTIP) emphasis on “regulatory cooperation” amounts to a “power grab” that will undermine Europe’s chemical, safety, food and other laws.
Hey!
Whatcha gonna do?
There will be a new government on 7 May 2015. With work getting more unhealthy, the workforce and the country are paying a heavy price. Hilda Palmer of the national Hazards Campaign spells out what it wants you and that new government to do about it.
Cartoons: Andy Vine
The great deregulation lie
David Cameron’s frantic rush to ‘boost business’ by removing safety regulations has come at a cost. And while you pay with your health already as a result of his government’s deregulation obsession, the effect is about to be amplified by European and international moves on the same remove-the-protection theme more.
Hazards webpages
Deady business • We didn't vote to die at work