Health & Safety: Stay Woke!

 

I enjoyed a couple of days walking in the Yorkshire Dales on Monday and Tuesday this week, our little group undeterred by the rain and gales that ushered in the New Year - somehow we had picked the intersection of two yellow level weather warnings for our hikes.

Monday was the easier day though and through the slowly clearing mist, we came within view of the iconic Ribblehead viaduct.

It is an imposing sight, even from over a mile away, beloved of both walkers and railway enthusiasts. Yet it is also a tragic one.

Constructed in the early 1870s, the viaduct and nearby Bleamoor rail tunnel were the last major works in the UK constructed purely by hand: no machines, just human and animal labour. Miles from any towns, the workers and often their families lived in a shanty settlement next to their work site in dangerous, unsanitary and exposed conditions.

Over 400 people died on the site from work accidents and disease over about three years of construction. Some 200 were buried in the churchyard at nearby Chapel-le-Dale, the dead far outnumbering the living in the tiny hamlet. We visited it and saw a tiny plaque that commemorates them there today. It is a shocking testimony of what happens in an unregulated, profit-focussed economy.

These days, of course, the media and many populist commentators and grifter politicians rubbish our modern health and safety laws as "woke", denouncing them as nonsensical - the implication being that they are not needed.

Yet consider this: before the Health & Safety at Work Act came into force just over 50 years ago in October 1974, the carnage from Ribblehead and Bleamoor continued in workplaces throughout the UK. There was some safety legislation, but it was piecemeal and often poorly enforced, if at all.

In 1947, just under 1,700 people died from workplace accidents in British mines, quarries, factories and railways alone: no figures were collected for other sectors.

Many more were injured and a 1958 report estimated over 2 million workers had chronic work-related respiratory illnesses. Even in 1974, in the year the Health and Safety at Work Act was implemented, nearly 2 people died every day in workplace accidents - 651 in total.

Five decades on, and with a significantly larger workforce, deaths have fallen drastically - 138 in 2023/4, a decline of nearly 80% since the law (and subsequent amendments and regulations) was introduced. The UK faces many problems and more still needs to be done, but, in the formal economy at least, it is one of the safest places to work. Thousands of lives have been saved, and possibly millions of injuries avoided.

So, next time we hear the agents of chaos declare we don't need "woke" safety rules, let's stay awake. It's the least we can do for those souls lost hacking their way through the Yorkshire hills all these years ago.

The Spirit of Free Enterprise

The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the Business Secretary, the foot-in-mouth ballroom dancer Vince Cable, is likely to exempt small businesses from most employment law protection for staff. It isn't clear yet, but the exemptions seem set to reduce further the rights of millions of ordinary people, potentially allowing their employers to bully them, treat them unfairly and dismiss them with some ease. Although the Con Dem Government already accepts that Britain has one of the most "flexible" work forces in the world, apparently some folk are not tugging forelocks far or flexibly enough not to traumatise our nascent entrepreneurs. So what little practical protection exists for swathes of low paid, temporary, part-time, often female staff, will be taken away.

All to help unleash the spirit of free, but evidently not fair, enterprise.

Sacking with CONfidence (Part 3)

On the morning after the beginning of the latest series of The Apprentice, it was somehow ironically appropriate that Lib Dem Business Minister Ed Davey announced that the Government have now moved on from their plans to reduce individual employment protection (see Sacking with CONfidence Parts 1 & 2) to signal an assault on collective redundancy rights.

Currently, employers can make staff redundant as long as they put up a pretty simple business reason for doing so (which can be about as straightforward as just wanting to make some basic changes to the way they do things); where 20 or more people are affected by the same proposal, there are some timescales which are applied - if 20 people are affected, there must be at least 30 days consultation on a scale rising to 90 days consultation for more than 100 people. (Lower than 20, there must be "adequate" consultation, which ACAS have indicated should normally be around two weeks). The need to consult does not remove the employers' ability to proceed - it simply means that where a significant number of people may lose their livelihoods, there is an obligation to consult on alternatives to redundancy and on the process being undertaken (such as the criteria to be used for selecting precisely which staff will lose their jobs).

You're Fired! A bit more flexibility needed for Lord Sugah!

The Government today has decided that this is no good - in the free market profiteers lexicon that informs their thinking, consultation on people's livelihoods reduces industrial flexibility and so it is up for a full review, along with long established protection where jobs are transferred from one company to another (the TUPE - Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment regulations). TUPE is intended to fit with the European-wide Acquired Rights Directive, which provides protection to employees throughout the European Union. Under this, if their employer's business is merged with another, their employment rights and terms and conditions must be at least as good as before. Britain may struggle to amend TUPE and still meet the legal requirements of the ARD, but it looks like our plucky ConDem masters are up for it.

How any of this will help the Government claimed objective of making it easier to employ staff, who knows? At present, you have to work two years to qualify for a maximum statutory redundancy payment of precisely £800 or 2 weeks pay, whichever is the lower - what a massive cost! The bankers must quake in fear when they think about having to shelve out so much to their cleaners. see what you'd get by clicking HERE, because who knows, one day it could be you.

It will be interesting to see how the new shout-out-loud Lib Dems face up to this: they have never been particularly sound on employees rights (really weird, given that by an overwhelming margin, most workers are employees) and they have been itching for decades to get rid of the Working Time Directive (in spite of being all in favour of it back in the early 1990s when they were so in favour of the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty). And of course, faux rebel Vince Cable, Business Secretary, will be ultimately responsible for the review of the legislation. Now doesn't that just so fill you with confidence?

God bless Blighty, land of the low paid and the maximum profit shareholders...

Sacking with CONfidence

It was only a matter of time: having picked off the disabled, the elderly, the public sector and others, the Conservative Government is now turning its attention to slashing employment rights of British workers. The Business Secretary, the loose-talking Lib Dem stooge, Vince Cable, who used to work for such enlightened employers as BSkyB, has just announced a consultation process on changes to employment protection law. Among other measures designed to make it ever harder for workers to secure any protection against ill-treatment, the proposals will double the period of time employees need to work before gaining legal protection against unfair dismissal. If, as is almost certain, this neo-liberal "flexibility" measure goes through to the statute book, staff will have to work for two years rather than the current one year before they can seek any redress if their boss just looks at them one day and tells them to get out.

Government Gangmaster-in-chief Vince Cable

The Great Myth is that the current employment protection laws we have are dreadfully complicated, cost employers millions of pounds and make it virtually impossible to sack anyone, even if they are useless at their job/thieves/never at work, etc. The media regale us again and again with tales of people getting hundreds of thousands of pounds because their line manager looked at them the wrong way - political correctness gone mad!

Except none of it is true.

Employers can pretty much dismiss with impunity as long as they follow a set procedure and have reasonable grounds for their decision. Only if they dismiss someone (presently with more than 12 months service) without good reason or without following a process that complies with the ACAS Code of Conduct is there any chance that an Employment Tribunal will find against them - and in total just one in ten submitted unfair dismissal claims actually reach a full hearing and win.. Even if an employer loses a case and unfair dismissal is found to have occurred, the average award made to an unfairly dismissed employee is a paltry £9,120. The median award was just slightly over £4,000 in 2009-10.

The average award is therefore about five months' pay for the average earner, even although they have been found by law to have lost their livelihood.unfairly and will almost certainly struggle to find other work. And even worse, in 40% of cases where unfair dismissal is found to have happened, no award at all is made. So, in other words, less than 6% of submitted claims of unfair dismissal end up in a tribunal hearing where a financial award is made against the employer.

To claim this protection makes it difficult for employers to hire and fire staff, stifling entrepreneurship and preventing job opportunities for people who need work, is quite frankly a pernicious lie. Doubling the period without protection will help no one apart from unscrupulous slavers who want even longer to be able to "let people go" with absolutely no need to account for their actions, regardless of the impact on people and society.

There are, to be acknowledged, some "no-win-no-fee" legal firms that do sometimes lead to groundless claims being submitted in the hope of getting a compromise payment from a former employer, but tribunals already have the power to dismiss frivolous claims. Doubling the period of protection will by contrast simply leave innocent people vulnerable to the employers' they depend on for their livelihoods even longer - a shocking power imbalance. Ironically too, it may lead to some reluctance among staff to look for new jobs, reducing healthy turnover in many companies or organisations - if you are reasonably secure in your current job, why would you want to go and find another one if it meant that for 24 months you could be dismissed on a whim?

If society is about more than making money for owners, serious reform of our employment laws is needed. Capitalists argue that employers create employment for workers and so must be given the advantage in our economic arrangements. For this reason, British employment law is even now based on the traditional legal concept of the rules of "Master and Servant", whereby the master (the employer) has an absolute power over the servant (the employee) who in turn has an absolute obligation to obey. Thanks largely to the efforts of the trade unions, statute law has mitigated this appalling construct to some extent, but it remains core to the way the employment relationship functions. Yet where would employers be without their staff? As often touted in management manuals and corporate propaganda, businesses are their people - so the law should expect businesses to treat their people with some respect and dignity.

This blog has argued for a fundamentally different, socialist society. In its absence, the only fair alternative would be employment laws which provide protection from day one of employment - this would still allow dismissal if for genuinely fair reasons and via a thorough and fair process; but where unfair dismissal is found, the damages incurred by the employer should be punitive rather than the piss-poor half-hearted compensatory ones that currently apply.

The media and the Government of course will rail that such an arrangement would damage business. Yet even many of the people who write such twaddle ignore the fact that they are employees themselves, along with over 85% of working people and as such potentially subject to the arbitrary action of their employers. Fortunately, not all employers behave in unfair or arbitrary ways, but many people have suffered greatly at the hands of those who do, and if Vince Cable and his gang-masters have their way, these hands will be even more maliciously powerful than they have been in nearly two decades.