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From International Socialism, No. 63, Mid-October 1973, pp. 8–12.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
EACH YEAR the Chief Inspector of Factories and other enforcement agencies issue their annual catalogues of death, disablement and disease suffered by workers in the cause of profit. Each year the union leaders issue their platitudes about ‘disturbing figures’ and ‘causes for concern’. They call for new safety legislation, more factory inspectors, tougher fines on the pinstriped criminals, better compensation for their victims.
Settling ever more comfortably into their institutional role as ‘responsible’ members of the establishment, they instinctively call for institutional solutions to a scandal which is an integral part of the society which the same institutions are designed to preserve. They forget the central lesson of trade union struggle that governments, lawmakers and law-enforcers will protect workers only so far as this does not interfere with the more important freedom of employers to conduct their business on the most profitable lines. They forget that the present set of rights enjoyed by trade unions was won not by friendly chats with politicians but by hard and persistent struggle – a lesson rammed home yet again by the rank and file action which castrated the Industrial Relations Act.
There is only one force that can bring the hazards of work under control, the organised strength of the working class. The use of this power seems to be the one solution which union leaders and the TUC fail to consider in their ‘policies’ for health and safety at work. The trade union movement cuts right across all the divisions of industry and safety law. It can reach down into the smallest slum workshops where no safety inspectors ever set foot. It is the only organisation committed solely to the interests of workers. It has 10 million members, enormous power and the right to use it, a right which, in disputes over health and safety, it is not restricted by the Tory freeze laws.
In the process of achieving this situation millions have died from injury, disease, malnutrition and the hangman’s noose. Thousands more will die and millions will be maimed if this power is not used in defence of its members’ health and safety.
Fortunately, as in all the other struggles facing the working class, workers are not waiting for instructions. Concern about hazards is growing rapidly among workers in all industries and is being increasingly expressed in direct action. Workers on a Southampton building site smashed up all the dangerous ladders when the management would not replace them. Worried about the risk of taking poisonous dust home on their clothes, lead workers gave management a two-week strike ultimatum to improve washing and changing facilities. Other lead workers are fighting for the right to see the results of blood tests and to be given full pay when they are suspended because of excessive exposure.
Workers in a chemical plant forced management to accept elected shop-floor representatives on the joint safety committee in place of the ‘loyal’ yes-men it had so carefully picked for the job. Corroded pipework was rapidly replaced and emergency showers installed throughout the plant. Bakery drivers refused to take out delivery vans on Saturday mornings after working the night shift because they found the work routine was ruining their sex lives.
All over the country such actions are becoming common as workers start to challenge the conditions that make their work unsafe, unhealthy or socially disruptive. It is part of a worldwide reaction against the continuing and often intensifying epidemic of industrial death and disease that now claims more than 100,000 lives a year in ‘accidents’ alone – at a time when technology can be seen to have the means not only to save the lives it squanders in pursuit of profit but also to make life better for ordinary people.
But the protests tend to be spontaneous and isolated responses to individual hazards and abuses. To make real inroads into the terrible toll of suffering requires a coordinated attack by the whole trade union movement. Every worker needs to feel that conditions can be changed and that any action they take will be backed by their union and by the whole movement. Every employer must be made to realise that any threat to health and safety will be answered by a threat to production and profits. Hazards are the product of cheap engineering; they will be controlled only when employers find them unacceptably expensive.
To achieve this situation the union leaders and the TUC must be forced into declaring war on hazards and providing the services needed to support the attack. Workers are crying out for information on the dangers of their work and the minimum standards of protection they should accept. There is an urgent need for leaflets, checklists, fast-acting information services and training in skills to defeat the abuses which management dress up in jargon of safety.
The trade union movement is almost totally unequipped for a struggle on this front. The higher you look in the trade union bureaucracy the less evidence you find for any serious trade union approach to safety, or, even more serious, any recognition that this is an area of conflict just as real as the fight against low wages. There is only one doctor in the whole trade union movement, the medical adviser to the TUC, Dr Robert Murray. As well as handling most of the health and safety enquiries from unions he is expected to attend an ever-increasing number of conferences and committees. The workload would keep two doctors busy without ever beginning to tackle new tasks, such as the production of leaflets on chemical hazards, to help workers identify and control hazards.
Instead of developing such tools, for a trade union attack on hazards, the TUC continues to make reform of the law one of the main planks of its safety policy. Other planks are equally worm-eaten. One of them is a joint statement on consultation on safety drawn up with the Confederation of British Industry. This document contains the remarkable suggestion that: ‘A clear written statement of a company’s safety policy is the essential foundation stone for any effective safety organisation.’
Also important, according to the statement, is ‘a genuine desire on the part of employees to improve the safety performance and health conditions, in their own and the company’s interests’ (My italics).
This particular plank is not only worm-eaten but riddled with the particularly dangerous form of rot found between the covers of the Robens report on Health and Safety at Work. There is, according to Robens, ‘a greater natural identity of interest between the two sides of industry in relation to safety and health problems than in most other matters.’ This remarkable theory appears to have been accepted by many union leaders, for it reinforces their belief that the elimination of hazards can safely be left to processes of joint consultation.
Out of 130 trade unions only three have full-time safety officers, the AUEW engineering section, the EEPTU and the NUM. Only a handful produce any kind of safety information for their members. None is producing enough to reach more than a few people on the shop floor. The safety training output of individual unions and the TUC can be counted in hundreds. The TGWU alone has 40,000 stewards. The effects of this lack of leadership are disastrous. The case history which forms the next section of this article shows how failure of leadership held back one particular struggle.
The annual statistics of injury, disease and death which form the final section are an indictment just as much of the union movement as of the capitalist system. Employers have a vested interest in safety on the cheap – the less they spend on it the bigger their profits. Their behaviour is easy to understand. The failure of enforcement agencies like the Factory Inspectorate to control any but the grossest abuses of workers’ health is also easy to understand.
Historically the failure of the trade union movement to open up a second front on health and safety can be explained away, with some justification, in terms of its preoccupation with the struggle against the even more immediate threats of poverty and starvation. Poverty and the defence of union rights are still urgent issues today but there is no doubt that the movement has the resources and the ability to fight hazards as well. Its failure to do so must be seen in the same light as the nationally-negotiated productivity deals which have sold so many workers into socially-disruptive and physically harmful work patterns – a growing appetite to central control of a power the leaders are afraid to use.
The fight for safety demands a return of power to the shop floor. It demands the development of rank and file organisation and skills of a far higher order than are needed to fix the rate on a machine. It often demands that decisions be taken urgently and without reference to ‘higher authority’ in the union. It is a challenge to the union hierarchy as much as it is to the power of the employers. The fight for health can and must be won – even if it means fighting both kinds of boss at the same time. With the pay front frozen by Phase 3, there can be no better time to open the second front, the attack on the hazards of work.
IN THE AUTUMN of 1972 militant stewards on the multi-million pound Anchor steelworks project at Scunthorpe began to take direct action against dangerous working conditions. Where attempts to win improvements by going through ‘proper channels’ had failed, direct action succeeded. A half-hour sit-in was enough to force management to install safety telephones.
When obstructed roadways and other hazards against which the men had been campaigning were cleared in preparation for a visit by Lord Melchett, the British Steel Corporation chairman, and a party of foreign visitors, the stewards greeted them with banners and a list of 80 major hazards. Ten days later, the demonstration and the hazards of a site which had already claimed five lives were extensively reported in Socialist Worker.
The accuracy of the stewards’ complaints was grimly vindicated on 13 November when 17-year-old Larry Leonard fell 37 feet to his death through an unguarded opening in one of the floors. Lack of guard rails around openings and makeshift temporary covers over holes had been one of the main faults listed by the stewards. Young Larry’s death, the sixth in 20 months, brought Granada’s World in Action to Scunthorpe to investigate the Anchor safety record. The Steel Corporation declined an invitation to have one of its top executives answer questions on safety and refused to let the programme film on site.
Effectively censored before it had even started, the investigation might have fizzled out like so many others had the stewards not helped World in Action smuggle a TV camera onto the site. The resulting film showed unrailed working areas and stairways, obstructions on gangways, work platforms without close boarding or toe boards, safety netting which had not been moved to keep up with workers painting the roof girders, dangerously stored materials and partly-blocked ambulance routes. The film proved that, as on most large sites, a construction inspector would have been able to quickly identify at least a dozen infringements of the Construction Regulations (though, needless to say, prosecution on a dozen counts – maximum possible fine for the lot £3,600 – would be about as likely as Princess Anne being charged with speeding).
The militancy of the stewards brought this problem and their struggle to the notice of millions and won useful concessions from management. One of these was that four shop floor representatives were allowed to sit on the safety committee at Anchor. You might think that the spectacle of workers organising for safety in the dangerous, ill-organised and lump-riddled construction industry would gladden the hearts of union officials. You would be wrong, and this, more than the example of rank and file militancy, is the point of the story.
On the Thursday following the Granada film, the trade newspaper Construction News carried an article purporting to rebut the stewards’ charges. It reported various critical comments on the film and its allegations, including the ones below: ‘Compared with oil refineries, power stations and other things we have built round here the Anchor safety record has been exceedingly good. Naturally it could be better if the men put more thought into it.’ And, ‘The safety facilities at Anchor are the best I have ever seen on any site ... Stewards are well informed on safety, and there is the utmost co-operation. As far as safety is concerned I should say Anchor has the best record in the country.’
There is nothing particularly remarkable about those quotes. They represent a fairly predictable management response. But they are not management quotes. The first came from Laurence Hancock, area secretary of the EEPTU and chairman of Anchor’s trade union liaison committee. The second came from J.H. Sowther, area secretary of UCATT. Taken together with the real management quotes these statements might have convinced other workers that Anchor was a safe site, that any accidents were caused by thoughtless workers and that the militant stewards were, as the Steel Corporation said, just ‘intent to cause trouble’. It’s a plausible story if you accept the usual stereotype of the ‘two sides’ in industrial relations – the management officials and the union officials.
According to the stereotype, if the ‘two sides’ agree then everything must be all right. Anyone who disagrees must therefore be in the wrong. In this way the militant challenge to the safety policies of the employers or the leadership of the union officials appears to be discredited. The officials can hang on to their role as ‘shadow spokesmen’ on safety rather than take the harder part of leading workers in an attack on hazards. This inertia and complacency, found at almost every level of the union hierarchy and usually at its worst near the top, is a deadweight holding back the struggle for health.
Anchor provided a classic example of this. By defending the employers – on the grounds that the site was safer than other similar jobs (itself a dubious contention) – the union officials obscured the vital fact that, like all the big sites, it was an extremely dangerous place to work. They were saying in effect that they found six deaths in 20 months not only acceptable but, because other employers might have killed more, actually praiseworthy. The comments of the two trade union officials were remarkable not only for the lack of anger at wasted lives; not only for the lack of sensitivity in the suggestion that the ‘safety record’ could be made even better if the men put more thought into it – when a young man has just been killed after failing through an unguarded and illegal hole in the floor – but above all, for the total lack of a trade union strategy for fighting construction hazards.
Below are some of the strategic factors that should have been considered if the Anchor protest was to be exploited rather than discredited:
The lesson for workers fighting the hazards of their work is exactly the same as the lesson that has been learnt in every recent struggle: life is too short to wait for the official leaders to lead. In the construction industry it may be very short.
EACH YEAR the figures for occupational injuries and disease are washed and shrunk in the statistical laundries of industry and government and then delivered in separate bundles. It is hard to believe that the system is not designed to conceal the truth. It is certainly not designed to reveal it.
You need to obtain four different annual reports to collect the figures for factories, mines, farms and offices and shops. Numerous other sources must be consulted and quite a few guesses made to obtain figures for other jobs. If you complete this mammoth task the result will be meaningless unless you make substantial adjustments. Under the Factories Act, for example, factory owners report only about 60 per cent of the injuries they are required to report by law; construction industry employers report only about half theirs. (Only 70 firms were prosecuted for this offence in 1971.) The unadjusted figures are the ones quoted in the annual report and in parliamentary debates.
It is not known how many cases of industrial disease go unreported but there is no reason to suppose that the proportion is much different. The figures for farms and for offices and shops are probably even less reliable. Employers do not have to report injury or death of self-employed workers. In the construction industry nearly 100 deaths and more than 20,000 injuries may therefore go unrecorded each year – with the full approval of the law.
In 1970 about 1.5 million workers were known to be self-employed and the wage freeze is accelerating the trend, particularly in white-collar areas. The reporting system for industrial diseases produces grossly misleading figures. The 1970 report of the Factory Inspectorate, for example, lists just over 300 cases of industrial disease, among about eight million workers, which might make you think that this was a relatively small problem. But these are only the notifiable diseases. Pneumoconiosis, the most important of all, is not notifiable and was therefore not included in the total. Other omissions are dermatitis, which costs workers more lost days than any other occupational condition, and poisoning by many substances which are not notifiable – for example TDI, a chemical which can give you incurable asthma after the smallest exposure.
All these irregularities and omissions should be ironed out in the annual report of the Department of Health and Social Security. This records the totals for industrial injury, disablement and death benefits, whether or not a claimant’s case has found its way in to any of the other catalogues. Here again the whole truth is not revealed: Self-employed workers do not qualify for injury benefits (in spite of paying a higher stamp contribution) so their injuries and deaths again go unrecorded. The figures for death benefits, paid to widows or other dependents, can indicate only the number of married workers killed.
Victims of occupational diseases only get into the DHSS statistics if their condition and occupation are ‘prescribed’ – in other words on the list of diseases which are recognised as being caused by work. Many conditions caused by or aggravated by work are not on the list. Miners, foundrymen, steelworkers and others in dusty trades are known to suffer more bronchitis than other workers; those in outdoor jobs get more rheumatism and arthritis; people who use vibrating tools get ‘whitefinger’, a painful condition caused by damage to the blood circulation in their hands; more than 100,000 workers have been robbed of some of their hearing by working in dangerous levels of noise. These and many more victims are conveniently hidden from view when industry’s debt to society is reckoned up each year.
It is hardly surprising that most people have no idea how large a toll of life, health and well being is taken by work. Asked to put figures to it, they usually suggest about 600 dead and 300,000 injured. It is no coincidence that these are the (uncorrected) figures given by the Chief Inspector of Factories in a typical annual report: this is the only one of the annual safety reports which press and television cover in any detail. The mass media can therefore be counted as the last stage in the statistical laundering.
The laundering works. It is common to see trade union leaders using the 600 figure. It even appears from time to time in Socialist Worker, without the vital qualification that it applies only to deaths in occupations covered by the Factories Act.
To arrive at realistic annual figures involves some guessing. These are probably near the truth:
|
Killed at work or dying from injuries |
|
2,000 |
|
Killed by recognised industrial disease |
1,000 |
|
|
Injured or off work with industrial disease (min. 3 days) |
nearly 1,000,000 |
|
|
Injured-needing first aid |
10,000,000 |
Even the most honest annual reckoning tends to shrink the problem by ignoring the disabled and bereaved left behind by previous years of profitable production. At the present time more than 200,000 workers are receiving industrial disability pensions and the working class contains nearly 30,000 women who have been widowed by industry. The conflict of industry between bosses and workers over the cost of safety touches the lives of millions. If an army were suffering these casualties it would fight back.
A coroner at Scunthorpe, Lines, told a jury last week to ignore a recent World in Action television film about safety at BSC’s £200 million Anchor steelworks project in the town.
The coroner, A.A. Collins, said, ‘In this country the facts relating to fatal accidents are investigated by a coroner and his inquest jury, who return a verdict in accordance with the evidence given in open court, where it can be tested by cross-examination.
‘These matters are not decided by militant workmen encouraged by a TV producer who arranges for a camera to be smuggled on to the employers’ site, in blatant and irresponsible defiance of a previous refusal by the employer to permit a film to be taken.’
The jury returned a verdict of accidental death on Laurence William Leonard, aged 17, of Lovett Street, Cleethorpes, employed by MVM Scaffolding, who died after falling 37 feet on the Anchor site on November 13.
Evidence was given that guard rails around an opening had been removed by persons unknown.
The coroner said it was unlikely that a jury could make a recommendation to BSC, who were most safety-conscious.
‘Their record is excellent no matter what has been said in other places,’ he added.
Construction News, 4 December 1972.
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