Worker Representation and Workplace Health and Safety

Worker participation in health and safety plays a key role in current EU and national strategies aimed at improving health and safety management. Yet there is much that we do not understand about its contribution to health and safety performance or the conditions enhancing its effectiveness. This book was undertaken to help further this understanding. It reviews the quantitative and qualitative evidence for the link between representative worker participation and effective health and safety management. Through a series of case studies in two sectors of the economy — chemicals and construction — it examines the dynamics of the detailed operation of representative worker participation in improving health and safety outcomes.

Two important sets of distinctions that need to be made when considering the issue of representation in health and safety at work are whether managers relate to workers on an individual basis or whether they do so through their collective representatives; and whether workers are passive recipients of information about the practice of health and safety management or have some chance to influence the direction of the outcomes of such engagement.

It is not our intention here to provide a historical review of the involvement of trade unions in improving health and safety, some indications of which are provided by other authors (for example, Weindling 1985; Bartrip and Burman 1983). But before looking in detail at the effectiveness of specific arrangements for representation in health and safety at the workplace, it is important to recognise that organised labour operates at a number of levels to make workplaces safer (Mishel and Walters 2003).

In their study of health and safety arrangements in the chemicals industry during the 1980s, Dawson et al. (1988) described an industry in which there were relatively stable patterns of employment with a largely permanent, well-qualified full-time workforce, well-developed management structures and a significant presence of large firms. There have been developments in the decade and a half since Dawson et al.’s study in which there has been a tendency to shift operations towards speciality chemicals (intermediates and consumer products) and away from bulk production (Pearce and Tombs 1998: 159–160). This has been partly responsible for the decline in the number employed in the sector in the UK since the 1980s. Nevertheless, the features of the industry noted by Dawson et al. have remained largely in place. Furthermore, the industry continues to be essentially one in which trade union organisation is still relatively well established and unions play a significant role in joint arrangements, including those for health and safety.

The industry was selected for several reasons. For many years it has been associated with a relatively poor health and safety performance, accounting for one in three of work-related deaths, one in three HSE prosecutions and one in two prohibition notices. This performance, as well as resulting from the many hazards of the industry, is widely regarded as the consequence of a number of underlying features of poor management arrangements for health and safety and a ‘risk tolerant’ attitude in the sector. In addition, the organisation of work in the industry undoubtedly presents many serious challenges to the implementation of contemporary prescriptions for systematic health and safety management. Temporary and multi-employer worksites, complex supply chain relationships and responsibilities in project commission, design and completion, large numbers of casual and relatively low-skilled workers and low levels of trade union organisation all contribute to these challenges. All of these factors are known to the industry and its regulators, and achieving better health and safety management arrangements that take them into account has been their stated aim for many years.

There are several preconditions for effective worker representation and consultation on health and safety. They include:

Despite gradual improvements in the frequency of work-related injuries and fatalities over the course of the last century, in the UK there are still over 20,000 deaths every year that are attributable annually to injuries or ill health related to work; 25,000 people leave employment as a result of work-related injury or illness; and more than 2 million suffer from ill health that in their view was caused or made worse by work. Work-related ill health results in the loss of over 30 million working days each year and many more workers experience limitations on their daily activities that stem from work-related illnesses.¹ The failure of employers to properly discharge the legal duties to prevent harm to their workers, which is suggested by such statistics, provides strong ethical and pragmatic reasons why people at work should have rights to adequate representation of their health and safety interests.