Health and Safety
Improving health and safety at work is crucial to the prevention of industrial accidents and diseases. It begins at company level and requires a significant amount of involvement by governments as well as employee and employer organisations. The high safety standards currently in force in certain countries have been shown to result directly from long-term policies promoting tripartite social dialogue, collective bargaining between trade unions and employers, and good health and safety legislation backed up by an efficient labour inspectorate.
At international level, more than 70 Conventions and Recommendations have been issued by the International Labour Organization (ILO). The best-known Convention is the one on occupational safety and health, adopted in 1981.
In Europe, this issue was addressed by the European Social Charter, which guarantees social and economic human rights. The text was adopted in 1961 and revised in 1996 [1]. Its Article 3 recognises the ‘right to safe and healthy working conditions’, and its Article 6 the ‘right to bargain collectively’.
These principles are taken up by the European Union Directives on health and safety, which furthermore promote employee participation.
The Council Framework Directive of 12 June 1989, on the introduction of measures to encourage improvements in the safety and health of workers at work [2], sets out specific methods of organising such participation in the workplace.
The scope of this Directive is broad, since it applies to all sectors of activity, both public and private (industrial, agricultural, commercial, administrative, service, educational, cultural, leisure, etc.), with the exception of the armed forces and the police, as well as ‘certain specific activities in the civil protection services’ which inevitably conflict with it (Article 2).
The text lays down the general framework for prevention in the company and establishes the principle of the responsibility of the employer, but places strong curbs on national rights, in particular by stressing the responsibility of the worker and his/her duty to take care of safety and by introducing a duty to assess risks in the workplace.
The provisions of this Directive appear to raise employee health and safety in the European Union (EU) to a high level, yet many Member States have been slow to comply, as is evident from the state of play regarding its transposition into national legislation.
In practice, there are more than a million employee safety reps across the EU countries; in actual fact, it is the most widespread form of representation.
Coverage of all workers by some form of health and safety representation constitutes a key objective of the trade union movement for the coming years.
Many studies have also found a direct link between the existence of workplace employee reps and the quality of that company’s prevention policies.
However, a significant number of workers in a majority of European countries are deprived of this representation.
Where no such representation exists, the ‘direct’ forms of participation advocated by the employers have proved ineffectual. Indeed, regulations governing this type of participation, adopted in certain EU countries (the United Kingdom and Belgium), have not produced any positive results.
It is therefore useful to investigate how effective the work of employee representatives really is in improving working conditions.
This is the aim of the European research project on employee health and safety reps, or EPSARE [3]. Its main purpose is to identify what factors cause the activities of safety reps to have a positive impact.
[2] Framework Directive 89/391/EEC. The deadline for implementation of this Directive by Member States was set at 31 December 1992.
Source: S. Gazzane - Health and safety representation of employees in EU countries. ETUI-REHS: 2006.
