Why are trade unions obsessed with health and safety?

British trade unions are obsessed with health and safety. What was once seen as a matter of fighting to improve conditions within dangerous manual industries against the ruthless drive for profits and efficiency is now a major organising principle of trade union activity, above all, in the modern service sector.

Every year the number of workplace fatalities and serious injuries has declined, to a record low of 151 fatalities in Britain last year. You would think that this downward trend would be seen as a generally positive development, even if these figures largely reflect the declining numbers of people working in the manual sectors where the majority of these fatalities take place as well as the technological developments that have made these industries safer over time. However, for the unions, this figure is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we face new and just as dangerous risks to our health that are not accurately reflected in the figures or taken seriously by the government and employers – who play “fast and loose” with our lives.

For example, in its recent report The Case for Health and Safety, the TUC claims that ‘workplaces are dangerous places’, whose dangers are ‘downplayed by the selective use of statistics’. The TUC estimates that ‘at least 20,000 die every year of occupational injury and disease, but the real figure could be nearer twice that’. In addition, the number of injuries that “should” have been reported last year was around a quarter of a million. Furthermore, it claims that between 1.2 and 2.2 million people currently suffer from work-related health problems; generally through minor musculoskeletal and mental ill-heath problems brought on, or made worse, by work.

But are the modern workplaces really such dangerous places that health and safety concerns need to become the overriding concern of contemporary trade unions? To me, it seems that as a result of the decline of trade unionism since the 1980s, health and safety has become a key mechanism for recruitment and “activism”, and above all a means of fighting for things that in the past would have been fought for on their own terms and through the process of industrial relations. For example, rather than fighting job cuts on the grounds of people’s need for a job or a living wage, the automatic response is to highlight the dangers any cuts will put employees and/or the public in, plus the mental anguish the process of cutting is likely to cause the workforce. And the attempts to impose cuts in the first place is itself seen as an act of “bullying” by a heartless management on a largely “vulnerable” workforce.

This explains the predictable (over-)reaction of the unions to the current Coalition government’s review of health and safety laws and compensation culture by former Thatcherite minister, Lord Young. What they see as a typically Conservative reaction to Daily Mail-type stories of “elf and safety gone mad”, is automatically interpreted as an attack on safe working conditions. What’s implied is that those nasty Tories are deliberately putting our lives at risk with their disregard for bureaucratic regulations and form-filling. This, in turn, provides the unions with one of the few means of appearing dynamic and radical and putting management under any kind of pressure.

However, the TUC and unions’ criticism of health and safety’s conservative critics is also highly selective. It ignores the often healthy cynicism, and even contempt, with which many of their own members regard the issue of health and safety. That is not just the understandable reaction to the sometimes true, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes false stories of council over-zealousness or official risk-avoidance, but the fact that health and safety in the modern workplace appears to be seen as a joke by much of the workforce.

However, while many of us may share the same feelings of anger or exasperation of the archetypal Mail reader, what this superficial reaction misses is actually a deeper cultural problem than the compensation culture and over-regulation of everyday life that is targeted by the Young Report.

What we’ve seen over the last two decades is a growth of a risk-averse culture, underpinned by a diminished view of the individual and our ability to cope with change and what used to be considered as the normal pressures of work. Where once people were seen as capable of changing the world around them, not least through trade union campaigns for better pay, conditions and rights, now we are seen by the trade union bureaucracy itself as “vulnerable workers”, an ever-widening definition, pushed, pulled and put at risk by circumstances over which we have little control.

This diminished view of people is in turn reflected in a heightened sense of danger, in which minor problems are automatically turned into threats to our mental and physical well-being. Hence, even the likes of the modern service sector that so many of us work in, which was never traditionally seen as a place of health and safety concern, is now seen as equally, if not more, dangerous to our health than the manufacturing sectors of the past.

To be fair, with the decline of any sense of social or workplace solidarity and of trade unionism itself, it’s not surprising that individuals may experience the antagonisms and conflicts of the both wage-labour and workplace relationships in a more atomised and individuated fashion. What is unforgivable though is that the unions actively promote and encourage such an outlook.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Paul Thomas has worked as a civil servant in Leeds for over 20 years. He’s a member of his union’s branch executive committee, and an organiser of Leeds Salon. He spoke at the Battle of Idea debate ”Slippery when wet: is health and safety a left-right issue?” on Sunday 31 October. The next Leeds Salon is ”The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate – What Now?” with Professor Raymond Tallis on Monday 13 December at Old Broadcasting House, Leeds.

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