TRADE UNION NEWS

August 2000

The TUC has welcomed the International Standards Organisation's rejection of the British Standards Institution's proposal of the British Standard as the basis for an international occupational health and safety management standard.

The BSI had put forward BS 8800 as the basis for the new standard that the ISO is drawing-up. According to the BSI, it put forward BS 8800 because it is a well established standard which is widely used as a guide for occupational health and safety management systems.

The TUC argue that the BSI proposals would have undermined the work of the International Labour Organisation on improving health and safety management. According to Owen Tudor, TUC Senior Policy Officer: "Standards must be decided by employers and workers, so the BSI proposals to go it alone without trade union input was frankly objectionable. BSI knew that unions, many employers and the Government were opposed to their plan, but they ignored these opinions. The ILO is the place where decisions about global health and safety should be taken and will be taken".

The ILO is currently preparing its own basis for an international standard on occupational health and safety management which it proposes to place before the ISO later this year.

On another issue, the TUC recently held three conferences dealing with rehabilitation. These conferences follow the TUC Consultation Document on the topic. The document revealed that 500,000 people take time off work each year because of an injury or illness which affects their ability to work. Of these, 25,000 never return to the workplace. The TUC recommends that employers introduce a comprehensible programme of rehabilitation to substantially reduce these figures.

John Monks, TUC General Secretary, told the London conference that: "Here in London alone, the TUC has calculated that about 5,000 working people leave the labour market permanently each year as a result of a work-related injury or illness. The effects of losing their jobs can mean poverty, a further deterioration in their health, and a loss of self-confidence".

Additionally, the TUC point out, the number of people being forced to leave work could be costing the Government and employers an estimated £5 billion a year. Margaret Hodge MP, the Employment and Disability Minister, told the conference that: "It is a shocking fact that every week some 3,000 people move from long-term sick leave to incapacity benefit, and yet 90% of them never return to work again".

Many delegates felt that employers take the attitude that rehabilitation is of no concern to them and is merely a matter for the NHS. The TUC wants the Government to introduce a new legal requirement that requires employers to adopt a rehabilitation policy setting out what they will do in the event of an accident or illness amongst their employees.

The results and recommendations for action from the TUC's Consultation Document will be presented to the TUC's Millennium Congress in Glasgow in September.

The European Trade Union Technical Bureau for Health and Safety recently published, in issue 13 of its Newsletter, David Walters outline of a project, carried out by the Institute of Employment Rights, which reviewed the structure and operation of the present legal framework for occupational health and safety in the United Kingdom.

David Walters argues that although the fatality rate has fallen since the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, this has, in part, been due to the decline in numbers employed in the high risk industries. "The scale of work-related harm suffered by workers remains enormous, as do the costs associated with it. For example, the available evidence indicates that thousands of workers and former workers die each year as a result of work-related injuries and ill-health. It also suggests that over a million employees, representing around 4% of the workforce, suffer a work-related injury each year; that more than two million people, or around 5% of the population of workers and ex-workers, suffer from an illness which they believe was caused or made worse by their work; and that in excess of 25,000 workers who have been injured or made ill by work leave the workforce each year". These statistics, amongst others, clearly suggest that there is a strong case for re-considering the current legal framework for occupational heath and safety.

The fundamental conclusions of the project, briefly, were:

• That clearer and more onerous duties should be laid on employers, particularly with regard to the management, organisation and arrangements that need to be put into place to ensure improved health and safety performance.
• To ensure that employers have access to necessary health and safety advice.
• To encourage employers to adopt a broader and more holistic approach to health and safety at work.
• To strengthen the effectiveness and coverage of systems of worker representation.
• To increase the likelihood of non-compliance with legislation being both identified and meaningfully penalised.
• To create a compensation system that provides employers with a financial incentive to reduce the scale of work-related harm.

The project also recommends the removal of the qualification "so far as is reasonably practicable", in terms of employers duties, and its replacement with a qualification that requires employers' actions to be evaluated in terms of their adequacy.

According to the RAAW Section of the T&G, a fight between casual workers in a Worcestershire field reveals how the industry is crying out for proper regulation and more responsible employers.

The fighting involved 100 workers from six countries and broke out in an onion field near Evesham. Several people were stabbed and there were several arrests.

The union has long been involved in a campaign to regularise gang masters and to prevent them from exploiting differences between groups of workers in order to pay lower wages. According to the union, gang masters are part of the system that brings people into the country and their is a need both to protect legitimate workers and also vulnerable workers brought into the country with promises of work permits and a new life. Farmers, farmworkers and food retailers are now agreed on the need for a legally binding code of practice for gang masters. A programme of spot raids is to be extended following a pilot scheme in Lincolnshire and East Anglia which clamped down on abuses. However, the RAAW points out, that although dozens of workers were caught working illegally, the gang masters escaped relatively unscathed.

Back

Mike Everley