TUC Group Of Nine Unions Demand Action Over Health & Safety Crimes

The current health and safety legislation and enforcement continues to fail people at work and given the governments trivialisation of health safety as demonstrated by Lord Young's Report, the situation is about to become far worse.

That is the message from the TUC's Co-ordinating Group of nine trade unions who are campaigning to highlight the situation via a rally and lobby of parliament on 2nd March.

The appalling official figures have been challenged repeatedly by health and safety bodies as being inaccurate:

According to the HSE between April 09 and March 10 152 people were fatally injured at work.

There were 26,061 major injuries, such as amputations and burns, to employees 1.3 million people were suffering from an illness believed to have been caused or made worse by their current or past work.

The Campaign Group is also calling for a nationwide week of action health and safety from 28th February to the 5th March. The downloadable campaign document continues:

Yet the 'real' picture is likely to be even more damming given that these statistics relating to fatalities in the workplace provided by the HSE are an underestimate due to reporting inadequacies.

For example, they do not account for those killed in work-related road traffic incidents, those killed at sea, non-workers killed by work activities or indeed those killed by occupational illness (who could number as many as 50,000 per year according to the Hazards Campaign).

The current legislative and enforcement framework is failing to protect workers.

The ConDem Government’s proposals contained in the Young Report (Oct 2010) not only fail to address the problems faced but will make things worse.

On top of this, the HSE is now faced with budget cuts of 35 per cent.
This will mean poorer enforcement and thus more workplace illnesses, injuries and deaths!

Health and safety breaches are crimes. If you kill, injure or hurt someone, you expect to go to jail.

Why is this different if you employ that someone? The fact is that hundreds of people in the UK are killed at work and untold millions suffer from occupational disease.

The Trade Union Co-ordinating Group (TUCG) brings together nine national unions (BFAWU, FBU, NAPO, NUJ, PCS, POA, RMT, UCU and URTU) to co-ordinate campaigning activities.

We are calling a Health and Safety Week of Action from 28th Feb to 5th March.

JOIN US!

Download the pdf document here

 

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