Workers’ Memorial Day falls every year on 28 April. It is a day when trade unions throughout the world commemorate and remember workers who have been injured or killed at work.
This year the day is being marked in conjunction with the TUC’s Day of Action to Fight for the Living and therefore it is important that workers and Labour party members unite to draw attention to this coalition government’s nasty attack on health and safety law.
The effect of this attack will be to destroy the consensus that has existed around health and safety for the last 40 years. For the best part of that time I have been a full-time official of my union and I have witnessed the significant improvements in health and safety in the workplace, including under the last Labour government.
Unfortunately, I have also witnessed the horrendous effects of poor health and safety management.
The explosion at the Port Talbot blast furnaces, in Wales, just over 10 years ago, killed three of our members and seriously injured many more. This week our members at the plant will remember those involved in the explosion with a service at a memorial garden, which has been created to commemorate those workers.
Regulation, enforcement, personal injury compensation, guidance, codes of practice and standards are all things that are regularly lumped together in lazy attacks on ‘elf’n’safety’. But they are also things that underpin people’s daily working lives and ensure that people don’t risk death or injury just by going to work. All this is under threat from the Tory-led government’s deregulatory agenda, as clearly demonstrated by the prime minister himself when he said earlier this year:
‘So this coalition has a clear new year’s resolution: to kill off the health and safety culture for good. I want 2012 to go down in history not just as Olympics year or diamond jubilee year, but the time we get a lot of this pointless time-wasting out of the British economy and British life once and for all.’
The prime minister seems oblivious to the fact that employers’ ‘failures’, like the Port Talbot explosion, combine to cost the country over £14bn every year.
As a progressive union we try to work together with good employers to improve working conditions and reduce accidents and on the whole we are successful.
We are also looking to develop new partnerships with employers to develop occupational health programmes for our members and also to look at how we combine health and safety with the new climate change and environmental agenda.
To achieve this we require the support and expertise from the Health and Safety Executive. One of the many fundamental flaws in the government plan is that cuts to the HSE will undermine their role in improving health and safety by advising employers and businesses.
This is compounded by the message the government is sending out to employers by implying that the laws are unnecessary and do not matter, that health and safety is not important and that there is no need for rules and regulations.
That will mean that more and more workers will be put at risk, made ill and killed or injured at work.
Community will continue to campaign for safer workplaces and a better health and safety system to protect our members, whether this is by working together with employers for better conditions or fighting government for better regulation.
As part of Workers’ Memorial Day events, we are also asking our members to lobby their local MPs and I will be writing to David Cameron to voice our members’ concern over this government’s shabby and opportunistic approach to health and safety.
Rather than engaging in an ‘elf’n’safety’ public relations campaign to endear himself to unscrupulous bosses and the right-wing media, the prime minister should listen to his own government’s reviews like the Löfsted report and focus his effort on reducing the UK’s ill-health, accident and fatalities statistics.
As we mourn the dead on Workers’ Memorial Day, we also renew our resolve to fight for the living – a fight that Labour must take to the Tory-led government.
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Michael Leahy is general secretary of Community the union
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I had my accident at work on a Sunday, pushing to complete a contract running behind time, I did the safety checks, started to put the lifting platform up to 96ft when a loud crash bang and it broke and I fell 45ft I landed on my feet, passed out work up with an ambulance crew arguing whether an helicopter should be brought in, I had to remind people it was an Oil refinery and no fly zone.
taken to hospital by an ambulance crew of a driver who did not drive to emergencies, and the second chap who pushed beds around, it was the days of Thatchers NHS .
That was Sunday Monday my employer turned up checked to see if I was alive, they left, on Tuesday I received my P45 they said I had broken company regulations, but they forgot I was the foreman and they had sent me a letter saying they wanted the work force to work seven days a week to end the contract. A week later they said they had no choice but to re-employ me due to then company solicitors.
13 years of fighting for compensation until I got so tired of all the mucking around ten medicals all came back saying, he’s paraplegic, ten more saying he’s only got a bad back, then I had a medical carried out at Stoke Mandeville , which stated his bladder and bowel and his sexual function all gone he’s without doubt Paraplegic.
I decided to tell them to stuff the compensation was causing me more problems then I needed so I dropped the claim my Union was not interested , and it was causing me more mental health problems.
And then I heard labour talk about scroungers work shy and lazy, that was enough for me to leave the party, a middle class middle England party talking about health and safety like Elf’n and safety says it all really, then you have work shy scroungers middle England Middle class political party.
says it all really
dear treborc – well finally, we have waited a long time for your story here and I am glad you have finally shared it with us,yes your anger went on and on and on,all directed at the Labour Party but I have noticed they have never turned you away. I have tried to imagine what your story might be,I think you have mentioned ‘wheelchair’ before so I thought you might be ex-military,and I have suggested before that you
get help as you were obviously in pain emotionally. I agree, sod the middle ,left or right choose your side-well for now anyway until there is more bloody room in the middle for the greater proportion of society to have a decent environment to raise their children, work and get some fun out of life. Did you manage to talk to your MP about getting any further legal help and your doc about social support .Hang in there ,we are your mates ,even though I have found you bloody annoying – but now I understand ,forgive me.
No thank mate Labour wells beyond me.
It’s incredible how many left wingers don’t want Police or The Army to bre prtected (in the Mainland) by being given the right equipent, Stab proofvests, allwed ammuntion when needed, yet,IF it was pointed out to these people that the Poilice are entitled to protection under Health and safety laws, these “left wingers” go all quiet.