How Real is Worker Involvement in Health and Safety?
| Pages | 4-7 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb054975 |
| Published date | 01 April 1981 |
| Date | 01 April 1981 |
| Author | Brenda Barrett,Philip James |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
How Real is Worker
Involvement in
Health and Safety?
by Dr Brenda Barrett, Principal Lecturer in Law
and Philip James, Research Assistant in Industrial Relations
Background
The Robens committee on Safety and Health at Work
recognised the cardinal importance of worker co-operation
with management if workplaces were to be made safer
places and believed that worker involvement would help
overcome the apathy which it felt was the primary cause of
accidents at the workplace. The Health and Safety at Work
Act apparently accepted the views of the Committee and
created a statutory framework for individual and collective
involvement in health and safety issues at the workplace.
The Safety Representatives and Safety Committees
Regulations subsequently made under the Act provided for
the appointment of safety representatives by recognised
trade unions possessing a variety of rights and functions.
In doing so, however, they may arguably have owed more
to the philosophy which conceived the Employment Pro-
tection Act's provisions for promoting the improvement of
industrial relations and extension of collective bargaining
than the Select Committee's desire for total workplace in-
volvement.
The Reason for Research
The authors and colleagues at Middlesex Polytechnic
undertook a research project soon after the implementa-
tion of the Health and Safety at Work Act with the objec-
tive of identifying the impact of the Act upon the
workplace. In the light of the prevailing philosophy of
worker involvement it seemed appropriate to include an in-
vestigation of the nature and extent of such participation
in occupational health and safety. The researchers were
particularly anxious to discover whether there was any
evidence that the new emphasis upon collective involve-
ment in safety as demonstrated by the introduction of safe-
ty representatives at the workplace, had obscured other
workplace developments of equal significance related to
personal involvement of individual workers. The purpose
of this article is to report the main findings obtained with
regard to employee involvement at the individual level,
although reference is also made to some of the more
general observations made in respect of collective involve-
ment.
The validity of this information cannot be denied since
the Act followed the common law tradition of stressing the
personal nature of the relationship between employer and
employee stemmming from the contractual nature of
employment: thus S.2(2)(c) of the Act requires the
employer to provide to all his employees:-
"...such information, instruction, training and supervi-
sion as is necessary..."
and
S.2(3)
requires the employer not only to have an up to
date statement of his safety policy and the arrangements
for carrying out that policy but
"...to bring the statement and any revision of it to the
notice of all his employees".
These duties, which are duties to communicate, are owed
by every employer to all employees, whether or not the
workplace is unionised.
Structure of Project
The project took the form of an initial survey of 26 fac-
tories in the London area and a subsequent in-depth study
of safety issues at six of the sites visited in the survey: at
both stages attempts were made to find out about worker
involvement though information was also collected on a
number of other issues such as management structure,
safety organisation, safety costing and training. The
research activity was extended over a three-year period and
involved a number of academic disciplines, since one of the
objectives of the exercise was to evaluate the performance
of the factories involved by the criteria of different
disciplines: for this reason the research team included an
accountant, a sociologist, a lawyer and an expert in train-
ing.
The project was intended to be
an experiment in empirical research
and to suggest criteria for later
studies. The first objective was achieved:
the second may yet be reached
The exercise was lengthy and detailed but the authors
would nevertheless like to make clear at the outset that
they are very well aware that the project was so limited in
scale that its findings can do no more than provide some il-
lustrations of what is happening and suggest some
hypotheses as to workplace practices. The project was in-
tended to be an experiment in empirical research and to
suggest criteria for later studies. The first objective was
achieved: the second may yet be reached.
Message from the Sample Survey
The survey of the 26 companies was carried out in 1977
and took the form of a structured interview with the
member of the management team who was most directly
responsible for safety on the
site:
thus in most instances the
person interviewed was a manager performing the safety
function either as a full-time or a part-time appointment.
The selection of factories could not be claimed to be scien-
tific:
the only criteria were that factories be relatively near
to the Polytechnic and be engaged in engineering pro-
4 | Employee
Relations
3,4
1981
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