27 May 2004
The presence of union safety reps prevents thousands of major injuries at work every year. In the UK there are over 320,000 trade union safety reps have been trained by TUC Education and 10,000 more are trained each year.
Dangerous employers can face a safety double whammy - safety is a subject on which trade union reps spend more time than any other, and it is an issue, opinion polls indicate, that is considered one of the key areas people at work regard as a legitimate topic for trade union action.
The UK unions are able to cite research done by their OHS Authority, the Health and Safety Executive, to prove that greater and better-informed employee participation in health and safety makes workplaces safer: active workforce participation in managing safety leads to large reductions in accident rates.
According to the report, it's union safety reps (not non-union reps) that have by far the greatest positive impact on safety at work - and the more training they get, the more marked the "union safety effect". The UK 's alternative model of reps for workplaces without recognised unions (the "representatives of employee safety" (RES) system) has been a lamentable failure, because they don't have the training, resources and support to make bad employers "give a damn".
Efforts to harmonise the regulations covering the RES and union safety rep systems were abandoned by the UK safety regulator last year. The prospect of effective safety reps getting into non-union firms, together with a union call for a nationwide system of "roving" union reps, was a prospect too dangerous for some employers to stomach.
Training Works
Trade union trained health and safety reps give "added value," says the TUC. HSE-backed study found trained reps are more likely go back to work and do something - for example, calling for formation of safety committees, undertaking health surveys, recruiting more safety reps and organising training days.
The findings of the study provide powerful evidence of the extent to which trade union training supports workplace activities and achievements of health and safety representatives. However it is likely that training does not simply support the continued existence of such achievement, but acts as a stimulus for their initiation and development.
Elected OHS reps in the UK have the opportunity to attend on-going training, unlike most reps in Victoria who attend only the basic 5-day approved course. The VTHC and our affiliates submitted to the Review of the OHS Act that there had to be on-going training for reps. This is supported by the HSE study which found that the more training a rep underwent, the greater the impact.
Union training is different
The HSE evaluation of union training found that several factors make it extremely effective. These include: sharing experiences with others; knowing legal rights and standards; and knowing how to access information and tackle problems at work.
The union courses were also "an important stimulus for taking up 'new issues' in health and safety," for example: pursuing gender sensitive strategies in health and safety; designing surveys on stress; representing workers at other worksites; becoming involved in participatory risk assessment; dealing with health and safety issues of work organisation; and dealing with musculoskeletal disorders.
Unions provide a reality check on workplace safety, the report suggests, because "occupational health and safety policies at both national and company levels are often evaluated against simple indices, such as lost time injuries, workers compensation cases or sickness absence."
It adds: "Unless these approaches are compensated by influence of the workers, what is labelled occupational health and safety management may aim more to minimise the number and costs of claims than to improve the underlying conditions."
Union training is different in that it "considers the whole production system and takes account the interaction between technology and organisational factors."
This is important because "blame the worker" arguments, though discredited, are "tenacious" and can offer employers both a scapegoat and a cheap solution, it says.
The report adds: "There is no form of training for worker representatives other than trade union training in which this fundamentally worker-centred set of normative arguments on health and safety are so comprehensively adopted. Such approaches to achieving an active and worker centred participation in occupational health and safety management are basic to both the character, quality and success of training.