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March/April 2023 issue

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Leadership
Opinion

Employees are not the problem

Open-access content Bud Hudspith — Wednesday 22nd March 2017
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

It is well established that active safety reps make for safer and healthier workplaces. Surveys show that organised workplaces are safer workplaces and many reps put in far more hours on health and safety than they are paid for. They tend to be highly committed to improving health and safety in their workplaces. The best employers take advantage of this and encourage and support them.

But too many of the employers I deal with have a much less positive attitude to their workers and their reps or, indeed, trade unions. They see them as people to be controlled, whose behaviour needs to be changed or influenced. It is not the behaviour of workers that is the problem; more often it is the behaviour of organisations that leads to poor health and safety. The recurring theme of union surveys and the common view of many of the Unite safety reps I deal with is "My employer does not listen to me".

This is why Unite is committed to improving the working conditions of all of its members through its Looking for Trouble campaign aimed at safety reps. I want these reps to look for trouble on safety and health so that they can find problems and have them fixed. I want employers to look for them too, and after they uncover any potential concerns they should ensure they are addressed.

I firmly believe that workers are not the problem -- they are the solution

Good safety and health management involves the workforce and its representatives. This means risk assessments, audits, accident and near-miss investigations that include safety reps, policies agreed with the workforce, jobs, machines and processes designed to fit the workers' needs.

I want employers to talk to reps and, above all, to listen to them. Reps should be able to raise concerns, discuss safety and health issues with their employers and arrive at decisions together. They should be able to raise issues without fear of victimisation, and employers should encourage that dialogue. Good employers want to know what is going wrong so that they can put it right.

Good workplace safety and health comes about through the activities of union-appointed health and safety representatives exercising their basic rights. Those rights are firmly rooted in enabling them to play a part in developing and promoting good safety and health. That is why safety reps' functions include the right to be consulted on safety and health issues, the right to information, and the right to inspect their workplace and investigate problems raised by their members.

Alongside these come the right to be paid while performing their functions and to be paid to be trained, both at and away from work. Trade unions and their reps are a force for good in safety and health.

I firmly believe that workers are not the problem -- they are the solution. The more employers recognise this, the safer our workplaces will be.

You may also be interested in...

 ‘Always on’ communications: stressful but hard to police

Wednesday 22nd March 2017
Companies with more than 50 employees must set out the hours when they do not expect employees to send or answer emails. The justification for the law is that workers were not being paid fairly for the unofficial overtime the evening and weekend correspondence involved.
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 Give the benefit of your expertise to small suppliers

Tuesday 21st February 2017
In most cases a push for supply chain improvement, whether it was cutting energy and materials use or pollution control, balanced the stick with the carrot.Suppliers might be advised they would be expected to cut waste by a set percentage or to achieve accreditation for their management system by a certain date or they would lose a contract. But the client organisation often provided encouragement and advice to help them reach that point by the deadline.
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 Working through: multiple sclerosis

Monday 13th March 2017
Many people with multiple sclerosis (MS) who feel able to work are missing out on the right support in the workplace, according to a UK parliamentary report. A year-long review by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for MS found that the fluctuating nature of the condition, which affects the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, is a particular barrier to work.
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 European workers are losing influence on OSH management

Tuesday 11th April 2017
At the same time, the research identifies an increase in the use of management systems approaches to OSH as managers or specialists take on responsibility for safety and health management.The qualitative study builds on EU-OSHA’s second European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER-2).
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 Lone guarantees

Thursday 13th April 2017
Louise Ward, policy standards and communications director at the British Safety Council, kicked off the Lone Worker Safety conference at London’s Olympia centre on 28 March with a session on wellbeing. Lone workers, like home-based workers, often miss out on health and wellbeing programmes that are focused on corporate sites. More importantly, they can feel the lack of basic social contact, Ward said, “such as having a conversation with someone over lunch”.
Open-access content
© Mark Waugh

 Construction contractors hold first UK-wide safety stand-down

Tuesday 18th April 2017
The Stop. Make a Change campaign is thought to be the largest stand-down event in UK construction and will see 60,000 workers halt work to discuss mental health, plant safety, fatigue and respiratory illness.Since the initiative was launched in November 2016, more than 50 organisations, including construction leaders BAM Nuttall, Balfour Beatty, Costain, Morgan Sindall and Skanska, have signed up.
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