Health & Safety

Last night’s Panorama , entitled “May Contain Nuts” was about “Health and Safety. When I looked at the blurb before the programme, it looked as though it might have been an intelligent riposte to all those mindless – and often simply fabricated – stories in the tabloid press about this or that measure – usually supposed to have been imposed by Brussels – that are supposed to show that we live in a “Nanny State”, and as Charlie Brooker satirised it a few weeks ago, provoke the response, “Its Policial Correctness Gone Mad”! It wasn’t.

The Programme began by referring to a few such stories saying which were true, and which were untrue. But, it made no real attempt to get behind the stories that were true to see if they were as ridiculous as the headlines make them seem. On the one issue where it did do that – the question of whether Musicians in Orchestras would have to wear ear protection where the music exceeded 85 decibels, seemed to reveal that the industry had discussed it with the HSE, and there would be no such requirement. It does raise some important arguments, however, about the way society functions, and at a time when still far too many workers die as a result of their jobs, where an even bigger number are injured or suffer some kind of industrial disease it is important to ensure that the case for Health and Safety is able of being argued without having to first get over a lot of misinformation or bad publicity arising from some of these side issues. After all, the media is quick to pick up on or to make up stories of this kind, and where some big industrial accident occurs like a train crash where they can sell their product by sensationalism they will get involved, but they never have any coverage of the thousands of accidents that ruin the lives of workers every day, or the continual breaches of basis Health and Safety that put workers at risk, or mean that they at least have to work in unsuitable and uncomfortable conditions. And, more and more, where workers do end up with some injury from their employment it is workers who are being blamed for it, or at least they increasingly face being simply sacked for being unfit for the job!

The Programme looked at the issue of gravestones in Nottingham. About 12 years ago, I was working in the Leisure Services Department of the first Council in the country to cause a furore over the issue. Fortunately, I wasn’t in the frontline of responsibility for the issue, but I did have responsibility for investigating what had happened, what had gone wrong, and trying to put measures in place to prevent it happening again. To put it in perspective, the story was taken up by the national newspapers and TV, and feelings were running so high that leading Councillors like my friend John Lockett who was Deputy Leader of the Councillor was getting anonymous phone calls, people congregating outside his house, his car being vandalised and so on. Yet, if his political position had been upheld the problem would never have arisen in the first place. It illustrates a large part of the problem.

In years gone by when Councils employed all their own workers the Grounds Maintenance teams if they were working in a cemetery and saw an unsafe headstone would have just sorted it out themselves. But, after the Tories introduced CCT that wasn’t possible. Contracts had to be entered into, specification documents drawn up and adhered to that spelled out exactly what jobs had to be done, and how much each was to be charged. This meant there was a problem. You couldn’t put into such a document the work that the Council’s workmen had done all those years, because really they shouldn’t have been doing it. The law states clearly that the responsibility for the headstones rests solely with the person who has it erected. Worse than that the Audit Commission that stands over Council’s to check they are not wasting money had even set out guidelines saying that Council’s COULDN’T spend money on doing this work, BECAUSE it wasn’t there responsibility. With private companies winning contracts for Grounds Maintenance work under CCT it was absolutely sure that these private companies would not do work that they were not being paid to do!

There had been a number of deaths in cemeteries, of usually children, where headstones had fallen on to people and crushed them. Even small headstones are very heavy. You wouldn’t want one to fall on your chest, and you can imagine older people easily pulling them over if they use them to help themselves up from kneeling at the graveside. The HSE issued instructions saying that all cemeteries had to be inspected to check for any dangerous headstones, and appropriate action taken. The Head of the Department was very keen on Health and Safety, having worked his way up from working in a Sports Centre, where accidents can occur frequently – just watch the old episodes of the Brittas Empire! So, a programme of inspections was set up, notices were posted on the relevant cemetery telling people that they should check their headstone, because any that were found to be dangerous would be made safe.

The private Grounds maintenance Contractor carried out the inspections, and the result was that hundreds of headstones were laid flat in the cemetery because they were found to be unsafe. Of course, when people went to the cemetery at the weekend there was an uproar. In truth, I think some of it was a bit hypocritical. Having gone around the cemetery myself, it was clear that many of the graves hadn’t been visited for decades. But, that people’s feelings should run so high is understandable for such an emotive subject. On the other hand, the same newspapers that were screaming for blood because the Council had acted to protect people’s safety would have been equally screaming for blood if some child or pensioner had been crushed under a headstone! For a socialist the issue was simple, the Council should just have sorted it as they used to do in the past. But, in the current conditions no Council would do that and face being pulled up, and Councillors surcharged by the Audit Commission for having unnecessarily spent Council Taxpayers’ money.

A similar situation arose at the time over playgrounds. Again there had been a number of fatalities in Council playgrounds, with one Council being sued for £1 million after the death of a child on a swing. For years, as a result of budget cuts the Council I worked for saw its playgrounds increasingly run down and denuded of equipment that was not replaced when it was vandalised or just wore out. When independent inspections were carried out by the National Playing Fields Association the Council ended up closing around half its playgrounds. In fact, that didn’t work out to badly, because at the time I’d been working on a “Policy for Play” that identified the most deprived areas of the Borough, and prioritised spending on playgrounds for those areas. When the outcry over the closures forced the Council to increase the budget for playgrounds, we were then able to ensure that some really good new playgrounds were installed in the places where they were most needed.

But, playgrounds are a good example of the issues over Health and Safety. Socialists, have rightly condemned all of those aspects of the Industrial Revolution that saw children placed in the most dangerous working environments. Yet, in reality, especially on the playgrounds we used to have when I was a kid, all of those same hazards of factory life, can be found in a playground. Sand pits were breeding grounds of all kinds of nasty bacteria that could cause various illnesses. The kind of rotating machinery of the factory that could rip-off a limb, was equally present in the old roundabouts, and impact injuries were bound to happen with unprotected swings and other equipment. Yet no one thought twice about letting kids loose in such an environment. In fact, I can remember when I was about 12 being on a Chinese swing with a friend and hearing a crunch when some toddler ran behind the swing, and must have almost had their head taken off. Of course, the parent blamed us rather than themselves for not properly minding their child!

And here lies the real reason for many of these actions by Councils and other public bodies. It is in reality, usually nothing to do with bureaucratism, and certainly not “political correctness gone mad”. Nor is it even a need to comply strictly with HSE guidelines. The real reason actually is a worry about being sued for huge sums of money in an increasingly Americanised culture of blame and claim. More than that, about a decade ago the Woolf Report set out a series of requirements that Councils and other public bodies had to comply with to show that they were adequately dealing with Risk. Every Public body has to have Public Liability insurance, and it isn’t cheap. Fail to comply with the requirements on Risk, and you just won’t get the insurance, or the insurance won’t pay out!

Its not just in those areas affecting Public bodies where this applies. An entire industry has grown up of people buying old bangers, and then driving to try to get people to run into the back of them so that they can make a claim for whiplash and other injuries. It is part of the legacy of Thatcherism, I think, where everyone is encouraged to be on the make in a very individualistic manner. I read a few years ago a report in America where something like 60% of people in a survey said that they thought that the way to get on was either to win the lottery, to get on to TV for something, or else to be able to sue somebody! Certainly, the ambulance chasing culture has been present in America for much longer than here.

In fact, in Europe things are different, despite having basically the same Health and Safety regulations to adhere to. On the Panorama programme they interviewed some Belgian building workers to ask if they had been on a ladder awareness course, which they hadn’t. Go around Spain, and you see some quite horrendous things that wouldn’t be tolerated here. Manholes left open are fairly frequent, and if you fall down a manhole and break your leg, you are likely not to be able to walk properly again! So, its likely that the real difference is as I said not to do with compliance of those Health and Safety requirements, but is due to that claiming, ambulance chasing culture that has not yet spread to the rest of Europe.

And, of course, that really has nothing to do with the Government, nor with its agencies such as the HSE. It has to do with the basic functioning of Capitalism. As service industries like the legal profession have grown, as ordinary workers become more familiar with dealing with lawyers who in decades gone by they would hardly have encountered so a branch of Capitalism has seen the potential to make money. That has fed into the kind of culture though that Welfarism has created over the last 100 years, and last 50 years in particular, which DOES encourage people to always look for someone else to resolve their problems – a mindset that Capitalism requires, because the last thing it wants is for workers to begin to think that they can and should look to themselves and their own collective strength to resolve their problems. It’s the kind of culture that Capitalism has created that I spoke about previously in my blog Is It Me? .

But, its precisely that answer that workers really need, and that is the real alternative to looking to, what is in any case an insufficient number of, HSE Inspectors, to resolve their problems. When I worked at the Council one of the problems the unions took up was that of overcrowding in the offices. It was a joke. The Heads of department as soon as they got appointed made sure that they secured for themselves a larger office, usually big enough for at least half a dozen people to work in, and got it well kitted out. On the other hand the inspection we carried out showed that in the Council’s Environmental Health Department, (which has the task of carrying out similar inspections in private industry) the largest offices had twice as many people working in them as they should have had! That was on top of dangerous conditions due to the floor being littered with things that couldn’t be properly accommodated, desks cluttered, and access to computers hampered and so on. But, the process required months of surveys, re-surveys, discussions, Health and Safety Committee meetings, and ultimately a threat to take the Council to the HSE. In the 1970’s, when I was a shop steward the process was much simpler. The bosses knew that when I went to them with a complaint the vast majority of the workforce were standing behind me, and they usually dealt with the complaints within a matter of days or at most a couple of weeks, because if not they would have faced a walk-out.

A similar thing applies to the threats to seamen being attacked by Somali pirates. All of the solutions being discussed revolve around sending more warships, putting Navy Seals or whatever on the ships, or even an imperialist invasion of Somalia. The simplest answer, is for mariners unions across the world to develop their own workers defence squads, with properly armed and trained seamen, and a demand for all ships to be sufficiently manned to be able to defend themselves against such attacks.

We introduced similar solutions into playgrounds by involving the local community in deciding where they wanted playgrounds siting, what they wanted on them, and handing them over for the community to run and own, so that Tenants and residents Associations opened and closed them, and supervised the kids in them. That way a lot of the regulations etc. become less important.

The Capitalist State if it is left to run these things or set the terms will always do so in such a way that is bureaucratic and inefficient. The answer to that is not for workers to have to put themselves at risk by accepting dangerous conditions, nor is it to simply throw up its hands and accept the cost and inconvenience caused by that bureaucratism. The answer both within the communities and within the workplace is for the working class to take back that control and that responsibility to itself, and through its own collective action make sure that its Health and Safety is assured.