TRADE UNION NEWS

July 2000

The T&G has helped recover £266,000 in compensation for a member in South Wales who suffered serious leg injuries following an accident at an aluminium works. A computer error led to his legs being crushed under the weight of 1,400 kilos of metal.

The member, a machine operator at the plant, has had to undergo several operations on his legs in order to give him a limited level of mobility. Thankfully, initial fears that he would never walk again have been overcome. The company accepted liability at an early stage which helped to ease the process of recovering adequate compensation. The level of the award will bring financial security to the member and his family as he will never be able to work again.

Injuries and accidents at work are costing the British economy up to £18 billion a year. But, according to the TUC and the British Safety Council, the price employers are paying for their health and safety crimes is far too low. The organisations have made a joint appeal to the courts to dish out stiffer financial penalties to those who break health and safety law.

In a new report Fine Times, the TUC and BSC argue that every year almost 300 workers are killed at work, more than 2 million suffer a work-related illness and almost as many are injured whilst working. Yet, the average fine for breaches of health and safety law amounted to a paltry £5,038 in 1998/99. If the most serious crimes - those attracting fines of over £100,000, of which there have been only 39 in the past 10 years - are excluded, the average fine paid reduces to a mere £3,442.

The TUC and BSC believe that the answer to safer workplaces lies not in upping the number of prosecutions against companies - already a costly and time-intensive business for the HSE - but in dramatically increasing the level of financial penalty. Fine Times features the following examples of what it considers to be minimal fines imposed for safety breaches:

• The operator of a nuclear power station was fined £2,000 after 5 sub-contractors were placed at unnecessary risk by inhaling radioactive dust.

• A partner in a scaffolding firm was fined £800 after an accident left a 25-year-old scaffolder brain-damaged. He was struck on the side of his head by a 21-foot steel pole which fell from a height of around 30 feet.

• A private school was fined £5,000 after an employee plunged 6 metres from a roof to his death. Serious flaws were discovered in the training and instruction provided to maintenance staff.

UCATT has issued 10 demands for action to put right what it considers to be wrong with safety. Briefly, the demands are:

1. Remove the anomaly of a firm employing less than 5 employees not having to have a written safety policy or having to record its risk assessments. Firms employing 4, for example, often employ 10 because 6 remain "self-employed".
2. Amend regulations such as the CDM Regulations in order to fully implement the European Health and Safety Framework Directive with regard to workers being able to refuse dangerous work without suffering detriment. The present system takes too long and doesn't lead to reinstatement.
3. Extend the Safety Representatives and Safety Committee Regulations so that construction workers, as well as actors and musicians, can appoint safety representatives even though the union is not recognised on site.
4. Extend the law on union recognition to cover construction sites where less that 21 workers are working for less than 3 months. This will require changes to the 1999 Employment Relations Act.
5. Over the past 20 years the health of men in manual trades has grown worse compared with the rest of society. This has resulted in a gap of over 5 years in the life expectancy of men in the highest social class and those in the lowest. Therefore, the construction industry must prioritise the funding of a preventive occupational health service.
6. The control limit for asbestos should be reduced to 0.1 fibres/ml over 4 hours, which is the limit set in a number of countries including the USA.
7. Introduce similar action with regard to solvent-based paints in Britain as taken in Denmark, where 95% of paint used internally and 50% of paint used externally is now solvent-free.
8. Reduce the hours worked by construction workers as a matter of priority. Long hours are considered to be a major cause of stress in the industry. The 7 year opt-out of the 48-hour week on the basis of individual workers signing, with no requirement for a collective decision with a workforce of less than 20, means that the Working Time Regulations have not yet reduced the pressure in the industry to work excessive hours.
9. Over half of all the HSE's prohibition notices are served on the construction industry. Additionally, a third of prosecutions involve construction. Therefore, more resources need to be devoted to the HSE's activities in the industry. That means more inspectors and more inspections.
10. Average fines in magistrates' courts are only £3,886 and in Crown Court are only £17,768. Tougher sentences need to be introduced and these should include prison sentences for all serious health and safety offences. A mechanism needs to be introduced for referring unduly lenient sentences for serious health and safety matters to the Court of Appeal with a view to increasing the sentence given.

UCATT also ask the question can privatisation damage your health? They quote in reply the example of a bricklayer who survived a nasty fall from a ladder while working for a private restoration company, having recently been transferred from English Heritage, the public agency responsible for the upkeep of stately homes and archaeological sites etc.

The bricklayer fell from an unfooted ladder while repointing and plastering inside a casemate at a depot in Hampshire. He told the union that: "The previous administration had always provided a scaffold for the task". He won £22,500 in compensation.

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Mike Everley