With the top job at the HSE soon to be vacated by chief executive Geoffrey Podger, comes the news that every Union Safety Rep and every trade unionist concerned about health and safety at work protection will applaud; Hazards editor Rory O’Neill is aiming at taking over the role of the leadership of the Health and Safety Executive!
Launching his bid via a new Facebook page, ‘We Love Red Tape’and writing in Hazards, he makes promises as to what a new HSE should look like:
“Hazards editor Rory O'Neill wants to reinvent the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as a forceful defender of workers, safety laws and enforcement. He is asking you to back his bid for HSE's top job.
Workplace health and safety is about you. It’s about blood and sweat, not pounds and pence. You are not a variable in the company accounts, you are a human being. You are not mollycoddled.
You work hard and it can hurt your body and hurt your brain. For tens of thousands in the UK each year, work is fatal. You deserve better protection.
You want it?
Then support Hazards editor Rory O’Neill for the leadership of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
With the man from Hazards installed as the new chief executive, you’ll see a very different kind of safety watchdog.
The all new HSE will not apologise for standing up for your health and safety; it will not flinch from chasing down and exposing the safety criminals. It will shout loud that the problem at work is not too much red tape, it is too many bloody bandages.”
Rory has the background required to replace Geoffrey Prodger and change the HSE into what it was originally created for – defence of worker’s protecting them from injuries and death at work and to work with employers to ensure risks are minimised; and prosecute those who break the law!
Rory O'Neill is editor of Hazards magazine and website www.hazards.org, professor of occupational health, safety and environmental policy at Stirling University and co-moderates the global unions' health, safety and environment e-lists.
As well as experience as a union rep both locally and internationally, he's been a consultant for international union bodies including ITUC and ETUC and global unions including IndustriALL and BWI and has represented unions at international agencies including the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Commission for Sustainable Development.
He has spoken on the workers' perspective on workplace health and safety at conferences in Europe, Australia, Brazil, the USA and Canada.
Rory has played a key role in global campaigns on issues from asbestos to pesticides to behavioural safety (he's not impressed with any of them). He's also worked in GP surgeries, the health service, bakeries, on building sites, behind a bar, for workers' health and safety centres and as a drystone waller. And other places.
Such credentials make him THE prime candidate for the post as Chief Executive of the Health and Safety Executive!
Source: Hazards / Rory O'Neill / Unionsafety
