Guest Editorial
Throughout the world millions of workers each year suffer injuries and damage to their health as a result of the work they undertake. In the European Union alone, for example, official figures indicate that during the year 1998 there were nearly 5,500 deaths and 4.8 million accidents resulting in the loss of three or more days of work. It has been further estimated that almost 350,000 people have been forced to change jobs, their place of work or their working time as a result of ill health and that nearly 300,000 have varying degrees of permanent disability (Commission of the European Communities, 2002).
Such work-related harm obviously has potentially disastrous physical consequences for workers, as well as emotional and financial ones for both them and their families. It is, therefore, no surprise that the issue of workplace health and safety has loomed large in the history of the trade union movement,both in Britain and internationally (Williams, 1960). Yet,surprisingly, it has tended, with some notable exceptions, to receive relatively little attention among academics working in field of employment relations.
The reasons for this lack of interest are unclear. Part of the explanation may reside in the technical nature of some aspects of the subject, extending, as it does, to encompass such matters as the risks associated with chemicals and other hazardous substances, the design and integrity of complex production processes, and the identification of linkages between work activities and particular forms of occupational disease. Another part may be related to the fact that it is an area of study in which contributions can be made by a diverse range of different types of specialists, including occupational physicians and nurses, epidemiologists, hygienists, chemists, biologists, engineers,ergonomists, occupational and organisational psychologists, sociologists and lawyers, and hence one in which there can be a need for cross-discipline collaboration.
Nevertheless, despite these potential sources of complexity and difficulty,as will be made clearer below, there is no question that employment relations specialists have a potentially important contribution to make to both advancing knowledge in the field and to aiding the development of policy at the organisational, national and international levels. Moreover, this is as true now as it has ever been.
The continuing importance of health and safety
It is all too easy to assume that the relevance of health and safety as a topic of study has declined in importance as manual work and employment in“heavier” industry has fallen across much of the developed world. Such an assumption, however, is, to put it bluntly, wrong.
Admittedly, the available evidence does indicate that aggregate trends in the propensity of workers to suffer work-related injuries are influenced by shifts in the occupational composition of employment (Davies and Jones, 2005), with the result that reductions of employment in manual work and in such sectors as mining, manufacturing and agriculture would be expected to contribute to a lowering of the inherent (injury) “riskiness” of jobs. That this is the case, however, neither means that current levels of injury are acceptable or that they can be straightforwardly expected to fall in the future.
Studies which have found a pro-cyclical relationship between movements in the business cycle and injury rates, for example, have pointed to the potential way in which rises in work intensity can negatively impact on safety performance (Nichols, 1997). Such an association has, moreover, been supported by findings from a number of workplace studies which have revealed how incentive payment systems and production pressures can result in workers, of their own volition or that of their line managers, circumventing laid down health and safety procedures and, more generally, experiencing injuries (Wrench and Lee, 1982; Nichols and Amstrong, 1973; Woolfson et al., 1996). In the face of the available evidence indicating that levels of work intensity have risen significantly in the recent past, and that managerial control and surveillance has also commonly been increasing (Green, 2001; Gallie et al., 2004), it would therefore be reasonable to expect that, at least in some areas of activity, injury rates have been rising rather than falling.
These changes in work intensification and managerial control, accompanied as they have been by a tendency towards reduced task discretion are, furthermore,also problematic given the well-established linkages which exist between these features of work organisation and the occurrence of work-related stress and musculoskeletal disorders (Anderson-Connolly et al., 2002; Brenner et al., 2004; Taylor et al., 2003). Thus, these linkages would suggest that the scale of work-related ill health has not been undergoing a process of significant reduction. In the case of the UK, for example, self-report data which sheds light on the extent and nature of occupational ill health over the period 1990 to 2003/04 shows not only that the annual prevalence of work-related illness among people who had worked during the previous 12 months fell only slightly(and discontinuously) during this period, but that the 2003/04 prevalence rate for stress and related (mainly heart) conditions was around double of that for 1990 (Jones et al., 2005).
Meanwhile, other developments in the composition of employment also appear to be problematic for the protection of workers’ health and safety. The growth of employment in small and medium sized firms is a case in point, given research evidence that they have access to less specialist health and safety advice,possess lower levels of knowledge about their legal duties and what they need to comply with them and, on average, tend to have higher rates of serious injury and fatalities (Cully et al., 1999; Eurostat, 2002; Nichols et al., 1995; Pilkington et al., 2002; Hanson et al., 1998). The increased usage of various forms of “non-standard” or contingent labour and the more widespread practice of outsourcing production and service delivery functions, via inter-organisational contracting, are others.
Self-employed workers, for example, have been found to experience higher rates of fatal and major injuries, both generally and among particular occupational groups, and homeworkers have been found to experience relatively high rates of work-related injuries (Health and Safety Laboratory, 2002). In addition, the available evidence, on balance, suggests that the working conditions of temporary and fixed-term workers are generally worse than those of “permanent” ones, notably with regard to aspects of their physical work environments, such as working in painful or tiring positions, exposure to high noise levels and engagement on work involving repetitive tasks and movement (Goudswaad, 2002).
There are also good grounds for viewing with a degree of concern the recent trend towards the fragmentation of previously integrated systems of production and service delivery through the establishment of inter-organisational contracting arrangements (Marchington et al., 2005). Thus, while arrangements of this type cannot be assumed to lead automatically to adverse occupational health and safety outcomes, not least because they can involve the shift of manufacturing activities to more specialist producers who have a fuller understanding of the risks associated with the “transferred work”, they can be seen as potentially problematic for three reasons. The first is that much of the externalisation of work activities would appear to have gone to smaller organizations and, in particular, small and medium sized enterprises, which, as already noted, tend to possess less adequate and sophisticated systems of risk management. The other two concern the way in which such contracting can create problems with regard to the co-ordination of risk management in situations where sub-contractor and temporary staff work in physical proximity to in-house personnel because of the diffusion of managerial control involved (Rebitzer, 1995; Kochan et al., 1994; Wiseman and Gilbert, 2000), and also act to limit the ability of those organisations engaged in the supply of labour or the provision of manufacturing and other services to invest in preventive health and safety measures as a result of the contract prices demanded by larger clients (Vickers et al., 2003). Indeed, on the basis of an investigation of the experiences of those working under sub-contract/outsourcing arrangements in four sectors, child care,hospitality, transport and building in Australia, the researchers involved reached the conclusion that they were associated with increased economic competition, as well as work disorganization, regulatory failure and a divided workforce, and that in “any organization where outsourcing has become common, OHS standards deteriorate … ” (Mayhew et al., 1996).
The decline in trade union membership and organisation in much of the industrialised world over the past quarter of a century must also, in terms of the protection of worker health and safety, be seen as worrying, particularly given that, at the workplace level in countries such as the UK, it has not been compensated for by the development of other forms of “collective voice”over health and safety matters; a situation which is starkly illustrated by the fact that the last workplace employment relations survey found that management in nearly 80 per cent of workplaces possessing 10 or more employees, did not consult or negotiate with either union or non-union representatives over the issue of health and safety (Kersely et al., 2005, p. 22). For, overall, UK evidence, as well as that stemming from studies in other countries, indicates that the presence of joint arrangements for worker consultation and representation is not only associated with better health and safety outcomes, but also with the existence of superior risk management arrangements, including the presence of written health and safety policies, the better provision of health and safety information and training, the use of health and safety practitioners, the carrying out of health and safety audits and inspections and the undertaking of risk assessments (James and Walters, 2005).
Moreover, this decline in collective voice is currently taking place in policy contexts which are often resistant to the extension and effective enforcement of health and safety laws, notwithstanding the substantial body of international evidence which indicates that legal requirements, as well as the likelihood that non-compliance with them will be discovered and penalised, act to influence positively how employing organizations approach the management of health and safety (Wright, 1998; Davis, 2004). In the UK, for example, funding to the Health and Safety Executive(HSE) has recently been cut in real terms and, in 2004, the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) published a new strategy which places more emphasis on “partnership working” and educational and information initiatives; emphases which, in the context of falling resources, inevitably raised the prospect of fewer inspections and investigations and associated formal enforcement actions (James and Walters, 2005). Furthermore, following the publication of this strategy, the government accepted the recommendations of a review of work of regulatory agencies which, among other things, called for an end to “unnecessary” inspections and the commitment of more resources to the provision of advice to employers and, in doing so, committed itself to a risk based approach to regulation under which there would not just be a “light touch” but a “limited” one (Hampton, 2005; Industrial Relations Services, 2005).
Unsurprisingly, similar developments have been taking place in the USA (OMB Watch, 2004). Meanwhile, at the level of the European Union, recent years have, somewhat similarly, seen a marked reluctance to propose further legal measures and growing pressures to focus attention on the role of “soft” regulation via the placing of greater emphasis on economic incentives, the publication of guidance and social dialogue (Woolfson, 2005).
This Special Issue and the contribution of employment relations
As the foregoing analysis has made clear, considerable scope, then, exists for useful and important research to be undertaken by employment relations scholars in the field of occupational health and safety. The dynamics that have informed recent and current regulatory developments, both in the UK and elsewhere, for example, is an issue that merits more detailed exploration and greater attention could also usefully be paid to whether, and in what ways,current legal frameworks could be reformed to take better account of the changes that have been taking place in product and both internal and external labour markets. Similarly, at the workplace level, further research could be undertaken to explore how some of the developments highlighted above, such as the greater emphasis being placed on inter-organisational contracting, the decline of“collective voice”, and the reliance now placed on various forms of non-standard employment, are impacting on the nature and scale of work-related harm and, at this same level, more attention could be paid to the actions that employers take to ameliorate the consequences of such harm and the experiences of workers in this regard, including how far attempts are made to protect their continued employment.
In fact, the five articles in this Special Issue serve, only too clearly, to demonstrate the potential that exists to undertake work of this nature. The first article, by Mayhew and Quinlan, for example, serves to highlight the way in which such contractual arrangements can have important occupational health and safety implications for drivers in Australia’s long-haul truck industry as a result of the economic pressures which they encompass. In addition, in doing so, it further reveals how these implications can vary differentially between those who are self-employed and those who work for small and large trucking companies.
The contribution by Walters and Nichols, meanwhile, in exploring the implementation of the British Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1997 in a number of chemical plants, reports findings that not only point to a clear link between their differing injury rates and their varying arrangements for worker consultation and representation, but also reveal how compliance with these statutory requirements was in all cases incomplete. These findings, in turn, lead them, in their concluding discussion, to consider how the effectiveness of this regulatory framework might be improved, both by revisions to its provisions and actions to engender greater compliance.
The third article by Baldry in some ways echoes that of Mayhew and Quinlan in that it focuses attention on the rise of sub-contracting within track-side work undertaken in the the UK rail industry and reveals how this increased usage has had damaging consequences for the way in which health and safety is managed. In particular, his analysis suggests that work arrangements of this type have resulted in a marked discrepancy between higher level safety structures and actual track-side practices and acted to increase the risks of worker death and injury as a result of the managerial disorganisation they have prompted and the economic pressures they embody.
The changing nature of employment and the challenges this poses for effective health and safety management also constitutes a central theme of the fourth article by Johnstone and Quinlan. Here, however, the focus is on the health and safety problems associated with agency work and the difficulties such work pose for health and safety regulators, with particular reference to the position in Australia. The author’s analysis notes how Australian health and safety legislation imposes significant obligations on both labour hire agencies and host firms with regard to the protection of agency workers but that compliance with these is often poor. Notwithstanding industry pressures to reduce these current obligations, the authors go on to argue that what, in fact, is needed is the establishment of a more far reaching regulatory framework which ensures better the observance of minimum standards and increases the ability of agency workers to raise health and safety related concerns with their host employers and agencies.
Finally, the last article in this Special Issue by James, Cunningham and Dibben addresses a rather different issue, namely how far UK employers currently possess adequate arrangements to facilitate the return to work and continued employment of workers who are absent for lengthy periods as a result of injury or ill health. In this, the authors draw attention to existing evidence which indicates that employers can do much to support workers in this regard and also provides a clear indication as to the type of workplace arrangements that are conducive to the effective provision of such support. However, on the basis of an examination of relevant secondary data, they conclude that relative few employers currently have in place arrangements of this type and that there is a need, therefore, to identify policy initiatives that can serve to encourage their more widespread adoption.
Phil JamesGuest Editor
