The Union Effect


The TUC trains around 10,000 safety reps every year, with many more trained through their unions. There are around 100,000 reps in UK workplaces today.


In February 2016, the TUC published a new edition of The Union Effect – how unions make a difference on health and safety, setting out evidence of how unions are making workplaces safer and the benefits for individual workers, employers and the wider society. Studies have shown that:


• employers with trade union health and safety committees have half the injury rate of those employers who manage safety without unions or joint arrangements;


• where there is a union presence the workplace injury rate is 24% lower than where there is no union presence;


• workers in unionised workplaces are less likely to have a fatal injury; and


• the arrangements associated with trade unions…lower the odds of injury and illness when compared with arrangements that merely inform employees of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) issues.


The guide also explains how trade union involvement saves the economy millions of pounds by helping to reduce workplace injuries and levels of occupational ill-health, developing a more positive safety culture at work. In 2016, an analysis of figures from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey calculated that savings delivered by unions across the economy fell in a range between £476m and £1,250m at 2014 prices. Prevention of workplace injuries and work-related ill-health contributed over half of the overall union-related savings (£130m-£360m a year).


The Union Effect also recommends a number of simple changes to the SRSCR, to make them more effective and help reduce injuries and illnesses caused by work. These include:


• Roving safety representatives who can cover a group of small workplaces, or the workers of contractors or agencies in the same workplace;


• The right to issue improvement notices to employers who are not complying with health and safety regulations, and to call in an enforcement officer if the employer does not put things right; and


• A requirement on employers to respond to issues raised by safety representatives.


With proactive inspections from the HSE and local authorities continuing to be cut back (see Chapter 2: Enforcement), the role of trade union safety representatives is more important than ever. However, the Trade Union Act 2016 (TUA 16) contains powers for ministers to make new regulations requiring any public sector employer (or any private or voluntary sector employer that is mainly publicly funded) who has at least one health and safety union rep to record and publish all the time taken, and any facilities provided. The TUC has branded this measure “pointless” and “bureaucratic”.


Even more worryingly, the TUA 16 also contains “reserve powers” allowing a minister to make regulations capping the total amount of paid facility time (again in the public sector, or where the organisation’s activities are mainly publicly funded), including facility time for safety reps carrying out their statutory functions under the SRSCR. As a result of union campaigning, this power cannot be exercised until at least three years’ worth of data on facility time have been collected and analysed, and only after consultation, followed by twelve months’ notice to the employer.


TUC Head of Health and Safety Hugh Robertson called this measure “really vindictive” and “underhand”: “At no time have the government given any justification for this proposal… It will not save money or remove bureaucracy, nor will it improve safety. It is simply an ideologically-led knee-jerk reaction,” he said.


A new analysis of facility time published by the TUC in February 2016 shows that for every £1 spent on paid time off for public sector union reps to represent their members, taxpayers get at least £2.31 back in savings. The report, The benefits of paid time off for trade union representatives, is based on new analysis of official figures by the University of Bradford and can be downloaded from the TUC website.