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Derek Maylor gives a brief summary of the main health and safety themse covered by the conference: The Telecom and Financial Sector Conference started with the lack of consultation and the frequent clear misunderstanding of the principles of Risk Management shown by many managers. The second largest debate of the week was concerning the cleaning of the BT estate, only the national call for strike action on pay had more people coming to the rostrum to speak though there was no augments, just angry members opposing the cuts in welfare. A clean and healthy work place would not seem mush to ask. Whilst BT Group is split into many different companies it can be difficult to pin down the owner of a problem, especially if the solution requires money to be allocated. Therefore we are to seek from BT a commitment to establish a single point of contact for such issues. The trail of new safety footwear has started in the North West and the Coord updated colleagues. Several concerns have already been highlighted – but then that is the point of the trial. There was a call for more effort to combat workplace stress specifically in our Customer Contact Centres. We will conduct a survey by November to evaluate the problem and seek urgent solutions. Interestingly, Openreach decided to produce a video for those intersted in health and safety within the BT Group. Derek was featured and this is a quote form part of his interview for the video: “Working together massive benefits, it’s more than extra ideas of opinions. Engaging with the workforce who are going to use new equipment or change working practices at the development or design stage, ensures best practice and real life scenarios. When subsequent equipment i9s then rolled out into the field safety has already been considered by the users – this has to benefit everyone, engineers and the company.”
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The 2010 CWU Annual Conference came to an end on Thursday 27th May. Amongst many issues debated, health and safety was once againa maior topic of debate.