The UK’s health and safety laws deliberately fall below international norms, and workers are paying the price

All is not well in Britain’s workplaces. The classic occupational diseases caused by chemicals and dust refuse to die and are now being complemented by the maladies of the 21st Century workplace – heart disease, suicide and work-related depression and despair.

This is neither speculation nor scaremongering. Asbestos deaths are at an all-time high, silicosis ruins or ends thousands of lives each year and occupational asthma afflicts unchecked new generations of wheezy workers. At the same time work-related stress, anxiety and depression are at a record high. This old and new health-robbing double dose is no accident. UK workers are vulnerable by design, increasingly overloaded and under-protected at work.

The modern UK worker spends more time at work than in bed. Many of us are available to the boss more waking hours each week than we are to our families. The lines between work and home life have blurred too, as technology gives employers a wireless route directly into our homes, day and night. Shiftwork, linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes and all round poorer health, is now the ‘daily’ routine for many. The result is that UK working hours are among the highest in Europe. And these excess hours are not just unwelcome, they are frequently unpaid. Nearly a million face the uncertainty of zero rights, zero-hours contracts.

In combining defuse work-life boundaries with an explosion in poor quality, insecure and low-paid work, the UK has flipped the usual association and married high employment to high risks. Work-related ill-health is rising as workplace sick leave has fallen to a new low. Burnout is now a World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised and classified ‘occupational phenomenon’. We are a generation of working wounded, frequently too poor or too worried to go sick.

At a time when the UK has a record number of workers and workplaces to police and as new risks are emerging, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) – the UK’s safety regulator – is running on empty, barely visible at work and increasingly absent from the courts. Workplace safety criminals – and the UK safety law is a criminal act – have never had it so easy.

These trends, described in damning detail in the Institute of Employment Rights’ forecoming publication, International
health and safety standards after Brexit, demonstrate why national workplace health and safety laws, well enforced, are a big deal. Authors Andrew Moretta and Professor David Whyte, though, show that far from being protected, an erosion of employment rights combined with a retreat from official oversight of workplace health and safety conditions, have left more UK workers vulnerable to abuse at work and lacking both support and an effective safety net. It is, they observe, a time when the future of all labour rights in the UK is “uncertain.”

Health and safety across borders

But Moretta and Whyte go further, looking at the UK’s place in a global economy where safety outcomes can be determined in the boardrooms of multinational companies or fashioned to suit global trade lobby groups, making national standards only one part of a responsible government’s essential regulatory armoury.

Consider this: The chemical industry is set to double in size by 2030, according to the UN’s Global Chemicals Outlook. It is an upward trend expected to continue for decades. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for example, reports “the chemical industry is one of the largest industrial sectors in the world and is expected to grow four-fold by 2060”.

OECD estimated annual global chemical industry sales will rise from US$5.7 trillion in 2017 to US$21.7 trillion by 2060. The industry’s global financial heft already exceeds that of all nations except the USA and China, based on GDP.

Companies and their uber-rich owners frequently have more economic power than the majority of countries where they do business. The online retailer Amazon, valued at about US$1 trillion, is worth more than the GDP of 90% of world’s nations. The personal wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, at about US$100 billion, would put him at number 65 in the list of richest countries if he was a nation and not the world’s richest shopkeeper.

It is a system that can elevate money over morality. The organisation governing world trade, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), does not have protection of workers’ rights, welfare or the environment as part of its core operational priorities. In fact, WTO has been used to challenge protective legislation as a barrier to free trade.

ILO rules

There is, however, a well-established global body capable of checking labour rights and safety abuses, and which is cited in international trade negotiations. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN agency, celebrated its centenary in 2019.

As Moretta and Whyte relate, the UK was involved closely in the development of the ILO and embraced enthusiastically its early ‘Conventions’, the legal instruments negotiated between governments, employers and unions to underpin employment and safety rights.

But there were earlier indications that the UK government would sometimes put business interests before workers’ health and safety. Thomas Legge, the UK’s first Medical Inspector of Factories, resigned from his post in 1927 when it became apparent the UK, under pressure from paint manufacturers, did not intend to adopt the 1921 White Lead Convention. Legge, outraged at a failure to protect painters from lead poisoning, subsequently became the first medical adviser to the Trades Union Congress.

As Moretta and Whyte note, the UK was a driving force in the creation of the ILO. However, they show this heralded and influential role has long since waned. From being an enthusiastic early adopter of ILO health and safety instruments, the UK now lags behind most developed and many developing nations. As this report reveals, the UK has ratified fewer than one-in-five of ILO’s up-to-date health and safety instruments, putting it below almost all European Union and OECD nations and on a par with Libya, Mozambique and Saudi Arabia.

This UK retreat from the global safety stage is doubly damaging as the need for and role of global baseline safety standards has never been more acute. Cost-cutting decisions made in the London boardroom of BP were major contributory factors in the deaths of 15 contract workers in the Texas City refinery fire in 2005 and 11 in the 2011 Deepwater Horizon oil rig tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico. As the gold price soars, companies including London-based Anglo American are cashing in as some of their workforce in Southern Africa die in poverty from dust-caused silicosis and tuberculosis.

When the UK fails to ratify ILO safety conventions, it sends a signal worldwide that safety beyond its immediate doorstep doesn’t matter, even though the UK coffers and the country’s most prestigious companies benefit hugely from income earned in other nations and produced by the labour of their nationals. In many countries, ILO conventions are the de facto safety laws, agreed globally and guaranteeing core rights and are, as Moretta and Whyte observe, “the thread which links all of the regional international rights regimes”.

If the UK thinks these ILO safety instruments are not worth ratifying, why should a developing nation step up? Even if the UK government’s intention is not to encourage a race to the bottom, eschewing globally accepted controls sends that clear and clearly dangerous message. It is a point not lost on the European Commission which, as Moretta and Whyte point out, indicated in a February 2020 draft negotiating mandate that any post-Brexit trade deal with the UK should include adherence to “conventions of the ILO”.

The protective power of unions

The ILO model is also embraced in ‘Global Framework Agreements’ struck between multinational companies and global unions. The agreement signed in 2017 between the UK-based global online fashion retailer ASOS and the global union federation IndustriALL, for example, requires both sides “to collaborate to ensure the application of International Labour Organisation standards” throughout the ASOS supply chain. It makes explicit reference to several ILO health and safety conventions and recommendations.

The 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse illustrates the high price that can be paid when this level of international safety commitment is lacking. The pancaked Dhaka building in which over 1,100 workers died supplied big name brands, including UK companies Matalan, Bonmarche and Primark. The tragedy exposed as more PR than OHS the voluntary Corporate Social Responsibility and self-enforcement audit programmes given pride of place in company annual reports and ethical procurement and sustainability policies.

But positive change came out of the Rana Plaza tragedy, and the ILO and its ‘normative values’ were central to securing this. The legally binding Bangladesh Accord, brokered by ILO and global unions with multinational retail chains, saw a blitz of factory inspections, and improvements to worker participation, fire and health and safety, all designed to meet minimum ILO standards. Matalan, Bonmarche and Primark all backed the deal, along with 20 other major UK supermarkets and retailers.

The Accord, set up in the immediate wake of the disaster and which in its initial five years involved over 200 brands and covered more than 1,600 workplaces employing in excess of two million workers, saw over 37,500 workplace inspections, resolved over 500 complaints and undertook remediation work in approaching 300 factories, while creating joint worker-management safety committees in over 1,300. Fifty factories, found to pose a ‘severe and imminent’ risk of collapse, were evacuated until made safe.

The workers the UK refused to protect

ILO standards are the international touchstone for responsible business practice. When over 300 workers were killed in Turkey’s May 2014 Soma coalmine disaster, national and international unions redoubled their efforts to negotiate concrete safety demands based on the globally negotiated and agreed ILO mine safety convention, Convention 176. Turkey ratified the convention in March 2015.

The UK has ratified neither this convention nor the other key ‘sectoral’ ILO conventions, covering construction (Convention 167) and agriculture (Convention 184), despite UK companies having extensive international and highly profitable involvement in each of these sectors. In each industry there have been clear cases of a health and safety double standard being applied, with adherence to higher standards at home than abroad.

The absentees from the list of UK ratifications are not irrelevant instruments on esoteric or archaic issues. They include almost all of the safety key conventions, including the main occupational health and safety instrument, Convention 155, and the occupational health services convention, Convention 161.

On the former, Moretta and Whyte point out the wholly implausible arguments put by the UK government to justify non-ratification, in the face of at least two recommendations to the contrary from its own health and safety regulator, HSE. On the latter, the UK’s workforce is poorly served by occupational health services by any objective measure, and the UK fails to come close to meeting the ILO minimum requirements. It is a failure that makes no sense, from either a business or a health and safety perspective. A 2018 academic review published by the UK Society of Occupational Medicine concluded occupational health services are good for efficiency, productivity and the economy.

Other absentees, known by heart and by number by international trade union reps because they are cited so frequently, include Conventions 162 (asbestos), 139 (occupational cancer), 170 (chemicals) and 174 (major industrial accidents).

This is not just about signing up to ILO’s back catalogue. ILO rule making has slowed, but it has not stopped. The Violence and Harassment Convention, Convention 190, was agreed in June 2019, and addresses behaviours, practices or threats “that aim at, result in, or are likely to result in physical, psychological, sexual or economic harm”. There is no equivalent measure in UK law. Gaps in the cover provided by ILO were identified in an ILO tripartite review of health and safety conventions conducted in 2017 and 2018. Ergonomics, biological agents and psychosocial risks at work were all identified as areas where new instruments may be desirable.

As Moretta and Whyte make plain, the UK government is in no mood to improve workplace safety regulation. But the UK remains bound by other international treaties and commitments, which require adherence to both European and international standards, including ILO’s. And the UK government can be held to account, by trade unions, labour and safety activists and relentless efforts to expose the harm caused and encouraged by its safety malfeasance or neglect.

Unions and safety advocates are finding creative ways to ensure decent and safe standards are observed internationally. Unions have, for example, negotiated binding labour safeguards in the procurement contracts of multilateral development banks and World Bank projects, including stringent occupational health and safety stipulations, sometimes including explicit references to ILO conventions.

If the UK wants to emulate the economic success of countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands it would do well to note the observation in this publication that these countries are far more enthusiastic ratifiers of ILO safety conventions. You can’t have a first class economy if you choose to play by third rate rules.

But we shouldn’t have to argue a business case. We shouldn’t have to put a case against a system where the law allows workers to be used, abused then thrown away. This may increasingly be the UK government’s way of doing business. But we must and can reject completely a government approach that by design requires some among us to die making a living.