Health and safety BW

Health and Safety at work-an organising tool
Taking up health and safety issues at work can seem a daunting task. There is a mass of confusing regulations, procedures and laws. Safety in the workplace is a major problem, and things are getting worse. Since the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act in 1974, thousands of workers have been killed at work. Nearly all of these were preventable. Added to this, are the tens of thousands of serious injuries, deaths and illness caused by work-related conditions.
Decent standards impose costs which the employers want to avoid. so it's hardly surprising that safety is so lax. The unions seem more interested in lobbying the state and employers, appealing for improvements in legislation, despite the fact that current laws are not enforced. No attempt is being made to organise around health and safety, despite it being one of the most vital issues affecting workers and one that effects all workers, cutting across divisions of craft, union and nationality.

What rights do we have?
To get to grips with Health and Safety, it is useful to know what the law says and how we can use it to our advantage. The best up to date and jargon free sources of information are the Labour Research Department (LRD) guides, Hazards etc.
It is important to keep abreast of new directives, regulations and legislation, LRD cover this in their monthly magazine 'Labour research'. Workers are the real experts about the work we do, and how safe it is. We can use research, technical information and the law, but ultimately, it is we who have the hands on awareness of what is safe.

A collective approach
Elect Safety reps at a mass assembly of all workers (except scabs and bosses of course), never rely on union full timers. It is important that the rep is in a union to help prevent victimisation, but also as non-union reps status, means that they only have to be “consulted”.
First identify the issue, collect information- get information from workers (questionnaires are useful)- then carry out a site inspection. The Safety reps should hold a meeting to discuss the information and what to do about it. At the meeting workers should elect a representative (responsible to all workers and recallable at any time by them) to take up the issues with the employer, and to meet with other Safety reps to co-ordinate activities and pool information and resources.
Like any other workplace issue, workers' strength and unity is a basic requirement to both prevent victimisation and to push management to make improvements. Reps should get an office, access to a telephone and fax, time off with pay to attend union training courses and use of a suitable room for meetings. It may require flexing our industrial muscle to gain these rights.

In our hands
It is important to recognise that health and safety standards can only be established and maintained through taking collective action. Workers need to cut through the bureaucracy that has given the impression that you can only get anything done if you go through the right channels. These exist to individualise the problem and diffuse them into “non-conflict”, time consuming procedures, designed to manage disruption by administering control through mollifying only the worse excesses.
It is the profits that the boss is worried about losing, not lives and limbs. So lets hit them, where it hurts, in the pocket. Health and safety issues also challenge the bosses' control of the workplace.

If workers want to win real gains in health and safety, including decent basic wages, the lack of which give rise to many dangerous working practises we see, and to end life threatening conditions. We need to organise independently of full time union officials and if needs be against and beyond them. We need to organise as industrial workers, not as craft workers with different unions or nationalities. It is only on the basis of class solidarity that any lasting gains will be made.

This leaflet was written by workers for workers.
Produced by the Solidarity Federation.
For futher information and advice; www.solfed.org or
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