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CWU Gives Cautious Welcome To New HSE Strategy

The CWU has given a cautious welcome to New HSE 5 year Strategy (launched this month June 2009) and Called on the HSE to get tough on Management Failings with strong safety law Enforcement and to give better support and protection to Safety Representatives .

150 Conference delegates, including many Safety Representatives attended a fringe meeting at the CWU Annual Conference in Bournemouth earlier this month where the guest speakers was Judith Hackitt Chair of the HSE and Hugh Robertson health and safety officer from the TUC.

CWU National Health and Safety Officer Dave Joyce addressed the meeting and said "CWU welcomes the HSE's new 'Be part of the solution' Strategy and looks forward to at least attempting to engage all our employers and the enforcers within the strategy goals but the Union will be looking for the HSE to back it up and get tough on the employers, managers and Directors who create risks and provide no controls - making workers sick, injured or killing them." 

Dave said "Employers are saying all the right things but it’s not what employers say that is important but what they do, and that means consulting and involving safety reps, complying with basic risk prevention measures and being held fully accountable for their actions or omissions with strong enforcement by HSE Inspectors. The emphasis of the new HSE strategy should be on ensuring management meets its safety duties. Tackling management failure is key in reducing the number of workplace fatalities and accidents in the UK. There's no place for a softly, softly approach to breaches."

Dave added "The HSE must stop relying on voluntary action and should instead take a more active enforcement role and should now support the Unions in pressing the health and safety minister for the introduction of statutory directors' duties. Trade unions have collectively called on the Health and Safety Executive to ensure that their new strategy addresses management failings and this should be backed up by new legal safety duties on company directors."

Dave went on "As we in CWU know - the burden of poor health and safety is mostly borne by workers and their families in heartbreak and distress – in an industry with unacceptable levels of accidents and ill health. The HSE’s ‘Be part of the solution’ strategy adopts some strong language on the effects of bad health and safety on workers, the need for more justice and accountability, health and safety as a right not a privilege, and the role of the HSE as an enforcer which the CWU very much welcomes."

Dave stressed, "We welcome the Strategy’s emphasis on ‘The need for strong leadership’ and on “Worker Involvement” and Safety Reps in particular are the key in this. New HSE guidance on Worker Involvement was issued at the end of last year and time will tell its effectiveness. CWU Safety Reps face managers lack of compliance every day in what can be a challenging job at the best of times. Operational managers who ignore even their own Safety Managers are all too familiar and that’s why CWU supports the need for new positive health and safety legal duties on directors rather than the voluntary guidance currently in place which isn’t working because it doesn’t hold those responsible to account."

"The new Strategy invites all employers to sign up to a pledge to Agree to play a part in reducing the numbers of work-related deaths, injuries and ill-health in Great Britain - to put health and safety at the heart of what they do – to recognise the importance of health and safety and to commit to working with the Health and Safety Executive and its partners and to ‘Be Part of the Solution’, the strategy theme. Lets hope they all sign up." 

Dave concluded "Lack of enforcement of safety reps rights and of employers' duties towards them undermines the massive and well accepted Union safety reps effect in the workplace and of course we currently have a CWU Safety Rep who’s been suspended for 10 weeks for no good justified reasons other than he was dogmatically doing his job. That’s why CWU has been calling for greater legal rights and protection for Safety Reps for a decade."

You can download the HSE Strategy documetn from the E-Library Database here



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