On 28 April 2022, members of Reading Trades Union Council and other trade unionists gathered in St Laurence's Churchyard, Reading, by the memorial to Henry West to observe International Workers' Memorial Day. Henry was a carpenter with the Great Western Railway who fell to his death during a whirlwind in Reading Railway Station in 1840.
RTUC was represented at the event by David Bales (PCS), John Oversby (UCU), Stephen Snook (PCS), Sue Taylor (PCS) and Tanya Wills (Unite Community). As Acting President of RTUC, Tanya gave the following oration, which proved to be both moving and rousing:
The Nanny State and Health and Safety Gone Mad
It was as late as 1974 that the Health and Safety at Work Act came into being. The act puts equal responsibility on the worker and employer to ensure health, safety and wellbeing of all individuals across all sectors.
Obviously the need for recognition of safety at work was fought for by workers and trade unions. Before the act, a death at work caused by poor working conditions would be regarded as unfortunate or even a nuisance and once the clear up and clean down had been done, work would continue while a replacement worker was found. A typical illustration of this might be textile workers, who would get parts of their bodies caught or crushed in looms, could no longer work if they had managed to survive and then would be quickly replaced so the looms never stopped working.
The majority of workers listed as killed or injured at work before the act was implemented were miners but as death and injury to all workers were just part of work life and many workers did not work for big employers such as mine owners, the true number of injured and dead at work since records began will never be known.
As with most rights that are fought for by working class people, almost as soon as they are implemented the ruling class begins to find ways of diluting those rights as workers rights negatively impact on profit. An effective way of removing rights is to persuade workers that they didn’t need the rights in the first place. The terms ‘Nanny State’ and ‘Health and Safety Gone Mad’ have entered the language and consequently the public consciousness. The trick is to impose guilt on those who might require help and protection, to belittle them just as the term ‘benefit scrounger’ serves to belittle those who have to rely on state financial help. The truth is, help and security should be a given in a civilised society. So, working class people begin to accept the toxic narrative that is drip fed to them, even such that they then call each other out for being scroungers or even joining in the narrative that there is too much emphasis on safety measures which do nothing but get in the way of getting on with the job.
We know that there is no safety implementation that is too stringent in the workplace if it means that implementation prevents injury or death of even just one worker in their work place.
So we come up to date with words and phrases introduced into public consciousness which serve to discourage people from demanding that they are kept safe in the work place. The COVID pandemic has resulted in the government now telling people that they’re ‘just going to have to live with it’. Translated, that means that the government is not going to do everything possible to protect people because that would inevitably mean that people would often be missing from work, and the economy would suffer. Better to have people die off than on sick leave or safety leave as it's easier to replace the dead than to furlough them and sick pay doesn’t have to be paid to the dead. The evidence for this is the current removal of all COVID safety restrictions and the subsequent huge increase in hospital admissions for COVID cases. Health care workers are not only suffering with COVID as a result of themselves being infected by the numbers of infected people coming through the doors, but also physical and mental health conditions resulting from the strain and work overload of dealing with what is a manufactured situation, a situation that could have, with proper health and safety considerations, been handled completely differently.
Trade unions and especially the TUC must be more vocal about the pernicious drip feed of dilution of workers rights and it's up to us to make that happen. It would seem obvious that the Health and Safety at Work Act is currently being hugely contravened. No worker should leave home in the morning, to return sick or injured or to never return at all, simply because care was not in place to protect them from their work place.
