Hazards Conference 2009
Bhopal - Satinath Sarangi
It is now 25 years since the Bhopal plant disaster which left poison gas streaming over residential areas of the city. Choking, coughing people were woken by their symptoms and proceeded to make a run for it, breathing in more of the fumes from the factory. Many drowned in their own body fluids.
Union Carbide blamed the workforce; specifically a worker who wanted to spoil a batch - an ‘industrial terrorist'. No evidence has ever been advanced in pursuit of this claim and the worker was never named. There were of course many real causes, managerial, technical, operational.
Union Carbide has halved the workforce at the site. Terrible working conditions exist and the workforce are all contract workers who are laid off when they get sick. Medical bills for those who get sick at work are never paid.
The Bhopal site was under-designed compared with a site in Virginia, USA. Safety mechanisms were removed from the plan for the site.
More than 100,000 people have serious health issues resulting from the gas released. They can not work. Many were sacked or lost their jobs when plant was closed down, including a textile mill and paper mill.
Unions are still active in this campaign.
Union Carbide have only ever offered $500 per person for the lifelong injuries caused.
This kind of thing is happening more and more in India, where foreign companies can wholly own local companies. Special Economic Zones exist where no law constrains the companies that set up there. For example India has hugely reduced import tax on Asbestos when many Indian ministers own Asbestos companies.
TUC - Hugh Robertson
HSE are 40% down in prosecutions over 5 years. The penalties are getting lower and lower, and the courts don't appreciate how serious H&S offences are.
While the HSE budget is protected for this year and the next 2 years, this means a steady drop in budget when inflation is taken into account.
Local Authority enforcement is in freefall.
We need more regulation and not less. The Government's position is that all new H&S law must come from Europe. The EU itself is, like the UK, in deregulatory mode. The UK government sees regulation as a burden on business. Businesses however will not regulate themselves.
In a recession, there is less investment in safety and cuts on Occupational Health programmes. There will be a fall in injury rates, but this can be explained by a drop in construction rates.
Green jobs - a misnomer. The recycling injury is extremely hazardous and occupational health risks are many due to exposure to heavy metals, chemicals and carcinogens. It is badly managed and unregulated.
Global warming will lead to higher temperatures, flooding and new diseases and the UK that currently we avoid because of lower temperatures. We need a legal minimum temperature for the workplace and to stop building glass and concrete greenhouses as office buildings.
In Occupational Health terms, we have high stress in the UK economy. Asthma, dermatitis and cancers are still a great problem and weak regulation exacerbate these.
Vulnerable workers remain at risk - migrant workers are part of an invisible and unregulated economy with no employment rights. We need to see this stopped and rights given to these people. The gangmasters laws should be extended to the construction industry.
Safety reps are still finding it hard to get time off, and lower union membership means that there are fewer of them. They need greater support from their own unions, and there should be new duties on employers including a responsibility to respond in a timeframe to written enquiries from the H&S rep. We also need to use the rights we've already got!
Charley Richardson - USA
There is great fear and inequality in the USA. Workers exposed to Cadmium were afraid to call in OSHA since they thought the company would simply shut the plant in response.
The LEAN model is being aggressively pursued:
- Ø Deskilling
- Ø Speed-up
- Ø Job combination
- Ø Automation
- Ø Moveable work - precarious employment
This is happening in the UK as well. The USA serves as a warning.
Companies increasingly monitor their employees by tagging and chipping them so they can check on their whereabouts at any particular time. They are also moving to eliminate microbreaks - the time the body needs to recover from the work it is doing - which increases the risk of injury, accidents, tiredness and occupational ill health.
Outsourcing and moveability of work is common and workers live with the threat of the whole plant being moved for greater profit. X rays scanned in America are being read in Australia. Patients are being sent to other countries to save treatment costs. Even Wendy's drive through calls are received by a call centre up to 3000 miles away.
Union strength in the states is only 14%.
Nancy Lessin - USA
Blame the workers is a popular approach in the USA. Workers need to ‘stay out of the line of fire' and when accidents happen, the worker has had the accident. Plan procedures and policies have nothing to do with it. After an accident, drug testing is commonplace and sometimes mandatory.
Under OSHA's voluntary protection programme, good injury and illness rates and passing planned inspections means that there are no OSHA inspections on the site. On Dec 14 2004, a worker was crushed in a machine. The plant stayed in the OSHA programme.
Trade union legislation in the states is in development whereby it may be easier to join a union; a majority of workers will be recognised. There will be penalties for violating the law. However, the law has not been passed. President Obama remains silent on the subject.
Getting the best from your enforcer
Making contact with the HSE:
HSE Helpline is run by a private contractor - DO NOT RING THE HELPLINE
HSE have taken their local office numbers off the website.
HSE offices do have a MAP on the website, giving a local office number.
RING THIS NUMBER.
HSE complaints officer, desk bound role - will write to a company telling them how they breach the regulations on the union's behalf. The complaint stays on their record.
Tutor wrote the GMB Safety Reps handbook - get hold of a copy - it may be online.
Any letters we send go on electronic file and the tutor recommended we send a paper letter as this will receive more careful attention and be more difficult to ignore.
Contacting HSE:
- Ø Get personal contact details
- Ø Exhaust internal options first
- Ø Document and contact HSE
- Ø Talk to them on the phone
- Ø Identify recent inspections
- Ø Inspectors must talk to you under SRSC regs
- Ø 2006 Worker involvement topic pack - must discuss with reps on visit, in private if necessary.
There is a new HSE strategy to involve workers to examine industrial relations issues.
The HSE has a database of inspections and prosecutions - you can look up your employer.
- Ø You can write to the HSE asking for information about these.
- Ø You can use FOI - they have to supply the information requested
- Ø They may redact personal information
What else can we do?
- Ø Organise campaigns
- Ø Contact UNISON regional office
- Ø Go to the press
- Ø Write to the HSE indicating why a decision not to prosecute is wrong
- Ø Involve the Hazards campaign and FACK (Families Against Corporate Killing)
The HSE may re-investigate if they feel they may have reached the wrong conclusion.
CPS may also be pushed to prosecute by the HSE.
HSE prosecuted the Met Police. An officer chasing a criminal across a roof fell through the roof to his death. HSE were ‘crucified' in court. Big changes in police procedures came about however - risk assessments were completed after this.
H&S in a Recession Economy - Hugh Robertson
Injury rates go down during a recession. HSE fatalities down 20%. However, this may because last year the HSE had a blitz on inspections of construction sites.
Less construction - less new workers - less long hours.
More refurbishment work is going on - high injury rates.
There are real cuts in Occupational Health and stress related illness will increase. Workers are far less secure during a recession and lack confidence in speaking up about working conditions for that very reason.
The biggest risk however is not the recession itself but the conditions as we emerge.
- Ø H&S falls down the agenda
- Ø New companies know nothing of H&S and nothing about managing people
- Ø Sales are critical for new companies - not H&S
Active safety reps are more important now than ever.
H&S in a Recession Economy - Charlie Richardson
In Chicago, when a company threatened to move the plant to where they could find a cheaper workforce, the workers took the equipment until they could get guarantees of severance pay.
We have to hold on to our power in the workplace. We are not management's partner in the good times and we must avoid being a junior partner in the bad times.
‘Hijacking the collective' - where management offers engagement not offered by the unions - the employees take it.
In the USA, when you lose your job you lose your union. A study in the USA has shown that those who do lose their jobs are less socially active in all ways for the rest of their lives.
A ‘Take care of ME' culture exists in the USA - rather than collective action.
Recruitment - engage with Trades Councils and Tenants Associations.
Stress should be dealt with by preventing it in the first place. 10 minutes CBT is not the answer!
Debate - safety reps rights
This was a very active debate. Many members felt that for major unions, workplace reps were part of a co-ordinated set of activities right across the board - an army of workers for the same cause. However, we felt that safety reps were not seen like that by their unions; they were seen as working on their own to an individual agenda in one specific location.
Many felt that unions had let their safety reps down, providing no backing for them. I asked why, for example, there was a lot of information given to reps about their rights, but no co-ordinating document to be handed to the employer when a safety rep takes up the position.
Since this was the case, management felt within their rights to claim total ignorance of the SRSC regulations, and force the reps to justify their time off, and even their existence, over and over again. The group felt that when safety reps looked for support, they were suddenly on their own.
Additionally, I commented that UNISON, in offering a 3 day course, essentially was wholly injurious to the education of a safety rep, since the existence of this course meant that some reps would never be allowed to do anything else, and particularly not allowed to complete the TUC safety reps courses. I said that a safety rep should be on track to complete all of the safety reps courses where they chose to do so and should be backed by their unions; it wasn't enough to do an introductory course and stop there.
We agreed that all unions should work together to improve the lot of safety reps and to remind employers of the rights we have and make sure that these are taken up and backed solidly.
We were advised that if paid release is not granted then an ET1 form should be submitted following at least stage 1 of the grievance procedure.
Final Plenary
We announced the findings of various debates which should shortly appear on the website.
Unfortunately, as I suspected, some reps took the conference as a holiday and didn't attend anything at all; the campaign organisers were going to discuss how to deal with this.
I find this desperately annoying - branches should not be sending ‘inactivists' anywhere - we need to root these people out.
Presenters
Satinath Sarangi founded the Bhopal group for Information and Action and is a leader in the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, and is managing trustee of Sambhavna trust which provides health care for survivors of the gas leak and subsequent pollution.
Hugh Robertson Senior Policy Advisor for H&S TUC
Charley Richardson Former Director of the Labor Extension Program, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Nancy Lessin Project Co-ordinator, United Steelworkers' Tony Mazzocchi Center for Health, Safety and Environmental Education
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