Health and Safety is No Joke: It’s Our Lives!
Under the title of Workers Memorial Day 2011 - Health and Safety is No Joke: it’s our lives! Dave Joyce, CWU's National Health, Safety & Environment Officer, argues that the Con/Lib-Dem coalition cuts will kill, injure and make more workers sick. He tears apart and nails the six lies the tory led coalition government's uses as excuses to attack and decimate the existing health and safety culture in the UK:
The coalition government’s ideological assault on working people from cradle to grave uses ‘deficit reduction’ as the excuse to make massive cuts in jobs, public
services and welfare benefits. The poorest and most vulnerable are being made to pay the price for the banking crisis. Within this overall assault there is a
massive threat to both the laws and enforcement that protect the safety and the health of all workers, in what will inevitably be a race to the bottom.
Government
cuts of 35% in the budget of the Health and Safety Executive budget and 28% to Local Authorities, will reduce the already ineffective state of policing workplace
safety and health which allows workers to be killed, injured, and made ill at a rate never reported in the tabloid press.
No-one voted for the slashing of the most
basic right to go to work safely and without risk to your short or long term health, and to come home alive and undamaged to your family at the end of the day.
The government rationale for cutting of health and safety protection is based on lies, apocryphal stories and straw man arguments set up by David Cameron,
Lord Young, Chris Grayling and the business lobby, based on tabloid headlines not on facts, evidence or reality.
Lie No.1
Health and Safety in Britain is one of best in world and very few people now hurt by work!
TRUTH: up to 1,500 killed in work related incidents, 250,00 seriously injured up to 50,000 die due to work-related illnesses EVERY YEAR in the UK.
Lie No. 2
Health and Safety has gone mad, it’s over the top, over enforced, over bureaucratic!
TRUTH:
There’s less health and safety laws and regulations now than there was 40 years ago, less paper work, less time required by employers; less spot inspection
of workplaces by HSE Inspectors and LA EHO Inspectors.
Health and Safety Inspectors on average visit UK workplaces about once in every 35 years now and only
1 in 13 major and fatal injuries are investigated.
Health and Safety prosecutions have gone down by 50% over the last 10 years and in 98% of major injuries there is
no enforcement action taken against the employer at all despite the law being broken.
Lie No. 3
Offices, shops, schools are ‘non-hazardous’!
TRUTH:
You’re less likely to be killed or physically injured but these workers face musculo-skeletal risks from working with computers, violence from customers and
pupils, and a whole host of stress related illnesses caused by bullying and harassment, by long hours and excessive workloads.
Lie No. 4
Compensation culture is rife!
TRUTH:
Less than 10% of workers made ill, injured and the families of those killed by work, get any sort of compensation at all and all reports show claims down
except for road traffic incidents.
Lie No 5
Health and safety costs too much!
TRUTH:
Good health and safety saves employers and state money. Poor health and safety costs at least £30 billion EVERY YEAR and who pays? The Public/Tax Payers
via health service and benefits costs – workers and their families pay in heartbreak and poverty. The employers however, who cause the injury and damage pay less
than 25%!
Lie No.6
Health and safety is only common sense, we can do away with laws and enforcement!
TRUTH:
Workers are injured, made ill and killed every day due to employers failing to manage health and safety and all the evidence shows what works is clear safety
laws, strictly enforced to protect workers from ignorant, noncompliant and often criminally negligent employers.
'Workers Memorial Day - Remember the dead - Fight for the living!'
Source: CWU LTB333/11
