The question of

Organize and survive: unions health and

and health and safety – a case safety at work

study of an engineering
5
unionized workforce
Peter Fairbrother
Affiliation not known

1. The question of health and safety at

work
Health and safety is an integral feature of work and employment relations. The
consequences of ill-health and danger have an untold impact on workers, on
their personal life, on those who enter employment settings, and on the
provision of services and goods. In a variety of ways, people deal with these
consequences, suffer injury or ill-health, care for the victims, take up claims on
behalf of the injured, testify to dangers and worries at work, campaign for
changes in legislation, and attempt to establish minimum standards of danger
and hazard.
Health and safety at work is also expensive. There are personal and social
costs arising from the debilitating demands of stressful work situations, the
dangers that are part of work, and the burden of deteriorating health. For
employers, there are financial costs as a result of hazards and ill-health
associated with work. To meet standards, to maintain a reasonably able
workforce, employers make a balance between the costs and benefits (both
financial and social) of addressing the problems of health and safety at work.
For the state, health and safety at work is a major question, in the form of health
care, the enforcement of standards, the effects on productivity and the provision
of services. What happens and what can be done raises moral and political
questions about who is responsible for these conditions and provisions and in

I would like to thank the factory employees who supported the research over a 15-year period. I
would also like to thank the following people, for reading and commenting on drafts of the
monograph: John Bennett, Bob Carter, Jud Cornell, Peter Gutkind, Jim Marshall, Theo Nichols,
Gavin Poynter, Al Rainnie, Jeremy Waddington and Arne Wangel. In addition, Richard Lampard
gave me invaluable technical advice about the presentation of quantitative data. John Berridge
provided extremely helpful editorial advice. Finally, I would like to offer special thanks to Peter
Caldwell who has worked with me on this project from the beginning, assisting in data collection,
discussing my interpretations of the material, and reading successive drafts. The research was
Employee Relations, Vol. 18 No.2,
funded by a Nuffield Foundation Small Grants award, a University of Warwick Research and 1996, pp. 5-88. © MCB University
Innovation Fund award, and an Economic and Social Research Council award (No. R000232006). Press, 0142-5455
Employee what way. In all, this is a contested and often fraught area of social and political
Relations concern.
18,2 Historically, health and safety at work in the UK has been the focus of
philanthropists, of policy makers, of employers and, of course, workers. Many
have campaigned over health and safety at work, making it the subject of
sometimes bitter contestation. The outcome has been a long history of
6 legislation dealing with different aspects of health and safety at work, much of
it dating back to the nineteenth century. In recent decades, there have been some
notable advances in the establishment of minimum conditions for more healthy
and safer workplaces, particularly in mining and manufacturing. Nonetheless,
the occasional disasters, involving sea transport, chemical production, or
nuclear energy, are simply the more visible reminders that health and safety at
work is a continuing and pressing problem.
What is equally important is the part played by trade unionism in addressing
the question of health and safety at work. It was through the union form of
collective organization, particularly in the nineteenth century, that many
workers began to seek relief from danger and work-related ill-health. It was out
of these concerns that many in the labour movement, unions and their
parliamentary counterparts, campaigned for legislation to deal with the ill-
health and danger at the workplace, as well as for the welfare provisions that
have been elaborated in many societies during this century. This was part of a
process whereby employers were forced to address some of the more blatant
assaults on workers and their communities.
While much has been written about the broader questions of social policy
and concern, pointing to the contradictions and uncertainties of these policies,
as well as their successes, very little has been written about the on-going
struggles in the workplace (e.g. Marshall, 1965; Offe, 1984; Pixley, 1993). In
particular, scant attention has been given to workers at work, and the part
played by social policies in the organization of the social relations of production
(an exception being Nichols and Armstrong, 1973). In part, this is because of the
seeming intractability of these questions where a concern with health and
safety at work is often seen as a secondary or subordinate question. Workers
seem more concerned with pay and related items; industrial relations are
routinized and for practical and pragmatic reasons health and safety at work
often does not appear at the forefront of concern. Yet, on a daily basis it remains
central as workers manage their work lives.

The promise of legal regulation

In Britain, until 1974, there was a long tradition of setting standards and guide-
lines for working conditions in a range of laws, including the Factories Act
1961, the Offices, Shops and Railways Premises Act 1963, the Mines and
Quarries Act 1954. Often this meant unevenness of standards and not all
workers in all workplaces were covered by legislation. In 1970, at the tail-end of
the Labour Government, the Robens enquiry was set up to make
recommendations on health and safety at work. The report is an early and clear
statement of the principle that health and safety is an individual responsibility The question of
best achieved through self-regulation (Robens, 1972). With the subsequent health and
passage of the Health and Safety at Work Act (HASAWA) in 1974 the aim was safety at work
that all workers in all industries would be covered by safety legislation for the
first time in Britain. In this respect, HASAWA embodied the principles of self-
regulation, though with some qualifications. It was an enabling Act which did
not set standards but laid down the guidelines for the procedures that have been 7
followed ever since.

A cluster of legislation and regulations

HASAWA provided a broad framework for the regulation of health and safety
at work, defining workplaces, imposing requirements and the provision of
guidelines for health and safety activity. Broad duties of responsibility were
placed on different social groups, employers (section 2), self-employed (section
3), controllers of premises (section 4), designers, manufacturers, suppliers and
importers (section 6), and workers (section 7). These duties were qualified in
various ways, but notably with the legal formulation that such duties should be
observed “as far as is reasonably practicable”, which opened up the possibility
of debate and disputation about the actual compliance with the general duties.
Provisions were made in HASAWA for issuing Health and Safety Regulations
and Health and Safety Commission (HSC) Approved Codes of Practice. The idea
was that eventually most of the previous legislation would be repealed and
replaced by regulations and codes of practice. This has taken time and is
subject to the operation and resourcing of the Health and Safety Executive
(HSE), which was charged with the responsibility for producing these
standards of conduct. But, since the passage of this legislation, the HSE has
found itself operating in a changed context, where the deregulation of labour
has prevailed and the resourcing for the HSE’s work has been increasingly
restrictive. Nonetheless, in a hesitant way, a series of regulations and codes of
practice have been produced, with implications for the conduct of health and
safety at work. More recently, the European Union has provided the impetus for
much British legislation on health and safety, particularly since 1990[1].
The legislation was shortly followed by the Safety Representatives and
Safety Committee Regulations (SRSC) of 1978. In these regulations, workplace
union representatives on health and safety were formally recognized as one
partner in the process of self-regulation. While these regulations provided an
opportunity for unions to exploit the possibilities heralded by the legislation
and accompanying regulatory requirements, initially unions responded both
tentatively and hesitantly. Some unions were very much at the forefront in
pressing for this legislation, but the majority of unions were ill-prepared for the
changes indicated by HASAWA. To an important extent, the delay in producing
the regulations relating to safety representatives gave unions time to develop
national policies as well as to organize so as to take advantage of the legislation.
The main issue nationally centred on whether or not the safety representatives
would be in a position to fulfil their statutory duties and to utilize the
Employee opportunities posed by the legislation without being victimized (Baker, 1984,
Relations p. 4). The 1977 Trades Union Congress (TUC) debated these issues and
18,2 approved a composite motion which recognized this worry but which also
called for the public sponsorship of safety representative training schemes
(TUC Report, 1977, pp. 421-5). This was the precursor to a massive expansion
of trade union education, centred on the health and safety representative
8 courses, offered by public institutions, such as the Further Education Colleges
and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), on the basis of paid
educational leave from work (Cornell, 1986).
Training courses became a crucial part of the preparation by unions for
dealing with health and safety at work, as well as promoting unionism in the
workplace (Baker, 1984; Caldwell et al., 1980; Cunningham, 1987). It soon
became apparent, despite an initial naive belief in some quarters that legislation
would ensure management-worker co-operation on these questions, that health
and safety would remain the subject of negotiation and occasionally conflict. In
this respect, both employers and trade unionists were in positions to utilize
legislation to support their own case. For managers, the presence of safety
representatives signalled a challenge to their control and authority, while for
unionists the legislation gave them “rights” that previously had not formally
been recognized. It was for this reason that many unions were worried initially
about the vulnerability of safety representatives and decided that such duties
should be undertaken by workplace stewards and not separately elected safety
representatives, who may be seen as outside the workplace union structure.
More generally, the legislation and accompanying regulations raised questions
about the formalization and routinization of relations between unions and
management on health and safety at work. One implication of the legal regulation
of health and safety at work was the establishment of joint consultative
committees to address health and safety questions. The legitimacy given to these
committees meant that they became a feature of the industrial relations terrain in
many enterprises, in both the public and private sectors. Nonetheless, while such
arrangements were part of the quasi-corporatist ethos of the 1970s, they rested on
far less fertile ground in the 1980s (Crouch, 1982; McIlroy, 1995). For unions, the
issue became whether these arrangements provided an opportunity to deal with
general health and safety questions substantively or as a substitute for dealing
with the immediate and detailed questions that would otherwise be taken up by
safety representatives.

Unions and legal regulation

As indicated above, unions have a long-standing concern with health and safety
at work. This remains the case, and is brought out clearly in a recent
comprehensive study of workplace union involvement, by Dawson and her
colleagues (1988). The key argument they advance is that unions are far from
neutral participants in the process of health and safety at work; on the contrary
union organization is a critical dimension in dealing with dangerous practices
and procedures, the principal focus of the book, associated with many work and
employment situations. They argue that where workers are unionized, receive The question of
average pay levels or better, and the workplace is relatively large, then accidents health and
are likely to be less than in low-paid, non-unionized small workplaces. The safety at work
implication of this is that union organization is a necessary condition for
beginning to deal with questions relating to health and safety at work.
Dawson and her colleagues examined the detail of HASAWA, its origins,
content and implementation. They identified the way in which the legislation 9
was predicated on a notion of self-regulation and the involvement of workforces
in regulating health and safety at work. In their words:
The principal responsibility for safety, and the legal obligation, was firmly placed upon
employers, employees, suppliers and other people involved in the supply of goods and services
through work. (Dawson et al., 1988, p. xv).

While initially there was debate and controversy over the place of unions in this
process, whether safety representatives should be union members, and whether
safety representatives should be accountable to unions, this, as the authors of
this study note, was of less significance in practice, in that where unions were
already organized they were able to establish the basis of safety representation
and involvement via the rights granted to safety representatives (Dawson et al.,
1988, pp. 20-4).
In a set of case studies, focused on chemicals, construction and retailing, the
authors explored the implications and effect of HASAWA and accompanying
regulations at a local level (pp. 63-153). They argued that unionization was an
important factor in addressing the problem of accidents and by implication
health and safety problems more generally. This is argument by default in that
apart from the willingness of management to initiate and maintain an effective
safety policy via self-regulation, a potent approach to health and safety
depends on the “degree of unionization, size of firm and extent of subcon-
tracting” (p. 179). Dawson and her colleagues argue that in practice unions
pursue policies concerned both with integrative bargaining (on the assumption
of partnership and the acceptance of common goals and objectives) and
distributive bargaining ( where the parties see themselves as having divergent
goals) thereby reflecting some of the tensions underpinning the legal regulation
of health and safety at work (p. 173). This becomes an argument for the
“responsible” workplace steward, committed to the representative role and
undertaking both integrative and distributive bargaining (Batstone et al., 1977;
Dawson et al., 1988, pp. 174-6;).
What is missing from this account is a consideration of the conditions for
union organization and action on health and safety at work. Dawson and her
colleagues do point to the correlation between union organization and safety
representation, noting that decline in union organization during the 1980s has
been associated with a concurrent deterioration in safety representation,
particularly in construction and manufacturing (p. 259). They also note that
union membership levels are a relatively clumsy way to judge what actually
Employee happens in practice, so that safety representatives or safety committees may
Relations exist in many workplaces in name only.
18,2 What Dawson and her colleagues are clear about is that the regulation of
health and safety at work is based on a tension between the assumptions
underpinning HASAWA that there was a “natural” identity of interests between
management and workforces on safety matters and the way in which safety
10 representation rested on some notion of trade union representation. As the
authors note, in an important comment:
The limits of workforce involvement on health and safety matters are thus set, legislation
notwithstanding, by the general nature and extent of workforce involvement in managerial
decisions on the range of issues. These in turn reflect the relative powers of workers and
managers which vary in different economic and political contexts. Where managers do not
consult, safety committees are unlikely to be effective. Where managers bargain over a wide
range of issues, they are likely to consult and possibly bargain over safety. Where they seek to
limit or cut back the influence of shop stewards, they are unlikely to encourage the activities
of safety representatives (Dawson et al., 1988, p. 268).

Apart from characterizing the model safety representative in terms of the

responsible workplace steward and noting the temptation in a bargaining
relation to negotiate safety away, there is little comment on the form and
character of trade union organization in the workplace. While this may be
fitting for an account which is examining the form and basis of legal regulation,
it is of limited help in developing an understanding of the importance of
workplace trade unionism for health and safety at work.
The thrust of the Dawson et al. analysis on local trade union involvement in
health and safety is a feature of the relationships between workers and
managers, in their many contexts. Clearly, this is an important insight which
should be extended if the centrality of unionism in addressing health and safety
matters is to be understood. It is necessary to spell out the tensions of unionism
and the relation between local relationships and legal regulation in this area.
This means examining the conditions in which unions bargain, negotiate and
enforce the requirements for safe and healthy working environments. In turn,
this means exploring the flux and flow of unionism in the workplace, pointing
to the unevenness and difficulty in developing an outlook, a consciousness and
an approach to these questions.

Uncertainties in the 1980s and 1990s

The circumstances and conditions for effective union action changed
dramatically during the 1980s. In a series of Acts – Employment Act 1980,
Employment Act 1982, Trade Union Act 1984, Employment Act 1988,
Employment Act 1990, and Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act
1993 – the Conservative governments of the period restricted what unions could
do and imposed conditions on how unions organize (Smith and Morton, 1993).
These restrictions were introduced in the context of unemployment and
insecurity of employment, as ongoing features of this period. Thus while trade
unions may have remained involved in health and safety representation in the
manufacturing sector during the period, the circumstances were far less The question of
propitious than previously. health and
Joint workplace-level consultative committees, of which the safety
committees are a prime exemplar, became a feature of many enterprizes in the
safety at work
period 1975 to 1980, covering somewhere around one-third of all establishments
in the private and public sectors (Millward et al., 1992, pp. 151-3). While overall
this pattern of arrangements was maintained during the 1980s, there was a 11
decline in such committees in the manufacturing sector during this period, from
36 per cent in 1980 to 23 per cent in 1990 (Millward et al., 1992, p. 153). This may
have been partly the consequence of the restructuring and reorganization in
this sector, and the downsizing that took place. Nonetheless, committees which
dealt specifically with health and safety remained at just under a quarter of all
establishments, with just over 30 per cent of establishments reporting such
committees for the private manufacturing sector (Millward et al., 1992, p. 162).
As noted by the authors of the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS)
report, such committees were much more likely to be found in unionized
establishments than those without, reflecting the way in which unions still
sought to give substance to the statutory provisions contained within the
legislation on health and safety (Millward et al., 1992, pp. 159-64).
What is more noteworthy is that during the 1980s, it became apparent that
safety representatives were much less likely to be in place in establishments
without safety committees than those which had such arrangements (Millward
et al., 1992, p. 162). There is some evidence that there was an increased tendency
for managers to deal with health and safety questions without consultation,
either via safety committees or with safety representatives, nonetheless, it
remained the case that in the larger workplaces, 500 or more people, and in
unionized workplaces, it was more likely that health and safety representatives
continued to operate.
In a recent review of the statutory provisions on health and safety in the
context of the erosion of union power in the 1980s, Reilly and colleagues argue
that where health and safety joint consultative committees have representatives
appointed by unions then there is a significant reduction in workplace injuries
(Reilly et al., 1995, pp. 275-88). The analysis is that while the general weakening
of organized labour has had an impact on health and safety, unions nonetheless
retain a residual presence with consequences for injury levels. Using nationally
representative aggregate data sets (from WIRS3), they confirm that a union
presence has a beneficial impact on injury levels. They also point out that worse
injury incident rates occur where management alone decided health and safety
in the absence of unions or safety committees. While the data does not allow a
consideration of the precise role of union representation plays in this process, it
remains a suggestive analysis.
Further, Waddington and Whitson (1996) report how health and safety
remains one of the most common issues raised by union members with their
representatives. Just over one-third of active members referred to health and
safety as one of their three most common grievances, especially so for
Employee respondents from the manufacturing sector (p. 169). According to Waddington
Relations and Whitson this concern with health and safety is a reflection of the increased
18,2 intensification of work. It is also an area where statutory regulation provides
the conditions for action on these issues, albeit in the form of largely individual
grievances. This, however, runs counter to some of the arguments by Dawson
and colleagues (1988) who noted that many procedures and institutional
12 arrangements may exist in name only, which suggests that statutory provisions
may not be as important as Waddington and Whitson suggest. Nonetheless, it
should be noted that it remains possible that union members could activate
these formal resources in relatively instrumental ways as work intensification
proceeds. The point is that the circumstances under which statutory provisions
have an impact at the level of the workplace remains uncertain.
Debates about the way unions organize and their prospects in a restructuring
economy raise questions about the future of trade unionism, with the suggestion
that unions will play a much reduced role (Brown, 1993, p. 198; Department of
Employment, 1992, p. 39; Millward, 1994, p. 133). Unions have faced legal
restrictions on their activity within the workplace. Managements have been
more assertive during the 1980s, redrawing employment boundaries and
emphasizing productivity and service delivery. The associated result was that
fatality and injury rates rose during the 1980s (Bach, 1994; Nichols, 1986). In
other words, the restructuring of the 1980s and the increased emphasis on
productivity, with its associated intensification of work, resulted in a noticeable
decline in health and safety at work.

The politics of health and safety

The legislation and regulations on health and safety rest on a tension between
two distinct approaches to health and safety regulation. The first, encapsulated
in HASAWA, is that of self-regulation by the participants to the health and
safety relationship, in particular employers and workers, and brought together
at a national level through the auspices of the state in the shape of the HSC/HSE.
Central to this approach is an implicit assumption that the questions arising
from health and safety can be dealt with at an establishment level, perhaps at
an enterprise level, by goodwill, procedures and a process of organization, on
the part both of management and workers (an anticipation of the deregulation
of employment relations in the 1980s).
The import of this approach is that both management and workers, as the
two major protagonists within the workplace, are assumed to share an
aspiration for healthy and safe working environments, to be achieved by
working together towards this end. Following on from this, it becomes possible
to view the solution to the problem of dangers and hazards at work as a series
of technical problems, to be solved with procedures aimed at facilitating an
understanding where all agree on the “ultimate” ends.
Qualifying the push towards self-regulation, the SRSC Regulations represent
another approach to worker-management relations at the workplace. These
regulations emerged out of the corporatist movement of the period with the
drive towards the legal recognition of citizenship rights, in this instance The question of
industrial citizenship, where safety representatives are legally recognized and health and
where safety committees are forums for management-worker consultation on safety at work
health and safety in the workplace.
The argument is, following Nichols (1996), that under the political economy
of the 1970s, when organized labour achieved a presence in the polity, both
within workplaces and on successive governments, they were able to make 13
gains, in the area of health and safety as well as on discrimination, equal
opportunities and trade union prerogatives. During this period, particularly
after 1974, when organized labour had some influence in the polity,
governments responded to their pressure with increased legal rights and
recognition at work, including health and safety legislation. The critical point in
this argument is that it was not so much that HASAWA improved the legal
regulation of health and safety, reflected in the declining injury rates, but that
public awareness of health and safety increased, TUC health and training also
increased, and the later SRSC Regulations incorporated a philosophy of trade
union rights, in the context of which there was a heightening of a trade union
safety consciousness (Nichols, 1996).
With the succession of this more corporatist phase of regulation in the 1980s
by a liberal market approach to industrial relations and increasing economic
deregulation, the earlier gains were lost as the balance of power shifted in
favour of capital and away from labour. Increasingly, the institutional
arrangements of health and safety at the workplace, such as safety committees,
routine inspection, the appointment of “experts” as safety officers, became part
of more formalized and procedural approaches to health and safety at work.
The emphasis shifted towards self-regulation with workers’ rights drawn into a
more managerialist approach to health and safety, where the parameters were
increasingly set by management alone, and insofar as workers’ rights were
recognized, it was in an increasingly formalized and secondary way.
Taken together, this legislation and the associated regulations capture
tensions which continue to be worked out. Before HASAWA, the focus of the
legislation and activity within workplaces, particularly manufacturing and
mining, was on standards and compensation for injury. With the passage of
HASAWA, there was a gradual shift within management from compliance with
standards and the attempts to minimize compensation to the management of
health and safety at the workplace in the context of self-regulation.
For unions the trajectory was different, at least in manufacturing. Building on
the sectional basis of unionism in the 1960s, unions sought to use the safety
representative regulations to extend the parameters of collective bargaining. In
this respect HASAWA provided an occasion for some sections of the union
movement, the better organized, to attempt to broaden and extend their
presence within workplaces, focusing on health and safety at work. Although
this was not a generalized development, it was a feature of an influential strand
of unionism, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The problem for unions
in the 1980s was that the principles encapsulated in HASAWA chimed in with
Employee the liberal market ethos of the time, and the moves to deregulate the economy,
Relations so that unions suffered an overall secular decline during this period. In effect,
18,2 this has placed the question of health and safety within a context where it is
acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that the workforce and management are in
relationships where different sets of interests are evident.
In this respect, the social relations of production mean that health and safety
14 remains contested and uncertain, worked out over time and in relation to the
changing relations between management and the workforce. Unions and
management are caught in the tensions and pressures towards accommodation
and resistance, between reform and revolution, between politicization and
depoliticization.
The implication of these observations is that workers organize and operate
collectively, through the union form of organization, and not as individuals. For
unions, the properties which define unions as moderate or militant are
frequently revised, reformulated and expressed in the context of the
relationships that define unions as unions (cf. Kelly, 1996, pp. 79-80 and[2]). The
point is that union memberships are continually working and reworking these
relationships, depending on circumstances, understandings, ideologies and the
relations within which they are embedded. It is within this complex of relations
that workers address the question of health and safety at work.
At one level the association between trade unionism, on the one hand, and
legal regulation, on the other, may be one of coincidence, rather than a relation
of social significance. For this to be the case, it would be necessary to argue that
the legal regulation of health and safety is effective irrespective of the presence
or otherwise of trade union forms of organization in the workplace. This
assumes that legal regulation can be enforced and that unions are not critical to
this process. That this is not the case is evident in three ways.
First, and perhaps most mundane, the enforcement of legal regulation
requires a process and agency of enforcement, which in the case of health and
safety is done by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The difficulty with
this is that the HSE remains numerically small, with limited resources to
undertake such a job. In addition, the legal requirements cannot be enforced
unambiguously, in that they are subject to interpretation and qualification,
expressed via persuasion and negotiation at the place of work or via the drawn-
out and expensive procedures of legal recourse.
Second, it would be expected that if trade unions were a neutral or
insignificant participant in this process, then there would be no appreciable
difference between what transpires in an organized workplace and one that is
not. Logically, it would appear to be the case that where a workforce is organized
collectively on the question of health and safety at work, then it is more likely
that such questions will be raised and addressed because unionization provides
a vehicle whereby workers can express their concerns and experiences in ways
that become a part of the process of resolving health and safety problems. To rely
on individual workers, rather than a collective voice, assumes that all are equal
in the workplace, that all workers have the confidence and ability to express their
concerns, and that managers are equally open and responsive to petitioning from The question of
individual workers. health and
Third, and most important, such an assumption rests on the premiss that safety at work
either the social relations of production are uncontested and non-conflictual or if
not, then in ways that can be resolved readily by regulation. This raises many
questions about the organization and construction of the social relations of
production, in abstract terms between labour and capital and, more concretely, 15
between managers and workers in the context of power relations and
inequalities, both of a material and ideological kind. Even in the case of health
and safety at work, where there is broad ethical agreement that work should
take place in a healthy and safe environment, the countervailing pressures for
the production of goods or the delivery of services, and in what way, raise
complicated questions about the organization and operation of workplaces that
are not readily reducible to legal formulae and regulation (Nichols and
Armstrong, 1973).

The argument
In principle, it is via trade unionism that workers are able to address health and
safety questions and take steps to enhance, improve or defend their conditions
of work and employment. Usually, it is through trade unionism that workers
begin to redefine individual experience and concern in collective terms. However,
this is not a straightforward process. The union form of organization is one that
is always changing and evolving, so that what is effective and appropriate in one
period may not be so in another. Unions are locked into the flux and flow of
power relations both within firms and within the wider community, with the
result that the union form of organization is neither fixed, nor can it be taken for
granted.

Stages in the argument

The first argument is that from the point of view of workers, health and safety
at work is both a collective and an individual interest. For the individual, it may
be possible to petition on some matter, but this action is unlikely to address the
common interest of all workers in all work settings. Following on from this, the
structure of work and employment relations mean that individual forms of
organization place workers in potentially vulnerable or isolating situations. To
counter this condition, workers have developed forms of organization,
principally via trade unions, so as to recognize their interests in common, those
that are susceptible to resolution via collective organization and action.
The second strand of the argument goes a step further recognizing that
health and safety at work is only one of a number of issues that unions deal with
and organize around. Pay, job security, sexual and racial discrimination, state
policy, corporate strategies as well as health and safety at work, are all matters
which constitute the world of workers and the communities in which they live.
The problem for workers collectively is how to pursue their aspirations, how to
prioritize their activity and objectives. There are no easy answers to these
Employee questions and they are subject to debate within unions as well as between
Relations different union memberships. More specifically, it is the case that within the
18,2 circumstances of the 1980s many unions have found it difficult to keep health
and safety to the forefront of their concerns (for a complementary analysis, see
Dalton, 1991). So, as well as the question of union organization and activity, it is
necessary to consider how and under what circumstances union memberships
16 decide to pursue questions relating to health and safety at work.
This analysis rests on a particular view of unions. First, it is suggested that
unionism is rooted in the complicated and conflicting interests of workers and
their employers. This means that unions continually emphasize and reassert the
routines and procedures of unionism, particularly in the context of recession
and uncertainty. Second, and related, in periods when the relations between
managers and workers are being restructured, when management has an
interest in redrawing the boundaries of control, established forms of unionism
may be found wanting, with adverse consequences for pursuing issues such as
health and safety at work.
The argument that the union form of organization is central to the way in
which health and safety at work is dealt with by workers and their unions was
the focus of one of the most popular and widely read books by workers on
health and safety questions in the 1970s (Kinnersley, 1973). Kinnersley
surveyed the legislation, the range of health and safety problems at work, and
the place of unions in dealing with these questions. He argued for active
workplace-based forms of union organization, where worker representatives
could begin to address these questions.
How and under what circumstances might unions be able to organize and
address health and safety questions? In posing the question in this way it is
necessary to explore the form of union organization that enables such issues to
be raised. Unions are not all of a piece. Some are organized in highly centralized
and remote ways, traditionally the case in the public sector, but also in a variety
of ways elsewhere (McIlroy, 1995, pp. 145-76). Other unions have questioned the
distinction between representative forms of organization and more
participative forms (McIlroy, 1995, pp. 158-69). The result is variation in union
form, raising questions about the processes of democratization and
centralization of unions. Thus, one strand of argument in this monograph is
that in order to address the routine, the mundane and the immediate, a
condition of involvement is a participative form of union organization.
A second condition for addressing the question of health and safety at work
is the development of an awareness among members and their representatives
of the nature of the dangers and prospects of ill-health that they face. The
means of acquiring such an awareness might in part come from formalized
training and education (Cornell, 1986). Equally and more immediately it might
come from discussion and debate within the workplace, involving workers,
managers, specialists and others. The point is how does such an awareness
develop in practice and under what conditions.
The presentation of the case study The question of
The argument is developed through a detailed longitudinal case study of an health and
engineering factory. This study takes up these questions via a case study of a
middle-size, routine engineering firm, designated Heating Factory, from the
safety at work
1970s into the 1990s[3]. The factory is located in Middle Town, in the West
Midlands. It is probably like many workplaces throughout the country, where
there are many dangers and where long-term health problems can be expected. 17
In other words, it is an ordinary engineering factory at the end of the twentieth
century.
The case study analysis begins in chapter 2 with an account of the factory,
pointing to the key characteristics of production, the workforce and the
community. In chapter 3 an overview of the hazards, both those concerned with
unsafe working conditions as well as those involving questions relating to the
health of the workforce or others who have connections with the factory. This is
followed, in chapter 4 by an account of the main features of management’s
approach to health and safety in the factory, which was to set the terms of
health and safety activity, co-opting the senior union leadership at the factory
as accommodative “partners” in the process. In chapter 5, the focus shifts to
unions, initially presenting a history of unions in the plant, pointing to the
centrality of workplace forms of union organization and the difficulties the
unions have had in maintaining a presence in the factory. In chapter 6, the focus
is on what unions have done about health and safety, pointing to the difficulties
and uncertainties of organizing on health and safety at work. Finally, in chapter
7 the themes and implications of the study are presented.
Employee 2. Heating Factory
Relations
18,2 Heating Factory has produced heating units for over four decades. Initially, the
factory comprised three sites in the same locality, a main site covering
administration, foundry production, assembly and packing, a second
production site concerned with press work and related assembly, and a third
18 site for design and development, and some administration, including sales. The
factory expanded in stops and starts, with old and new buildings, aged and
modern equipment, and with a workforce whose security of employment was
punctuated by periodic announcements of job loss. Although questions about
its future were decided elsewhere, the factory was an important employer in the
town. Throughout its history, the factory, has been owned by a succession of
corporations, all externally located, and all with sets of corporate interests
which were not necessarily aligned with those of the factory and the locality but
nevertheless played an important part in the way the factory developed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a considerable lead time between the design
of new boilers and their subsequent production and marketing. In part this was
a consequence of the market which until the late 1970s was small and
expanding slowly and during which period production at the factory was
stable. Towards the end of the 1970s one of the two production sites was closed
and moved to the main site. However, during the 1980s, there was a rapid
expansion of the market for domestic heating units, and the factory increased
production, making a wider range of units than previously. Further, expansion
and some limited diversification of production occurred in the 1990s, including
the opening of a third, purpose-built site for spare parts and distribution.

Factory ownership
The original company manufacturing domestic heating units was founded in
London, in the late 1800s, moving within London and then relocating to Middle
Town in the 1930s to what became the main site. This was not a complete move
and it was not until the 1960s that the engineering and commercial functions
were also moved to the West Midlands. During the 1960s the factory became the
main national manufacturer of domestic heating equipment as well as an
important competitor in the domestic cooker market. The company expanded
its manufacturing base in the area, opening a second production site, mainly
concerned with pressings and fabricated sheet metal components. In 1978 this
site was closed down, with the incorporation of the fabrication work within the
main site and the cessation of cooker manufacture.
The heating company, which operated the factory, has had three owners
during the post-war period. From the late 1940s until 1973 the company was
owned by Industrial Corporation; from 1973 to 1988 by Household Corporation,
producing a range of domestic and household appliances; and then by
Construction Corporation, a major construction company. During the 1970s the
heating subsidiary company entered a period of stagnation when little product
innovation took place and it failed to increase its market share. However, during
the 1980s the company became one of the five major manufacturers of domestic The question of
heating units in the British market, with approximately 20 per cent of the health and
market share in Britain. After the acquisition of the parent company in 1988, the safety at work
subsidiary heating company was merged with another subsidiary heating
company (acquired in 1990) to form a larger and more diversified heating
company, becoming part of one of the largest domestic heating unit
manufacturers in Europe. 19
As with many companies during the 1980s, the parent company, Household
Corporation, devolved financial and budgetary control, except for major
financial investment decisions, to the factory management. This meant that
with the expansion of the market in the 1980s, the factory management had the
resources to invest in new models and respond positively to increased market
demand. Management at the time were under the impression that if the factory
failed to prosper then it would eventually close down. In the event, the product
development work carried out at the factory coincided with an upturn in the
market for the product and the factory entered a phase of increased production
which continued into the 1990s.
In the 1990s, the factory began to lose its previous production autonomy.
When Household Corporation was taken over by the Construction Corporation
in 1988, Heating Factory was placed in a subsidiary company covering four
sites, engaged in the production of heating products. This subsidiary company
then set about reorganizing the production of heating goods, establishing
parallel manufacturing lines at the Middle Town site and another site in the
north-east of England (previously a major competitor of Heating Factory). This
resulted in an element of job insecurity among the Heating Factory workforce
as the company debated product development and capital investment. So began
another period of uncertainty at Heating Factory, evident in pay negotiations at
the factory as well as announcements and rumours about the long-term future
at the factory. In 1995, the company announced the loss of 200 jobs at Heating
Factory and the transfer of 90 of these jobs to the partner plant in north-east
England.

Employment patterns
Heating Factory has always been privately owned, producing a product for an
expanding British market and, from the 1970s onwards, an increasingly
international market. It was one of the six largest privately-owned employers in
the town, with a relatively stable and established workforce (17 years of service
on average in 1994) who had developed their unionism over a number of
decades and who were willing to question remote corporate decisions from time
to time. But, it was also a workforce which did not see a broad ambit of
alternatives to the type of work they did or where they worked.
The size of the factory workforce (covering three sites until 1978 and two
thereafter until 1995) has been relatively stable (Table I).
Throughout its history, the majority of the workforce has been male, with
women employed in support and ancillary occupations, such as clerical work,
Employee canteen work and light assembly, although these divisions have been modified
Relations in the last few years. The pattern of recruitment from the late-1970s onwards
18,2 was haphazard, partly because of the fluctuating demand for heating units and
partly because of an intensification of labour in the factory as indicated by
increased productivity. In general, recruitment into the factory focused on full-
20
time permanent employees, although in 1985, the company proposed and then

Year Employeesa Turnover (£ million)

1975 1,450 n/a

1976 1,400 n/a
1977 1,400 n/a
1978 1,070 n/a
1979 1,400 n/a
1980 1,003 10-20
1981 1,003 10-20
1982 1,003 10-20
1983 900 20-50
1984 900 20-50
1985 900 20-50
1986 900 20-50
1987 900 20-50
1988 1,100 20-50
1989 1,100 20-50
1990/91b 1,100 20-50
1991/92 1,100 20-50
1992/93 1,001-1,500 125-250c
1993/94 1,001-1,500 125-250
1994/95 1,001-1,500 125-250
1995/96 1,001-1,500d 125-250
Notes: aThe
series is not strictly comparable because of different ways of recording the data.
A breakdown on the basis of sex was not available.
bFrom 1990 the data were collected on a financial-year basis. In addition, from 1992/93
data for employee numbers and turnover were presented in bands as indicated.
cThe increase in financial turnover is beyond what would be expected normally in this
type of factory and reflected changed accounting arrangements, following the acquisi-
tion of the factory by a large multi-divisional construction company in the late 1980s.
dOn 31 December 1995, the number employed at the three Heating Factory sites was
Table I.
Employment and 1,007.
financial turnover, Source: Kompass, 1975-95/96.
1975 to 1995/96
abandoned a plan to recruit shopfloor workers on temporary three-month The question of
contracts because of union opposition. health and
Complementing these patterns of employment, a relatively sizeable safety at work
proportion of the workforce (although still a minority) were of south-Asian
ancestry, with many employed at this factory for at least 20 years. In the 1970s
there was some evidence of institutionalized racism, with workers of south-
Asian ancestry ending up in the foundry and labouring areas in 21
disproportionate numbers, although this was less evident in the 1980s.
Nonetheless, such practices resulted in long-term patterns of job segregation
which were often expressed informally by adverse work and time allocations.
The number of women employed at the factory remained small, ranging from
150 to nearly 200. There was some change in the deployment of women within
the factory during the last 15 years. In 1979 women production workers at the
main site were not permitted to work in the foundry area or most of the
assembly areas. This contrasted with the practice at the second site where
women workers were employed more widely in the paint shop and assembly
areas, although not in the press areas. With the move to the main site women
have been employed on a much larger scale in the assembly areas than
previously, although still in small numbers. More recently, in the early 1990s
there was an increase in the number of women employed at the factory as the
company recruited more sales and support staff, although women still
remained in a minority. Throughout the whole period, the language of the
factory remained both gendered and sexist, indicated, for example, by catcalls
and whistling when women walked through some parts of the factory,
especially the foundry.
Until the early 1990s, five unions were recognized at the factory:
Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU); Transport and General Workers’
Union (TGWU); General, Municipal and Boilermakers Union (GMB); Electrical,
Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU); and the
Association of Supervisory, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS)
subsequently Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF)[4]. For the shopfloor
unions, an effective occupational segregation distinguished the unions, with the
AEU (foundry section) organizing the foundry, TGWU in the distribution and
assembly areas, GMB representing semi- and unskilled workers in the
fabrication areas and the EETPU the electrical craft workers. The AEU
(engineering section) also had members outside the non-foundry areas,
representing the toolroom and some maintenance. Despite different
memberships, the unions in the factory effectively operated as two bodies with
the shopfloor unions operating under the auspices of a joint shop stewards’
committee (JSSC) and the staff union recruiting and representing first-line
supervision and technical staff.

Restructuring
The shifts and changes in ownership and market conditions were accompanied
by a pattern of restructuring in Heating Factory which initially reaffirmed the
Employee autonomy of production at the plant and more recently its vulnerability. For
Relations most of its history in Middle Town, the factory has operated as an independent
18,2 production unit, irrespective of ownership. This gave the management at the
factory considerable independence, especially in their negotiations with the
recognized unions at the plant. For their part, the unions were able to pursue
agreements and raise questions with management, which by and large were
22 settled at the factory level, with little reference to workers at other factories in
the town or within the corporate group as a whole.
In the late 1970s, the factory management took the decision to concentrate
production on one site, and close the second smaller site. Prior to the merger of
the two sites, production of heating units took place at the main site, where the
foundry and assembly were located, and at a second site, where the paint and
press shops were based and where some related assembly took place. With the
decision, in 1978, to base all production at the main site, new paint and press
shops were built and the assembly area expanded. These new work areas were
located between the foundry and assembly areas and involved upgrading the
production process, so that the paint shops were fully mechanized.
Following the merger of the two sites there were two major redundancies at
the factory, one in 1981 and the other in 1984. In the first programme, 116
workers took voluntary redundancy. At that time, the market had contracted to
the extent that the factory was put on a three-day week. In the second
redundancy, the company initially asked for and obtained 50 volunteers. In each
case, the unions became involved in negotiations about the redundancies. In
both cases, the union committee was able to negotiate the terms of the
redundancy offers and retain the practice of voluntary rather than compulsory
redundancies.
Although the factory in the 1980s was treated by Household Corporation as
a unified profit centre, the internal organization of the factory comprised a
number of cost centres which the management in the latter part of the 1980s
attempted to monitor as mini-profit centres. To facilitate this development, the
factory management introduced a group bonus scheme, implemented on a
departmental basis. In turn, management began to reorganize and “rationalize”
departments and, via the establishment of production teams, attempted to
redraw the boundaries of control over work processes. Although this was a
period of increased production and diversification of products, it was also a
period when there was considerable debate about the introduction of “new”
working practices and procedures, injecting an element of worry among the
workforce about the future patterns of work and employment at the factory.
The local management began to prepare the workforce for a period of
reorganization and restructuring, aimed at challenging long established work
procedures and allowing the factory management to deploy labour in a
“flexible” way. The rationale for this was presented in terms of the growing
popularity of human resource management (HRM) and total quality
management (TQM). In part, the espousal of these approaches by the local
factory management was seen as a way of reinforcing the legitimacy of
management to manage, and narrowing the remit of shopfloor unions to pay The question of
questions and the representation of members over individual grievances and health and
the like. While these changes began to be introduced in the mid-1980s, it was safety at work
only with the change of ownership in 1988 that there was a broad commitment
to this restructuring programme, particularly among senior factory managers,
including members of the personnel department, who led the programme.
This restructuring began slowly and initially involved a re-assessment of the 23
technological base of the factory, particularly in the assembly areas. When the
two factories had merged in 1978 the paint shop area was rebuilt and equipped
with up-to-date equipment and materials. This left the assembly area and the
foundry as functioning areas with relatively old and out-dated equipment and
related work procedures. In the face of growing competition in the home market
and a desire by the local management to extend their export sales, there was the
realization that new technologies would have to be introduced to enable
manufacture to the appropriate standards and that there would have to be a
more “efficient” deployment of labour. In the mid-1980s, at a time when the
factory appeared to be financially successful, Household Corporation began a
process of replacing old equipment in the foundry and further mechanizing the
production process. Alongside this there was the gradual introduction of new
technologies in the assembly area.
With the change of ownership in 1988, and the beginning of laying the
foundation for an integration of factory production in Middle Town with other
similar factories in the newly established subsidiary company, there was a
renewed impetus for the continued introduction of new equipment and an
increase in labour flexibility at the Middle Town plant. Apart from
announcements and information bulletins presenting the modernization of
plant in terms of financial viability and security, the management at the factory
began to introduce the workers to these changes in formal induction sessions.
Building on this earlier period, at the end of the 1980s the company
introduced quality circles into all production areas. This was significant for the
way in which the re-utilization of labour at the factory involved a redrawing of
the relationships between management and shopfloor workers. The procedure
was that first-line supervision, chargehands and relevant stewards met weekly
with shopfloor workers at “scrap” meetings. The remit for these meetings was
to discuss how the work was going, to raise problems about production activity,
and to consider ways in which any problems or difficulties could be resolved.
Notably, health and safety was not a formal agenda item at these meetings and
was seldom mentioned, even indirectly. Minutes were taken at these meetings
and forwarded to personnel. In practice the circles tended to be treated by the
workforce as a necessary inconvenience rather than as a serious endeavour that
would contribute to the improvement of production. All the same, the aim was
to inculcate a view that production workers should be part of the process of
considering production objectives which was as important as resolving specific
difficulties and problems. This was further complemented by the introduction
of section leaders concerned with quality and responsible to the quality control
Employee department. Shopfloor workers were taken off the job for half an hour in small
Relations groups and had the changes explained to them by company personnel. After six
18,2 months this was followed up, focusing on achievements and plans for the next
six months. In effect, this created a climate of acceptance of retraining and
redeployment as a feature of work at the factory in the 1990s.
The restructuring of labour practices also led to a breakdown in demarcated
24 work areas, specifically with respect to electrical and fitting work. With the
introduction of new technology, particularly in the press shops and the
assembly areas, there were moves in 1992 by the personnel department and
union leaders to establish a dual skilling arrangement for fitters and
electricians, where each did a limited amount of the others’ work. Initially, this
was introduced for apprentices, leaving established workers alone, so that each
new apprentice in either fitting or electrical work was introduced to the new
technologies which had become the occasion for redefining skills. All
apprentices were introduced to computer aided manufacture and design
systems, both at college and on site, and in this respect had developed the
competences appropriate for the restructured workplace.
A further aspect of the acquisition of the factory by Construction
Corporation was a programme to increase substantially the capitalization of
production. In the 1990s, against the background of increased price
competitiveness, the subsidiary heating company’s operating profit fluctuated,
with a loss in 1994. The company response was to reduce the number of sites
involved in heating unit production from three to two and at Heating Factory to
introduce automated lines in different production areas, and particularly the
foundry in 1994. This was accompanied by efforts to increase labour
productivity, introducing “new” forms of work organization, such as cell
production teams. For the workers this heralded a further round of uncertainty
since it was unclear whether heating unit production in future would be located
on one or two sites.
The shopfloor unions were part of this process of restructuring and
reorganization in the 1990s. In 1993, they negotiated an agreement on labour
utilization and new technology, building on earlier and less precise agreements.
This last agreement covered staff in maintenance and other service areas in the
factory and aimed to define the limits of dual skilling. Central to the agreement
was an attempt to protect the position of older workers who did not want to be
retrained in the use of electronic equipment. Underlying this concern was the
issue of status and whether it was possible to negotiate staff status for
maintenance and related workers, as new technology was introduced. It is in
these respects that the shopfloor unions accepted the basic thrust of the
restructuring and attempted to secure a continued future for workers at this
factory.

Summary
As with many engineering factories, Heating Factory had experienced the
vicissitudes of the 1980s in sharp ways, expressed through the changing
approaches of management to work organization and production procedures. The question of
Employee numbers were reduced, output fluctuated, and there was considerable health and
uncertainty about the future, especially in the first half of the 1980s. To an safety at work
important extent these developments were associated with the change in
ownership in 1988 and the increasing qualification to the autonomy of
production at the plant. No longer were decisions about production taken in
relation to market conditions by local management but were part of an overall 25
corporate strategy about the production of domestic heating units. Increasingly
the subsidiary heating company began to reorganize production at its four
related sites, and take decisions about Heating Factory which involved the
possibility of job relocation within the company and between sites.
Throughout its recent history, Heating Factory had been reorganized and
restructured in a variety of ways. The basic process of production remained
more or less intact, suggesting a continuity in the types of hazards and dangers
faced by many workers at the factory. Nonetheless, sections of the factory had
been rebuilt and equipped with up-to-date machinery, on occasion introducing
“new” hazards and dangers. Complementing this, the basic structure of
employment was unchanged, with a predominantly semi-skilled male
workforce employed at the factory, albeit employed under the different
conditions of production teams in the 1980s and 1990s. To begin to address and
explore the way in which health and safety was a concern, the analysis begins
with an examination of hazards and dangers at the factory.
Employee 3. Hazards at work
Relations
18,2 One of the features of discussions about health and safety at work is that there
is a tendency to focus on the obvious and immediately identifiable issues and
problems: injuries, noise, dust, housekeeping, the technology of production,
26 information technology, and layout (for example, Baldamus, 1978; Codrington
and Henley, 1981; Delbridge et al., 1992; Meekosha and Jakubowicz, 1991;
Nichols, 1989a, 1989b; and Stevens 1992). While this is understandable it is
worth remembering in any identification of the hazards and dangers at work
the less readily acknowledged issues and problems, such as the health
consequences of work stress or the long-term nature of many aspects of work,
such as working with chemicals or in noisy environments or indeed the
unknown, such as working with information technologies. The result is a
constellation of hazards and dangers which have been part of life at Heating
Factory for at least 15 years[5].
At Heating Factory, by 1980 and until at least 1995, the production process
had three main components to it: the foundry, metal and paint work, and
assembly. In addition there was a research and development division on a
nearby site, where an administrative and sales staff was also located. Taken
together and over the period of the study, this was a process where hazards and
dangerous occurrences were a feature of work life[6]. There have been
improvements over time, particularly in the more transparently unsafe or
hazardous areas of production, such as foundry work, but it is also the case that
different problems have arisen over time, such as those associated with labour
intensification, work pressure, and using information technologies. Each of the
main areas of work will be described, as well as the supporting work areas in
administration, research and sales.

Foundry
The heart of the factory for much of its history has been the foundry. This has
always been a relatively self-contained area, where castings and heating cores
were made. It was an area where teams of men work at furnaces, other
machines and on tracks. Little had changed in this area during the 15 years of
the study, although in 1994, the moulding area was upgraded with the
commissioning of an automated moulding line, taking some of the hard labour
of the past out of the area. Nonetheless, the same basic processes were utilized
and the layout of the area was much the same in 1995 as it had been in 1979.
There was the appearance of constant movement in this area as materials for
the furnaces were brought in by stacker trucks from the outside yard. There
was also frequent movement of the cores and castings as they went from one
part of the production process to another. At the end of the cycle the cores and
plates were moved out of the foundry area in readiness for the next stage in the
production process.
 The area has always been hazardous, with workers suffering routine and The question of
regular occurrences of “minor” injuries, such as burns from molten metal and health and
fingers caught in rollers. These injuries happened in the course of work in this safety at work
area, often from material handling but also from the processes of work. The
environment was noisy, with the sound of metal on metal punctuating the day,
every day. It was a hot, tiring and debilitating place of work. Here workers faced
possible injury and long-term ill-health. 27
There were dangerous work processes in this area of the factory. In 1979 one
foundry steward (AEU) described this in the following terms:
We might have problems where a bloke is pouring a box. It might blow up…

At times this was made worse by the actual system of work:

[Before the relocation of the track] he was just kind of standing there with his pot and just nice
and relaxed and pouring this. Well, the position of the crane that holds the bogey and the new
position of this new track meant that when he was pouring he had to pull it back…so he was
under pressure…He was using his strength to pull this back and he had to pour it at the same
time instead of just standing there relaxed…

While this was not a permanent arrangement and was partly the result of the
reorganization that was taking place, it nevertheless was a common type of
problem for these workers. Over time, there was less and less direct handling of
molten metal, particularly with the building of the automated moulding line in
1994. However, it remained an area of noise and clutter, where there was also the
inherent danger of working near or with molten metal.
Heavy manual labour constituted a central feature of the labour process and
physical fitness was at a premium. This was reflected in the workforce being
relatively young and almost exclusively male, with most workers in their 20s
and 30s[7]. Workers in this area have always been expected to lift heavy
materials on and off lines, in and out of moulds, and to shift materials around
the shop in accordance with the dictates of production in the area. While there
were improvements in the technology with the installation of lifting machinery,
it nevertheless remained the case that this was an area where tasks were
physically demanding. It was also the case that with the introduction of new
equipment, fewer workers were required in the area. So that while there was the
appearance of less hazardous working conditions when compared with the
past, individual workers often experienced an intensification of work.
The foundry was also a noisy area, with a steady background of noise. Until
very recently, teams of workers poured molten metal, tapped and shook moulds
to settle the metal, and lifted metal plates on and off lines. After the installation
of the automated moulding line in 1994, this was replaced partly by the hum
and clatter of the line, but with sounds of metal on metal at the end of the line
and elsewhere. Noise was also part of the process of making plates and cores.
The cores, for example, have always been cleaned by teams of men using
hammers and vibrating tools. In another area, known as the knockout area, the
sound of metal banging on metal was more or less continuous, as workers
cleaned up other parts of the mouldings.
Employee It was an area where there had been considerable rebuilding with the
Relations installation of new machinery and the commissioning of different lines. The
18,2 result was that there were periods in the 1980s, particularly 1986, and
subsequently in 1993 and 1994, when there were outside contractors working in
the area and when there was a lot of rebuilding. At the same time production
was maintained on the existing lines so that the area was often crowded with
28 factory employees and outside contract workers. The presence of contract
workers, albeit on a temporary basis, meant that work routines and procedures
were occasionally disrupted, sometimes resulting in clashes between the two
sets of workers.
The foundry was an obviously hazardous and dangerous place of work. For
management and the workforce it was seen as the heart of the production
process, since any disruption here had knock-on effects throughout the plant. In
general, the workforce were young, often brash and confident about their
abilities to cope with the demands of work and to face up to the dangers implied
by working in the foundry. While the modernization and re-equipment of the
foundry eventually qualified the somewhat self-confident atmosphere of the
earlier period, it nonetheless remained an area of manual labour, at the centre of
the production process, with an occasionally assertive workforce.

Paint and press shop

The paint and press shop was situated between the foundry and the assembly
area. Four main production processes took place here: sheet metal work,
guillotining, press work and painting. It was here that the heating unit
containers were made and prepared from untreated sheet metal. Overall, a
range of different activities were undertaken in this area. Workers generally
worked individually or as members of small teams. It was an area where, in
general, the pace of work was set by the machinery.
When the paint shop was relocated from the smaller site in 1978, it was re-
equipped so that it could not only meet the demands of an expanding
production output but also provide a relatively safe and healthy workplace. In
contrast, old press machines (some dated from the 1940s) were also moved on
to the main site and located adjacent to the paint shop. Subsequently, during
the 1980s and 1990s, technical improvements were made in this area, with the
introduction of some computerized technology and some new presses,
although it remained very much an established press shop, organized in a
relatively traditional way.
The four stages of production in this area were laid out in a sequence so that
the metal work or, in the vernacular of the industry, “metal bashing”, took
place at the beginning of this work area and the paint shop completed the
process. The cutting and guillotining areas comprised cutting machines, metal
sheets, swarf and other metal filings, creating noise and an atmosphere heavily
laden with the glittering metallic dust typical of such areas. This was followed
by the presses, large cumbersome machines, where workers shaped and
fashioned the metal ready for the paint shop. Again this was an area of metal
sheet, metal rod and metal waste and it was usually hot and noisy. The final The question of
stage in the process of metal production in this area was the paint shop. There health and
were two paint lines, both of which were fully automated. In this section, safety at work
operators attended to paint preparation, oversaw the line and carried out
minor rectification. It was an area where workers believed that the hazards and
dangers of work had been addressed. The work, however, was paced by
machinery; it was routine work and it could be stressful. 29
One of the main problems identified by the stewards from metal working
areas from 1979 onwards was housekeeping, that is keeping working areas
clean and tidy and safe. In 1989, a number of stewards (AEU and GMB)
discussed with one another housekeeping; safe access and egress, and dealing
with an injured worker:
The area was too small for the number of stillages used. The gangway lines were soon covered
up and there was a clutter of stillages. This meant that there were difficulties about getting
people out of the area in the event of an accident as well as being dangerous in their own right
because of loose metal hanging out of the stillages. An example of the problem was given by
one of the stewards who said that last week one worker had dropped a casting on his knee.
They could not get an ambulance into the area so they sat him on a chair and then got a Brush-
truck and loaded the injured worker, seated on the chair, on to the truck and took him to the
medical centre.

It was, for example, quite common for workers to have cuts on their arms from
the material sticking out of stillages. For many, even in 1994, this was accepted
as a feature of life in a press shop.
Even though workers occasionally worked in obviously dangerous working
conditions, workers did not always acknowledge the danger. This was
illustrated dramatically in the metal cutting area on one occasion, in 1989, when
a worker wilfully refused to stop work, although the working conditions were
unsafe. As reported:
[The steward – AEU] described a situation where a machinist continued to work on his
machine although a new roof was being put up directly above the area where he was working.
Although others thought it foolish to continue working in the area this did not carry any sway
with the worker.

Why the worker should respond in this way was not clear, although the
machinists were paid on a piecework basis and earnings would have been
affected adversely if he had stopped work. After all, many workers expressed a
view in discussion that they recognized danger but what choice did they really
have other than to continue working?
Noise and dust have long been problems at the factory. In 1979, in an area
situated adjacent the press and paint shop, a shop steward (AEU) was asked
“What are your members’ main work worries?” He answered in the following
terms:
At the moment it is definitely dust and noise, 100 per cent both things…We are wood workers
and create a lot of dust ourselves. At the moment we haven't got an extractor motor because
our shop has been…reorganized…They gave us an extractor but we couldn't use it because it
created so much noise.
Employee Shortly afterwards a new extractor was installed in this area. Although this
Relations problem was solved, the slowness with which management responded to such
18,2 problems was a constant irritant to the workforce.
Paint fumes and noise and dust in the press shop remained long-term
features of these work areas. While the paint shop was more or less fully
automated, the ducts carrying paint into the shop had to be loaded and cleaned
30 periodically, workers continued to monitor the shop during operations and they
cleaned it down periodically. At the same time in the adjacent areas workers
were employed monitoring the press machines and moving metal around. As a
result, this had always been both a noisy and dusty place in some sections and
seemingly full of fumes in others, and workers, almost without exception, spoke
of these conditions as routine and expected.

Assembly
The assembly area was very different to the foundry and parts of the press and
paint shop. It appeared quiet and clean, with people moving around at a much
slower pace. This area consisted of a number of tracks where the heating units
were finally assembled in readiness for packaging and despatch. These tracks
ran parallel to each other, although throughout the period there were alterations
to the layout and at different times one or two tracks were relocated and joined
together to incorporate pre-assembly work from adjacent areas. Testing and
inspection units were located at different points down the tracks.
This was a complicated area because there were many different processes
taking place, as the heating units were put together and then packaged ready
for shipment. It was also a place where a wide range of materials was used,
including metal parts, electrical components, plastic products, and packaging
materials. As a result, the hazards and unsafe practices in this area were many
and varied. In various ways they were integral to the way in which work was
organized and structured. While there had been many changes to work
procedures and the materials used, most notably a long-term asbestos
substitution programme, it nonetheless remained an area of some danger and
hazard.
Overcrowding was mentioned frequently by stewards from all areas, but
particularly by stewards in the storage area of the assembly shop. In 1989 one
steward (TGWU) described the problem in the fabrication area, although he
could have been speaking in 1979 or 1994:
The company had built a series of stillage racks in the area but it had not been enough for the
number of stillages used and had resulted in some areas of work being squeezed together.
This new storage area had been built over the summer but had not had the beneficial results
expected.

In part, this was a problem that occurred in the context of fluctuations in

demand and the storage problems associated with increased output.
Other preparation and assembly away from the assembly lines involved
working with asbestos (even in the 1990s). Following the initiation of an
asbestos substitution programme throughout the factory in the 1970s, its use The question of
had been reduced substantially, by the increased use of artificial fibres. This, health and
paradoxically and not unusually, then created a series of other problems, safety at work
particularly skin irritation. It is also a material about which the long-term
effects on health are unknown. Throughout the 1980s, there was frequent
mention of problems associated with the use of such fibres, although less so in
the 1990s. 31
Asbestos remained a concern in the assembly area despite the substitution
programme. In 1988, one steward described how he worked in an area that was
no more than two feet away from a designated asbestos area. When working
there he said it was possible to see the asbestos dust in the air. The steward
complained and asked for a roof to be built over his machine so that there was
some protection from the dust. The company, however, refused this request on
two grounds. First, the area where the steward worked was not a designated
asbestos area and therefore did not require any special precautions. Second,
there was the possibility that the steward’s work would be moved to another
area within the next six months so it would be premature to spend any money
on asbestos protection!
This episode points to an important feature of the assembly area, that there
were sections of work which frequently had been relocated in this area,
although always in relation to the four main production lines and the
established sub-assembly areas. Such a structure had the consequence of
dividing the workforce along production lines and in some areas in terms of
gender. So, for example, a module shop had always been an enclosed building
within the larger factory building, where electrical sub-assembly work was
done in the main by women workers. Once assembled and tested, the units
were taken out onto the main assembly area ready for incorporation in the
heating unit. This both isolated and separated these women workers from the
rest of the assembly area. It also meant that they were not familiar with the
routines and demands of other areas of the shop so that if they were
reassigned on a temporary basis to other areas of assembly they were often
novices in situations where it was often assumed by management they would
be and should be familiar with routines elsewhere.
The assembly shop was the one area of the factory which had been
transformed in its appearance and practice over the 15 years of the study. In
1979 it was an area where there was a lot of manual work and the tracks were
only semi-automated. By 1989, the area had been changed, almost beyond
recognition. The tracks were more fully automated and the packing and
despatch had benefited from technological improvement and upgrading. It
was thus an area in which the workforce had become familiar with change, as
new equipment was installed and lines were upgraded or replaced. Here
workers had learned the skills of operating automated lines of production,
although even in 1994 there were still clusters or pockets of manual sub-
assembly and assembly work in the area.
Employee Other work
Relations While the foundry, press and paint shop, and assembly, comprise the main
18,2 production areas of the factory, other work takes place which is equally
necessary for production and distribution. This includes clerical and
administrative work, research and development, labouring, cleaning and
catering. These were areas of employment where the majority of women in the
32 factory were employed. The obvious dangers of the factory floor were not
evident here, and these were areas that were usually thought of as safe, clean
and secure. In this respect, there was a failure to appreciate the range of hazards
and dangers of work that may exist in such areas of work and employment.
A large multi-storey plate glass building, the office block, was located at the
front of the main factory building complex. Behind the reception area, the
clerical and administrative offices were sited. Here a largely female clerical
workforce, nearly 150 in 1994, was employed recording the movement of goods
and services in and out of the factory as well as around the factory itself. Wages
and salaries were administered through these offices as was the marketing and
sales of heating units, although some administrative and sales staff were also
based both at the research and development building and at the new sales and
distribution site.
For staff at the factory there was a general worry about working conditions.
As one staff representative (ASTMS) mentioned in 1979:
We have a perennial problem where I work particularly, about heating. Frequently the
heating supply in the particular block of offices where I work at the back has been very bad.
The boilers that are used frequently break down. Often the working temperatures have not
been right perhaps all day. In fact this week for three days the temperature has not been up
to the minimum 60 degrees [Fahrenheit] within the first hour. And this winter we have
virtually been there all day in low temperatures.

This is a somewhat surprising comment, given that it is a factory which

produces heating units! While the offices did not produce the drama of some of
the problems described for the shopfloor areas, they were still areas where
questions about health and safety were occasionally raised.
Over time there was a greater awareness that there were hazards and dangers
associated with work in offices. This was brought out most clearly by a
recognition among the management towards the end of the 1980s of the possible
hazards of working with visual display units. Initially this was cast in terms of
possible eye dangers. By the 1990s mention was made of repetitive strain injury
(RSI) and related ailments. RSI had become an increasing possibility in these
work areas, with the changeover to computerized work systems in the offices
and the increased use of information technologies by these staff.
Research and development work was done principally at the nearby site,
where some 30 to 50 staff were employed. Here prototype units were built and
tested, and component parts were developed and improved by a technically
trained workforce. Development work was an important part of the whole
operation, especially in view of the relatively strong market position of the
factory towards the end of the 1980s. The centre comprised a large multi-storey
building with work rooms, laboratories and testing areas which were relatively The question of
clean and quiet. In addition, this was an administrative area which in the 1990s health and
was expanded as the company reorganized. safety at work
Nonetheless, the technical staff in these areas worked with a range of
potentially hazardous and dangerous equipment and materials, the dangers
from which were very much seen as part of the job. Staff were employed to
develop new units or to improve on the current materials or processes of 33
production. This involved an element of experimentation, trial and risk, with
occasional accidents or injuries from something that did not proceed quite as
planned. In this respect, these were staff who had a keen appreciation of the
dangers and hazards of material and equipment worked with in the factory. For
this reason it was fitting that one of the main instigators of the asbestos
substitution programme worked in this centre.
Alongside these work areas a number of people were employed in support
activity, in the workyards at the main site. Male labourers worked in the yards,
loading and unloading goods, shifting materials, as well as tidying up and
keeping a semblance of order over what appeared to an outsider as chaos. The
work was dirty, tiring and often involved being outside in inclement weather.
This was demanding and debilitating work where labourers faced a range of
hazards and dangers, which were among the most immediately dangerous on
the site and from which there was little respite, such as manually cleaning the
dumping areas for metal waste.
Others were employed in a range of service and support occupations, cooking
and catering, or in the case of the factory nurse, providing medical services.
This work was done in specialist, dedicated areas, each with its own order of
hazards and dangers. In the case of cooking and catering this work took place in
hot kitchens and was done principally by women. There were two canteens
(works and staff) on the site, combined as one in the 1980s, providing food at
different times of the day. The factory nurse was available during the day shift
and provided a range of services, sometimes in conjunction with the company
doctor who usually came on site at set times, twice a week. Employees could
visit the nurse at the medical centre for treatment and assistance with “minor”
injuries, for preventive treatment, and occasionally the nurse went onto the
shopfloor if there was an injury.

Summary
For many years, the core of the production process was the foundry, regarded
by those who worked there as the most dangerous and hazardous area in the
factory. The other shopfloor areas, the press and paint shops and the assembly
area, were sites for a range of dangers and hazards. This direct production work
was largely done by men, often working in tiring and hazardous conditions.
Alongside this, and equally important to the whole enterprize, were research
and development, clerical and administrative work, and labouring and catering.
These were the areas where a larger proportion of women were employed, in
Employee what were often thought of as support or less central activities, and far less
Relations hazardous work areas.
18,2 As indicated, there is a direct relation between methods of work and health
and safety at work. The hazards were a feature of work organization and
relations and were seen as such by the workforce. In all the discussions about
health and safety there was an acceptance that the type of hazards described
34 above were “typical” of engineering work. The only exception was in
discussions about asbestos where there was a general awareness that it was
hazardous and that possible alternatives should be used. This apart, work was
seen as necessarily hazardous by most who worked in the factory, both manual
and non-manual.
 4. Managing health and safety at work The question of
health and
The management approach to health and safety at work has been one of safety at work
managerial control and increasing incorporation of the union leaderships into
this process. This in part was in line with the recommendations of the Robens
Report (Robens, 1972), which informed HASAWA, and where it was argued that
the prime responsibility for health and safety should lie with employers,
35
complemented by an active involvement in this process by employees. These
recommendations were predicated on a 1970s version of “social partnership”
where it was claimed:
there is a greater natural identity of interest between the two sides of industry in relation to
safety and health problems than in most other matters (Robens, 1972, para. 66).

In Heating Factory, this assumption was interpreted by management that the

prime relationship in dealing with health and safety at work was between union
representatives and the personnel department (responsible for industrial
relations). For management, this was a reluctant partnership as union leaders
initially sought to locate health and safety within the bargaining relationship.
However, over time, management increasingly asserted the assumption that
health and safety was implicitly a managerial concern and should be seen as
such. So, what began as a formalized “partnership” became a process where
management sought to define the parameters of health and safety activity and
union leaders increasingly were co-opted as supporters of this approach.

Managing the workforce

The first step in this approach was the establishment of a formal managerial
structure to administer and organize health and safety at work. With the
passage of HASAWA and the accompanying regulations, senior factory
management took the decision to appoint a safety officer, a member of the
personnel department, and gave operational managers formal responsibility
for health and safety. Before that, these questions had been dealt with by the
personnel manager and managerial staff on a relatively ad hoc basis, concerned
principally with the enforcement of standards so as to achieve minimal
compliance with the law. However, in 1975, these arrangements were formalized
with the establishment of a safety committee (comprised of managerial and
worker representatives). This committee was set up at the instigation of the
trade unions on site, with support from the safety officer.
The factory management had long been organized as a conventional
hierarchy. This organization was a multi-level structure which included plant
management, production managers, superintendents and first-line supervisors.
Shopfloor workers covered the full range of manual engineering work and were
graded as skilled (toolmakers), semi-skilled (operators), others (material
handlers). Work had always been organized in sections, with each section
working under a first-line supervisor. Until the late 1980s, the pay scales were
worked out on a piece work basis, which covered the bulk of manual workers,
Employee with the non-manual staff on time payment systems. The manual pay systems
Relations were gradually shifted from a payment by results to time payments, with
18,2 elements of performance payments, although even by 1994 this process was by
no means complete.
Usually, first-line supervisors were promoted from the shopfloor and while
they received some training, which from the mid-1980s emphasized team
36 building and human resource management (HRM), their approach to
supervision often had more in common with that of Victorian school teachers
than with modern theories of management. Nonetheless, with the shifts in
managerial approaches to supervision in the mid-1980s there was an increased
emphasis on training of supervisors and the encouragement of more co-
operative forms of supervision. For most shopfloor workers, management
began and ended with the first-line supervision; in contrast, the union stewards
frequently came into contact with superintendents and members of the
personnel department as they attempted to resolve grievances and represent
their membership. As with first-line supervision, superintendents approached
their job in varied ways, some attempting to develop co-operative relations with
their workforces, others seemingly preferring more authoritarian and didactic
approaches.
In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the approach by management towards
the administration and organization of health and safety was to lay the
foundation for a managed partnership with union representatives. This
included establishing a health and safety management structure based on the
safety officer, within the personnel department, and promoting the safety
committee as a joint consultative committee. At this time, a number of union
leaders took initiatives on health and safety practice and worked closely with
sections of management on these issues. However, from the mid-1980s, more
conscious steps were taken to define health and safety as a managerial
responsibility in which union representatives were seen by management as a
subordinate adjunct to the managerial structure. In this respect, the redefinition
of health and safety responsibility was part of an approach which underwrote
the prerogative of management to manage.

The health and safety management structure

The factory was under the authority of a managing director and senior
management directorate who represented formally and effectively the parent
companies at the factory. Until 1988, this was a relatively autonomous and self-
contained directorate, with the works manager responsible for operational
activity and the personnel manager for industrial relations, although informally
secondary to operational concerns. In this respect, the personnel manager and
the support team worked with and to operational management and supervision,
promoting a unified approach to health and safety, so as to comply with the
requirements of health and safety legislation and regulations and with the aim
of gradually improving health and safety at the factory. However, with the
acquisition of the factory in 1988 by Construction Company there was a shift in
emphasis, since the personnel department acquired a divisional responsibility The question of
for industrial relations and related activity. This resulted in a much higher health and
profile for the personnel department than had been the case previously and safety at work
changes to the administration and organization of health and safety (Bach,
1994, pp. 131-5).
There was a long-standing managerial organization at the factory to address
health and safety matters. Initially, this was an ad hoc set of arrangements 37
based on meetings between management and union leaders, as part of routine
industrial relations. At this time, in the early 1970s, the personnel manager took
responsibility for health and safety, but as a relatively minor and secondary
item. In the main, the approach was to comply with the minimum requirements
of the Factories Act 1961 and the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963
and most attention was focused on injuries, addressing claims for
compensation and attempting to keep injuries down to some “acceptable”
minimum. During this period the initiative for health and safety queries was
much more likely to come from the increasingly active JSSC.
There have been two safety officers at the plant. The first, in post from 1974
until 1982, was not trained in such matters, having a personnel qualification. He
undertook safety responsibilities as part of a general remit for personnel
matters. In contrast, his successor, originally a production engineer, had moved
into training and then into health and safety. On his appointment as training
and safety officer he undertook a safety officers’ course. In theory he divided his
time equally between training and health and safety, whereas in practice he
spent more time on health and safety. Both safety officers reported to the
personnel manager.
The important point to note about this structure is that it was one where the
formal arrangements relating to health and safety at work were not a core
component of the operational managerial structure. While operational staff had
a formal responsibility for health and safety, under HASAWA and accompany-
ing regulations, this was not their primary responsibility. Rather it was up to the
safety officer to establish a health and safety profile in the factory and to
encourage operational management to acknowledge their responsibilities in this
area. But, it also remained the case that the responsibility of the safety officer for
health and safety was one of a number of responsibilities undertaken by this
manager. In this respect health and safety was not an area of prime
responsibility for the personnel department and the safety officer was effectively
reduced to a specialist adviser with some authority over these questions, but
little operational control (Dawson et al., 1988, p. 78; Torrington et al., 1985, p. 14).
Nonetheless, the location of the safety officer in the personnel department had
the positive effect of locating health and safety as a factory-wide concern and
meant that there were occasions when health and safety could be addressed as
part of the industrial relations remit (Jones and Tait, 1992, p. 39). In addition, the
safety committee also provided the basis for promoting a broader health and
safety view and practice.
Employee The safety officer as “inspector”
Relations The first safety officer was formally responsible for dealing with all health and
18,2 safety problems in the factory as well as for developing an awareness among
the workforce about health and safety. This, however, was not his only
responsibility and was seen by him as one of secondary importance. While this
officer had the remit to work directly with operational supervision, the main
38 reference point was to the safety committee, established on 17 March 1975 as
two committees (“foundry” and “rest of works”) and then as a unified committee
on 9 June 1975.
The first safety officer defined safety work as de facto inspection work. As
observed in 1979 he did not see himself as a provider of protective clothing and
equipment, but as an “inspector”:
The safety officer expressed the view that he did not want to become a general distributor and
purchaser of protective clothing. It was the purchasing departments responsibility to obtain
the clothing. The safety officer was concerned with quality. As long as this was right he did
not want to know.

and
These views were consistent with views expressed by the safety officer earlier in the day. He
frequently said his concern was with standards. He was in effect a “factory inspector”. If a
standard was set – whether by government regulation or a union and it was agreed – then he
would apply it. He did not want to negotiate about safety. He did not want to become engaged
in ancillary activity like purchasing or distributing protective clothing. It was the purchasing
officers’ job to obtain the clothing and the foreman’s job to see that operators wore the
clothing.

In line with this outlook, the safety officer undertook a monitoring role for
safety standards in the factory. If a complaint was made about fumes, for
example, he would conduct the tests or alternatively he would call in the
appropriate medical official or inspector. This was part of an approach which
was aimed at ensuring that official standards were met and employees took
steps to protect themselves by wearing the appropriate clothing or conducting
themselves in the “safe” way.
As well as enforcing standards, the safety officer saw his job as providing an
awareness among the workforce of safety standards and safety procedures.
This involved an extensive training programme on health and safety in the
factory for the manual workforce, the “hourly-paids”. Five hour sessions were
held every Tuesday morning, covering general safety procedures (including
injury reporting), the Factories Act, HASAWA, eye protection, noise, and work
methods. The material for these sessions comprised films, publications, posters,
and the like, mainly from the Health and Safety Commission. The emphasis in
these presentations was on official standards and it was in these terms that the
safety officer defined his role. In this, the safety officer at this time gave no
attention to the office workers and the non-manual workforce in general[8].
Following an approach which defined health and safety as compliance with
regulations, the first safety officer spoke of the major problems as noise, fumes,
lifting, protection, and guards on machinery. He identified a range of problems The question of
about protection and the use of equipment in safe ways. With respect to the health and
welding bays, for example, he spoke of dangers to the eyes and blamed the safety at work
operators for failing to use the correct equipment. Similarly he mentioned that
in some areas operators use the protective gloves that are available while others
do not do so. It was the same in noisy areas, such as sections of the foundry and
the press shop area, where workers frequently mentioned noise (according to 39
the safety officer). Again, the safety officer commented that ear protectors were
available but one of the difficulties was to encourage their use.
But, there were also areas of activity which the safety officer recognized as
hazardous but which he chose to ignore. In one area of the foundry in winter the
foundry workers to counter the cold had laid open ended gas pipes along the
floor and lit the escaping gas to create a primitive and worrying looking gas
heater, around which workers huddled at break time. This practice was
acknowledged as dangerous by the safety officer, but he also remarked that “it
was cold”.
This was a period when the dangers of working with asbestos were
recognized and an extensive asbestos substitution programme was introduced.
This involved replacing asbestos with artificial fibres on a planned and
researched basis, although in the late 1970s asbestos was still being used in
sections of the plant, in marked areas, as well as in the foundry on the
mechanical moulding plant. This was a joint programme, involving the safety
officer, technologists from the research section and senior shopfloor union
safety representatives who had made this a particular area of concern. These
staff met with the supplier of asbestos and worked out “safer” ways of
transporting and using the material as well as a programme for replacement. It
was an ongoing programme and did not have a fixed timetable, rather it was
organized under the aim of gradual substitution of asbestos in the factory.
According to the safety officer the company had agreed to this programme
because the use of asbestos created “bad publicity” for the factory, a sentiment
shared by the safety officer.
In line with his approach to health and safety, the first safety officer worked
closely with Health and Safety Executive inspectors. They came into the
factory on routine inspections, in response to requests from the safety officer to
check equipment or in response to workers’ complaints, which were being taken
up by the safety officer. The inspectors visited the factory two to four times a
year during the second half of the 1970s. These were self-contained visits, in
that workers were not told about the impending visit, nor did they see the
reports, although they were available to the members of the safety committee.
Comments by the stewards about this period suggest that workers had a
cynical view of the inspections, which did not allow them to raise what they saw
as health and safety problems in the factory. According to the stewards the
inspectors came in, attended to the inspection for which they came, and then left
without commenting about anything else.
Employee The inspectorate was seen by the safety officer as a part of an approach to
Relations safety which emphasized standards, and compliance with them, although the
18,2 inspectors had served three improvement notices on the company between 1975
and 1979[9]. In one case in 1979, an improvement notice was placed on a press
machine because of a lack of ventilation. Additionally, noise levels were
mentioned as too high, although they were not covered by the notice. In another
40 part of the factory, in the foundry, ventilation was a problem and on the advice
of an inspector the roof was raised:
Further along the line a large extractor was sited above the line. This extractor goes up into
the roof which was raised to increase ventilation. However, although this was done on the
advice of the factory inspector, the stewards complained that it was too cold and asked the gap
to be blocked. Subsequently, it was blocked with what appeared to be a polythene sheet. When
the factory inspector saw this he asked why. However, he took no action when told the reason.

This was a minimalist approach to health and safety where standards were met,
often at the behest of the inspectors. In those cases where there was debate about
the practice, although formal requirements were met, such as the use of
asbestos, the approach was a reactive one, responding to worker complaints and
public image. There was very little innovation or proaction during this period.

The safety officer as “manager”

With the appointment of a new safety officer in 1981, there was a change of
emphasis, although not a change in the overall approach followed by the
company. The second safety officer had worked for a time as a skilled manual
worker, then as a trainer and only turned to health and safety officer with his
appointment as training and safety officer at the factory. He brought with him a
much stronger commitment to training as part of the development of a health
and safety awareness, among managers and shopfloor workers. This, coupled
with increased attention to managerial practices, had the effect of underwriting
a managerialist approach to health and safety, where an attempt was made to
incorporate health and safety as part of the responsibilities of line supervision.
The second safety officer brought a different view to the question of health
and safety, seeing his role as adviser to line management on health and safety
issues. In his words, he was an “overseer on health and safety” in the factory. He
saw his remit for safety in the following words:
I have the authority to stop anything or to pull rank if you like and say “you can’t do this or
you must do that” but obviously as far as responsibility for … making sure HSE
requirements, health and safety requirements, are met, then that responsibility is clearly with
the line management and not with me … it’s quite clear in the safety policy that it is not [me]
that is responsible for everything in the press shop, spot weld and all the other departments.
So they have got the responsibility, the managers or the foremen, to ensure that things are
complied with and that things are repaired or whatever, systems are followed. But obviously I
am there as an adviser, an overseer, as an assistant to them and as a monitor, to monitor the
things that are happening.

When he was first appointed, the second safety officer had an office in a
Portakabin building which was adjacent to but not part of the main factory
building. Within six months he had moved into office accommodation within The question of
the main building, with more rooms than previously allocated to safety and health and
training. In part, this symbolized a physical shift from the periphery to the safety at work
centre of the managerial structure of the factory. However, the personnel
resourcing remained limited. Initially he had only the assistance of a clerical
assistant, although from 1984 he had engineering and industrial students on
secondment from the local polytechnic/university working with him. In 1985, a 41
training assistant was assigned to the safety and training section to work with
the safety officer. Complementing these arrangements, the factory nurse was
located in a medical centre on site and the company doctor visited at fixed times
each week.
The base line of this approach was to maintain a familiarity with the
regulations and related requirements under the legislation. However, this was
not an easy matter and it became increasingly difficult for the safety officer to
keep up-to-date with the legislative requirements and the regulations. In the
1990s this burden was added to with the increased health and safety regulation
directly from the European Commission[10]. One of the ways in which safety
officers kept abreast of such developments was by reading through the relevant
journals and digests and noting developments which had a bearing on the
factory. Alongside this reading, the safety officer had been an active member of
a local employer’s safety group since the early 1980s, where safety officers from
the different employers in the area met and discussed safety matters.
The view of the second safety officer about the main health and safety
problems in the factory was more or less the same as that of the first safety
officer, although the emphasis during the 1980s was more on proactive
responses by management. The more or less tangible hazards and dangers at
the factory, such as asbestos and the substitution materials, dust and fumes,
and noise, remained ongoing concerns of the safety officer. What was
distinctive was his emphasis on work systems and the means for securing
compliance with safe working practices.
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the company continued with its
asbestos substitution programme, replacing the use of asbestos in the
manufacture of heating units or as part of the production equipment, in all but
one small marked area in the factory. But, as this programme proceeded
problems emerged with the replacement materials. In particular, skin irritation
had become a seemingly chronic problem and as with many such hazards, not
all people were affected. For a minority of workers the use of such fibres was a
persistent source of problem and resulted in the safety officer and his support
team experimenting with alternative fibres and ways of working.
Dust and fumes remained a problem associated with the work processes
followed at such factories. Consequently, the safety officer regarded monitoring
the presence of dust and fumes in different parts of the factory as a key activity.
One practice was to take testing equipment into areas where there were long-
standing questions about dust levels or fumes and to set up the equipment to
obtain samples and records. Occasionally this meant responding to specific
Employee queries, such as establishing procedures for handling formaldehyde in the mid-
Relations 1980s, following the realization by some workers that it was potentially lethal.
18,2 In this respect, the safety officer was responsive to complaints or queries or was
involved in routine monitoring of known areas of concern.
The programme of noise abatement was maintained throughout the 1980s
and into the 1990s. New equipment brought into the factory was assessed both
42 in relation to its function as well as its safety features, including noise levels.
However, “metal-bashing” remained a feature of factory-life here and the safety
officer followed the approach of his predecessor and focused on personal noise
protection. Often this involved an assessment of new ear plugs and other forms
of hearing protection. One of the problems the safety officer saw in this aspect
of health and safety was a laxness in the use of such protection equipment by
the operators and part of his time was spent exhorting workers to use the
available equipment.

Continuing problems
For the safety officer, one of the main questions facing him was how to achieve
compliance with safe work systems, in that systems of work were laid down,
procedures for working established and work techniques known, but they were
not complied with by operators or enforced by supervision. According to the
safety officer (in 1987), people over time drift away from these systems of work.
You have systems, you have procedures, you have equipment to use and people for whatever
the reason, sometimes they are being careless, sometimes they genuinely think that they are
not doing anything wrong, but people drift from those systems. Sometimes … it doesn’t have
terrible horrific sorts of consequences but at other times you can see that it’s potentially very,
very dangerous, particularly with, say regards to maintenance. So, I’m trying … to make sure
that people and the supervisors ensure that people follow the systems that are laid down and
that they don’t take a short cut that is unauthorized and could result in some sort of incident.

As with his predecessor, the second safety officer held the view that the main
problem was people, but in contrast he placed most emphasis on developing an
awareness among the managerial and supervisory staff, rather than individual
workers. It was part of safety officers’ task to encourage everybody, from the
“top to the bottom” to think continuously about health and safety and to adhere
to good practice. This involved training first-line supervision about these
systems of work, explaining what should be done and why. The emphasis,
according to the safety officer in 1987, was on the following:
… we all know that people are measured and foremen are measured by how many units they
are making and absenteeism and overtime worked but we have not got to lose sight of the
training that they give and the quality of the training that they give and the health and safety
instructions, and the accidents that they might be having in the department. They’ve got to be
in the evaluation of the department’s progress and it’s very easy … for organizations to forget
those and push those to the back and have their sights set on the other goals, which are
obviously important.

Having pointed to the tension between production and health and safety, the
safety officer went on to state:
 My biggest problem is people. My biggest problem is trying to get everyone, from top to The question of
bottom, to think consistently about health and safety, to try and get everybody to act
responsibly, to accept their responsibilities, and just to try to foster that good working health and
practice, you know, keep your eyes open for things, and try and educate people in that way safety at work
and get that sort of working together for the good of everybody. That’s my biggest problem, I
think. Because so often ... even so long after the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work
Act and all the publications from it, you still do have problems where people think it’s nothing
to do with them, they can shut off and it’s somebody else’s problem. 43
The safety officer saw workers as unwilling to take responsibility for health and
safety at work. In his perspective, workers saw safety as somebody else’s
problem and dangers and hazards as part of the work process.
The theme that dangers and hazards were an integral and ongoing feature of
the work process was touched on by an employee relations officer speaking
about health and safety in the 1990s. In a comment, she referred to the
continuity of concern with hearing problems, minor injuries cuts, bumps and
bruises. She noted that workers have a somewhat fatalistic view of minor
injuries in the factory, stating that “I think it is expected and accepted”. She also
pointed to a new problem which was becoming more extensive and principally
involved women workers who, in her view were in danger of suffering RSI in a
number of work areas. She said:
In quite a few areas… in the factory areas where you might expect, you know in the module
shop [where] they are doing fairly repetitive work … pulling down [equipment] and …
drilling, and some of the keyboard areas as well.

This observation draws attention to the way in which dangers and hazards at
work are often invisible and unrecognized for many years. The work procedures
in the areas mentioned, the module shop and the offices, had long been
characterized by work procedures where such injuries could be expected, but
these were also areas of women’s employment and to that extent relatively
invisible areas for health and safety questions, although the problems
associated with RSI were known elsewhere for at least ten years.

Injuries at the factory

A more enduring and obvious concern was the injury rate at the factory.
Although the incidence of reportable injuries had declined in the early 1980s it
began to rise again from the mid-1980s. Until the end of 1986, the incident rate
was around 20-22 per year (although it is necessary to be cautious about these
figures given the changing requirements for reporting injuries). Even so, in
absolute numbers the incident rate began to increase at the rate of five to six per
month from the end of 1986, for a period of five or six months. Five years later
in the context of work reorganization and the introduction of new lines and
equipment, the injury rate began to increase again.
For many years, from the mid-1980s, the definition of an injury was an
incident which resulted in the loss of a day or more by the employee from his or
her “normal” work. To illustrate, if a fitter broke an arm, had it set and returned
to work and was allocated a bench job sorting out nails then this worker would
Employee be deemed unable to do “normal” work and an injury recorded. In the 1990s, the
Relations decision was taken, following the integration of the plant into the broader
18,2 corporate structure, to investigate all “incidents” in the factory, irrespective of
loss of time, thereby also covering “incidents” which could best be described as
“near misses”. In 1995 the safety officer estimated that there were 50 or more
incidents per month. The impetus for this changed policy came from
44 management and not the workforce, and critically covered property damage
was well as injury to the person. Nonetheless, it was claimed by management
representatives that the priority remained personal injury rather than property
damage.
The types of injury that occurred in the factory are indicated by the official
listing of injuries in 1995: cuts (330); bruises (113); strains (97); eyes (37); burns
(22); and others (16), making a total of 615. In aggregate terms, these figures
suggest that there was a likelihood that every second person at the factory
would suffer an injury involving at least the loss of one day’s work. Of course, if
it is noted that there were only 536 shopfloor workers employed at the time then
a number of workers must have experienced more than one injury in 1995.
Over time, there had been an improvement in the incidence rate of injuries at
the factory (Table II). During the 1990s there was a statistically significant
downward trend in the frequency rate of injuries at the factory. In part, this was
the result of some changes in the organization of work, with modifications to
jobs and machinery, and in part it was the result of the increased effort which
the company gave to a managerial organization on health and safety, involving
the establishment of accident prevention schemes to conduct inspections,

Year (by quarter) Frequency rate: lost time accidents × 100,000 hours worked

1991: Fourth 3.5

1992: First 5.1
Second 3.1
Third 3.6
Fourth 3.4
1993: First 2.9
Second 2.7
Third 2.6
Fourth 2.5
1994: First 2.8
Second 2.8
Third 2.0
Fourth 2.2
1995: First 3.1
Second 2.2
Third 2.3
Table II. Fourth 2.2
A measure of injury
incidence Source: Company records
investigations of injuries and monitoring of health and safety practice. In 1993 The question of
when, following concerns expressed at the safety committee about the incidence health and
of “minor injuries” at the factory, the safety officer in consultation with his safety at work
counterparts in the parent company decided that it would be beneficial to
review the pattern of workplace inspections. He took steps to reorganize the
accident prevention procedures by changing the practice from three-monthly
checks by first-line supervision to monthly inspections by 14 accident 45
prevention teams (composed of a first-line supervisor and two shopfloor
representatives). On the basis of this initiative, a new procedure was introduced,
via the personnel department, with the support of members of the safety
committee.
Nonetheless, it remained the case that this renewed activity by the company
took place against the backdrop of a continued union concern with health and
safety in the workplace. This is signified by the activity of the convenor and
deputy convenor on the safety committee, and the continued representation of
the stewards, as safety representatives, ensuring that injuries were reported
and the details recorded in the accident book, as well as representation via the
union in compensation cases, where appropriate. While there was an
unevenness in the way in which these matters were taken up by the stewards
and safety representatives, depending on where in the factory they worked, as
well as by the degree of experience and union consciousness of the steward or
safety representative, it remained the case that there was a continuing
awareness about the importance of making health and safety a union concern.
After all, this was one of the ways in which unions in the factory had not only
acquired but also maintained a presence in the beleaguered circumstances of
the 1980s and 1990s[11].

Managing health and safety

The management approach to health and safety was to underwrite the safety
officer as an “expert” who worked directly with operational management and
where the unions played a minimal role in these arrangements. He worked
with management and first-line supervision and serviced the safety
committee. This provided a structure of relationships which brought the
safety officer into contact with the unions and workers in the factory, but via
an organized and routine set of relationships which had the effect of retaining
control over health and safety in the hands of management. Moreover, this
was a structure of relationships which created the appearance of
collaboration and partnership between management and the workforce on
health and safety questions.
The central element in this process was the relationship between the safety
officer and first-line supervision and managers. This was a two-way
relationship which was established with the appointment of the second safety
officer and became increasingly routinized during the 1980s. If the safety officer
made a decision that something should be done he would either go on to the
shopfloor to discuss this with the relevant managerial staff or he would
Employee circulate a memorandum to all relevant management. Conversely, management
Relations would occasionally telephone the safety officer about problems and queries.
18,2 This occurred during one interview, when a manager rang the safety officer
about a chemical. The disposal of chemicals must be authorized by the safety
officer and he arranged to deal with this the following week.
The safety officer worked with and through management, in practice
46 actively discouraging shopfloor workers from coming directly to him. Instead,
both safety officers actively encouraged the practice of shopfloor workers
approaching supervisors, in the first instance, rather than raising issues
directly with them. Nor did the safety officers encourage shopfloor workers to
refer their concerns to the safety representatives. During the 1980s, these
procedures were further developed with the establishment of the practice of
supervisors raising issues directly with the safety officer. In discussion this
was illustrated by the safety officer with reference to handling consignments
of waste, the procedures for which were written by the safety officer when
approached by the relevant supervisor.
These arrangements were further formalized and legitimized by the cycle of
activities involving report writing and servicing the safety committee. The
safety officers were expected to write a monthly report for the director with
responsibility for health and safety. This arrangement created a timetable of
accountability which permitted managerial strategies towards health and
safety to be developed. In addition, at a more mundane level, the safety officer
worked to the safety committee which received a bi-monthly report from the
safety officers. These reports created a cycle of activity for the safety officers
and the management of health and safety, structuring the “official” approach to
health and safety.
The safety committee had been set up in 1975 and by the 1980s included up
to eight recognized shopfloor safety representatives. When it was first
established, it comprised the works manager and the safety officer, the senior
convenor and deputy. By 1977, meetings were regularly attended by three
management and five union representatives (excluding the convenor). In the
early 1980s, the maintenance manager became the key operational manager in
attendance rather than the works manager who no longer attended. For the
safety officer this change was an important development because the
maintenance manager usually dealt with problems raised by the committee and
his presence signified a recognition by the company of a serious intent to deal
with health and safety issues.
The safety officer had always been the secretary of the committee while from
the mid-1980s the senior union convenor (who resumed his attendance) and the
maintenance manager alternated the chair. There was never a formal agenda
for the committee since it worked on the basis of the minutes of the previous
meeting. The practice for the committee was to go through the minutes, noting
action taken, updating the item or removing it from the minutes as no longer
applicable. It was possible to raise new issues under any other business and
thereby incorporate them in the cycle of business created by this approach. In
the 1980s, committee meetings usually lasted two to two and a half hours and The question of
occasionally would be added to with an extra activity, such as a film, selected by health and
the safety officer for its “educational value”, for example, on the maintenance safety at work
systems.
Until the mid-1980s, the minutes of the safety committee meetings were very
long. They dealt with a variety of issues, including day-to-day concerns such as
a worker not wearing gloves in a situation where it was a requirement to do so. 47
In the safety officer’s view this occurred because safety representatives would
save issues for the safety committee meeting rather than raising the matter
directly with the relevant supervision. In effect, this approach by the safety
officer amounted to an attempt to encourage safety representatives to “inform”
on their members, although it is also noteworthy that non-compliance in
wearing protective clothing seldom became the subject of disciplinary
proceedings. Where this was a prospect the safety representatives acted as
stewards and usually contested any such move by supervision, although
privately they may have thought the member foolish for not complying with
these requirements.
From the mid-1980s, the practice of having an open agenda at safety
committee meetings was revoked. It was agreed that what were regarded as
“small” items should be dealt with on the shopfloor and referred directly to first-
line supervision. Following this decision, if such items were raised at the safety
committee they tended to be ruled out of order by the chairperson. In the view
of the safety officer, this resulted in an upgrade of the safety committee, so that
it dealt with general items about the progress in dealing with health and safety
items, as well as the introduction of new procedures, new plant and equipment.
Increasingly, the safety committee became the major vehicle for
incorporating the unions into the routine of dealing with health and safety in
the factory. Both the convenor and the deputy convenor were the principal
union members of the committee by the end of the 1980s, which represented a
departure from an earlier practice where the convenor did not attend on the
basis that it was important that the union committee developed health and
safety specialists who played a leading part on the safety committee. The result
was that not only did the safety committee become a principal forum for raising
health and safety questions, it also provided the means whereby a managerial
approach to health and safety was legitimized.
What was striking about the way in which both safety officers defined their
roles was that there was little mention of the safety representatives and the
unions, apart from noting that the senior union leadership was integral to the
working of the safety committee. In the 1970s more emphasis was placed on
individual worker responsibility, whereas in the 1980s and 1990s the emphasis
was on line management responsibility. Indeed, both safety officers, and other
members of the personnel department in the 1990s, defined health and safety as
a managerial responsibility and as compliance with regulations and external
requirements. The problem was to “manage” health and safety and the differ-
Employee ence between the two successive officers reflected the changing arrangements
Relations within the management to health and safety.
18,2 The approach was to affirm the safety officer as “expert” manager, and to
take health and safety out of the bargaining arena and rediscover the principles
of Robens in the 1980s and 1990s. Further confirmation of this was given in
1992 on the organization of a union course for safety representatives, as
48 illustrated vividly by the employee relations officer:
…the GMB ran a course at [Cooker Factory], about a mile down the road, and they asked if our
safety reps could go and we said yes but we would like to send our safety officer as well and
they said: “Fine, can he run some of the course for us?”

The union leadership on site were in favour of this arrangement and affirmed
the role of the safety officer as the “expert”. This was complemented by the
other side of this policy, taking health and safety out of the industrial relations
arena. As noted by the employee relations officer:
We try to avoid bringing safety issues into the collective bargaining arena, although
sometimes you can't avoid it, but we try to do it.

It was this view that prevailed at the factory from the late-1980s onwards.

Summary
Until the 1990s, hazards and dangers at the factory were seen principally as
shopfloor problems, involving the male manual workers. Initially, most
attention was given to the foundry and the press shop rather than the assembly
area, although it was recognized that injuries occurred across the factory. By
the 1990s there was a broader recognition of health and safety, with the
acknowledgment of RSI and related injuries occurring in the clerical areas as
well as on the shopfloor. Nonetheless, it also remained the case that the focus of
attention was on dangers and hazards on the shopfloor, rather than elsewhere.
Health and safety was very much a managed process at the factory. The
initial approach was based on the safety officer as internal “inspector”,
providing advice and guidance on legal regulations and “official” requirements.
The focus was to ensure that workers behaved in an appropriately responsible
way in compliance with the formal requirements. This was not an approach
which saw the workforce or their representatives as participants in an
apparently joint approach to health and safety. That came later, with the
appointment of the second safety officer, and the elaboration over the next
decade of a comprehensive approach to health and safety, with a managerial
structure within which the unions played a carefully “guided” role. As part of
this, the management team gradually refined the administration of health and
safety via the safety committee and related structures, so that the safety officer
was provided with a means for legitimating and confirming his place, as the
health and safety “expert” in the factory.
The other side of this approach was the exclusion of the workforce from the
general administration of health and safety in the factory. Workers were
expected to comply with the regulations and requirements but it was not The question of
assumed that they could, or indeed should, take the lead in the establishment of health and
healthy and safe working practices and conditions. The one exception to this safety at work
general approach came in the 1970s with the inauguration of the asbestos
substitution programme. Nonetheless, the novelty of this programme
highlighted the way in which health and safety was seen as set of arrangements
which could be dealt with by a responsible management. Central to this 49
approach, was the gradual removal of health and safety from the industrial
relations arena, and the concurrent incorporation of trade union leaders in the a
dministration of health and safety on management terms.
Employee 5. Representing workers
Relations
18,2 As indicated in the second chapter, “Heating Factory”, a key component of the
1970s legislation and regulations on health and safety at work was the
establishment of a “partnership” between unions, via safety representatives and
50 management, as well as the active participation of union representatives in
safety committees. Such involvement was premissed on a form of unionism,
marked by membership participation and independence from management. In
the absence of this, unions would be ill-equipped organizationally to raise the
difficult and tentative questions associated with hazards and danger. Although
it may be the case that managements commit themselves rhetorically to
providing healthy and safe working environments, what might constitute such
a condition may be much less clear-cut on a day-to-day basis. As a corollary of
this, and in the context of the organizational hierarchies of most workplaces, it
thus becomes important for workers to raise their queries and concerns in
impersonal and collective ways. Without this assurance, individual workers
may, understandably, be nervous and uncertain about the consequences of
complaint and protest. For this reason, union organization becomes an
important prerequisite for addressing the question of health and safety at work.
But union organization and activity is not fixed and static; rather there are
fluctuations and uncertainties in the way unions organize and operate, and the
unions at Heating Factory were no exception. Such variation is rooted in the
changing relations and circumstances of union position and presence, within
workplaces and beyond. The implication of these features of trade unionism is
that at times union memberships may be in a position to take up health and
safety questions; at other times less so. In some periods, depending on the flux
and flow of relations with management, unions may be in the process of
establishing a basis within the workplace, of defending what has been gained in
a previous period, of renewing their presence in ways that permit workers to
articulate their collective concerns (Fairbrother, 1995). It is within this complex
of relations that workers may begin to deal with the hazards and dangers they
face at work.
This means that a consideration of the fluctuations in workplace union
organization and activity is critical for understanding the way that health and
safety is dealt with in the workplace. Given the sustained attempts by the
management at Heating Factory to structure the involvement of workers on
health and safety questions on the basis of individualistic relationships,
between workers and their immediate supervision, it also becomes important to
consider the place of workers as union members in this relationship. For it was
through their union membership that workers, at least in principle, were able to
express an alternative interpretation of the dangers and hazards they faced,
defining them in collective rather than individual terms. As a counter to the
managerial approach, the successive union leaderships sought to build their
presence on health and safety around the active safety representative, dealing
directly with immediate supervision, occasionally the safety officers, and The question of
contributing to the safety committee. In this way, the unions gave some health and
substance to the rights for workplace representatives under the SRSC safety at work
regulations and laid the foundation for an enduring aspect of a participative
form of trade unionism in the factory. The degree to which this was possible
depended on the form of union organization and activity from the 1970s
onwards. 51
Building the joint shop stewards committee
Before the 1970s the shopfloor at the two sites were totally unionized, with 100
per cent membership, while the staff union had around 50 per cent of eligible
workers. This was a union organization which was built around the activism of
the male stewards, particularly in the foundry area. This was a strategic area
for the production process and because of ongoing pressures about work flow
and payment arrangements the workers in this area were prepared to question
managerial practice and procedures. Union activity in the factory was
dominated by the foundry area, in part because this was regarded as the central
production area, where stoppages prevented output throughout the factory, and
because bargaining at the time occurred on a shop or sectional basis, with
tailored and fragmented pay systems organized around piecework and bonus
arrangements. It was also an area with a young confident male workforce who,
in the circumstances of the 1960s and 1970s, was willing to take a lead in
stopping work to secure their position in the pay structure.
Many of the workers were relatively young and not bound by established
procedures and ways of relating to supervision. It was also the area where the
senior convenor worked and during the 1970s he built up a loyal following, not
only among the foundry stewards but also with many of the non-foundry
workers. The result was that other sections in areas outside the foundry tended
to follow the lead established by this relatively militant section of the workforce.
Centred on the foundry membership, the JSSC developed as an active and
outward-looking committee between the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Its
leadership at this time was based on a partnership between an AEU convenor
and a TGWU deputy convenor, the two largest unions in the factory, and
supported in negotiations by a small committee of senior stewards, comprising
the leaderships from the recognized manual unions. This leadership reported to
a weekly steward meeting to which all manual stewards (23 in total during the
1970s and 1980s) in the factory (the main site and the research and design
centre) could attend and which in fact did so.
The pace and concern of the committee was very much set by the two senior
leaders of the JSSC, who divided their activities in complementary ways. On his
election as AEU convenor in 1978, this union leader had taken an active role in
developing the profile of the JSSC in the factory, questioning management
policy and practice on a range of issues around pay and conditions of
employment. In part, this was made possible by the relatively chaotic payment
systems operative at the factory, centred on piecework and bonuses, which gave
Employee the union representatives, and the convenor in particular, an opportunity to
Relations develop a collective approach based on workers’ grievances about the
18,2 administration and operation of these arrangements.
It was reported that with the enactment of HASAWA and its surrounding
publicity, the senior union leadership at the time sought to develop a more
proactive approach to the representation of their members in what was
52 obviously a relatively dangerous and hazardous workplace. The lead was taken
by the TGWU deputy convenor who had developed a specialist interest in
health and safety, attending courses, participating in a local union health and
safety resource and pressure group, and working with educationists to promote
appropriate courses for such factories. The result was that health and safety in
the factory came to receive a high profile among the union representatives in the
factory and in a more limited way among the union membership. This was
evident most clearly in the general awareness in the factory during this period
of the asbestos substitution programme, but was also apparent in the debates
among union members about the introduction of facilities for personal
protection.
In this, the union leadership built on the sectional basis of union organization
in the factory. This was a JSSC which comprised three unions on the main site
(AEU, TGWU, and EETPU) and a steward system of representation, with
stewards representing the different sections of workers which comprised the
manual workforce at the factory. A parallel structure of representation was
established at the second and smaller site in the area, but in this case built
around two unions, the GMB (the majority union) and the EETPU. During this
period, there was some contact between the two union groups, but the main
drive came from the JSSC on the main site, which developed a reputation as an
active union committee and one which was innovative in the area of health and
safety at work.
It was on the basis of this sectional form of representation that the unions
developed their activity over health and safety. The JSSC became a weekly
forum, where stewards received support in their representative activity,
particularly from the convenor, and where they developed an awareness of the
collective basis of problems faced by both individual members and stewards
alike. On health and safety questions, the deputy convenor took the union lead
in addressing dangers and hazards, encouraging the stewards to bring their
concerns to the weekly JSSC meeting. This approach was supported by the
senior convenor at the time who saw the JSSC as the principal opportunity for
the stewards to develop a sense of collectivity, with each other and in relation to
their members.
The basis of the manual union organization in the factory was the active
relationship of the stewards to members. This relationship, it was argued by the
leadership, gave the stewards confidence to raise issues at the JSSC and to
develop their representation of their memberships, taking issues to supervision
and pursuing workplace issues in a variety of ways. On health and safety there
was a common recognition that this was a dangerous and hazardous factory,
but it was also a factory where the question of power and authority was also an The question of
integral feature. As one AEU steward, and safety representative, described the health and
situation on the factory floor in 1979: safety at work
Dust [is an ongoing problem]…I might have problems when a bloke is pouring a box, it might
blow up, thing’s like that. I might have disciplinary problems but they are very mild. I might
have a foreman coming up. He might try and give one of them a bollocking.
53
All but two stewards in 1979 said that it was a common practice for members to
bring problems to them.
Another steward (TGWU), one of five stewards of south-Asian ancestry and
based in the assembly area, commented about the work problems brought to
him:
So many things. They [the members] can’t sort it out with their foremen or supervisor, money-
wise, general arguments, management’s attitude.

This steward also referred to difficulties which his members had outside work,
which were also raised with him.
Often the stewards attempted to sort out problems themselves, reporting to
the convenor and the JSSC, once it had been dealt with, although stewards were
encouraged to bring problems to the JSSC for general discussion, to inform the
committee or to seek advice.
In the case of the stewards who said members did not come to them, one was
the electricians’ steward and he said he seldom saw his members, since they
worked all over the site. The other steward (TGWU), the only woman on the
JSSC, represented mainly women workers in a sub-assembly shop, said of
members raising problems with her:
They do not seem to worry about anything. They do not seem to be bothered about money.

This, however, was an unusual response and probably reflected the way the
women workers saw themselves as a marginal minority and the fact that this
steward was not listened to by most of the members of the JSSC.
There was also a view that management was not responsive to the problems
that people faced in and outside work. For management, the objective was to get
the work done. One steward (AEU) described how management played on the
conscientious nature of one of his members:
They’re always hounding him. They know he is a worrier. He does worry about the job. He
worries about every aspect of the job…He’s worried about how to get it done and how quick
he can get it done…

Managerial unresponsiveness was described many times in 1979 and over the
subsequent years. The incidents were different but the theme of blaming
workers for problems with the job, as well as showing little sympathy for the
problems of the individual, recurred again and again.
A number of stewards had developed the practice of calling members’
meetings, to discuss problems arising on the section, to report back from the
Employee JSSC and to advise the steward about section opinion on general union issues.
Relations This was done by the senior convenor, as steward of his foundry section:
18,2 We have one [section] meeting every week…just to keep the job running. I believe in everyone
on the job…expressing themselves every week at least because it’s a monotonous old job and
people can get up and talk about things and keep interested in them and it’s better to get
things out in the open if there’s a problem and thrash it out and not let the gang split up. I think
54 it’s very important that they agree with each other and stay united so that the company don’t
use that[12].

At these meetings the stewards discussed work effort, pay targets, pay levels,
and the activity of the convenor, although the convenor expressed the view that
the “real reason is to keep…harmony within the gang”. The convenor
attributed the unity of the gang to these meetings:
It sounds a bit like fantasy that you can get it but we have got it, really and truly they do work
as a team completely. There is no such thing as individuals.

The regularity of these meetings in the foundry was not unusual, with a further
12 foundry stewards calling meetings of their sections on average at least once
a week. This practice was not confined to the foundry area, as other stewards
also called frequent meetings of their sections, exemplified by one TGWU
steward in the assembly area who called meetings of his section at least twice a
week. Other stewards (18 of them) called meetings of their section much less
frequently, monthly or bi-monthly, and three stewards never called meetings of
their section, although almost all the latter represented small sections and
worked closely with their members. Only in one case, the electricians section,
did the steward not call section meetings because “there is nothing to talk about
really”.
The other side of the dominance of representation of particular sections was
that the specific concerns of workers, both those of south-Asian ancestry and
women, tended to be marginalized. While there were five stewards of south-
Asian ancestry on the JSSC, none was in a senior position in the union and
specific concerns about language or leave arrangements tended not to be
central to the stewards’ discussions. Nonetheless the convenor was aware of the
concerns of these workers whose stewards he tended to meet with separately. It
was different for the women workers who were numerically more insignificant
and whose concerns were often ignored. This was evident in the stewards'
meetings in the late 1970s and early 1980s where the one woman steward was
frequently overlooked in the discussion and where even the obvious health and
safety concerns of the women, such as working when pregnant in certain areas,
were regarded by other stewards as specific to women and of no major concern
for the committee.

Divisions, decline and renewal

With the merger of the two production sites in 1979, the JSSC was expanded to
include six GMB stewards from the second site, and the senior negotiating
committee was expanded to include the GMB senior steward. Little changed
initially, and the union leaderships were able to consolidate the JSSC as an active The question of
and participative committee, representing, if unevenly, sectional memberships health and
irrespective of union membership and adopting a critical stance towards many safety at work
of the managerial initiatives at the time. In particular, the senior leadership
began to question the basis of the rather chaotic and divisive payment systems
at the factory, organizing a briefing course on work study for all stewards,
including a consideration of payment systems[13]. 55
However, by 1984, the senior convenor had been in post six years and was
beginning to be seen by some sections of the JSSC, particularly the GMB
members and assembly shop stewards, as unduly partisan towards the foundry
members. Increasingly, the senior convenor began to take the initiative with
management, failing to report back to the JSSC as comprehensively or as
regularly as had been the case in the earlier period. Throughout this period the
senior leadership often acted with the uncritical support of the steward
committee and without reference to the membership. Those JSSC members who
disagreed with the senior leadership, and particularly the senior convenor were
isolated and “encouraged” to resign. Increasingly, the senior union leadership
came to accept the company definition of the requirements for the long-term
future of the company, with the result that the terrain of issues for bargaining
came to be defined by the company, rather than the union leadership.
In 1986 there was a membership rebellion against the JSSC senior leadership
and a number of long-term stewards either resigned or were voted out of office,
including the convenor (resigned) and his immediate successor (voted out).
They were replaced by a younger group of stewards who were committed to a
renewal of past union practices. This was accomplished by a much more
assertive approach towards management, questioning the continued problems
that section stewards were having in representing their members to first-line
supervision, particularly over the pay arrangements, which if anything had
become more complex and uncertain. The senior leadership turned its attention
back to the idea of developing the committed and active “section” steward as the
basis once again of an active JSSC. Towards this end, the senior leadership, and
the newly elected young (late 20s) convenor (AEU) encouraged, for the first time
in a number of years, the attendance of stewards on union courses dealing with
industrial relations and health and safety at work.
Nonetheless, there was still the residue of bitterness among the more long-
term stewards about the changes that had taken place on the committee and
this came to a head in 1988 when a bitter and divisive strike occurred at the
factory. The issue was the failure of management to meet commitments on
bonus payments for one particular section of workers. The background to the
dispute was the group bonus scheme introduced in early 1987 and which
provided the opportunity for earnings increases in the direct production areas.
This distorted the traditional pattern of differentials and indirect workers
(toolroom, pattern shop, maintenance and stores) tabled a wage claim that
addressed this issue. After unsuccessful negotiations, a majority of the indirect
workers voted for strike action which began in April 1988. The direct
Employee production workers did not participate in the strike but were “laid off” as the
Relations strike progressed. In addition, the indirect workers were divided over the
18,2 dispute and, apart from the toolroom, many began to cross the picket lines and
return to work. The new leadership was unable to maintain support for the
strike and after four weeks the strikers returned to work amid feelings of
bitterness and demoralization.
56 The fall-out from the strike was considerable. Relations between the factory
management and the convenor had become quite strained and personalized and
shortly afterwards the convenor resigned his position[14]. The company, aware
of the weakened state of the union, also refused to recognize the ex-convenor as
a steward. Although he had the moral support of the majority of the steward
committee he was not reinstated as a steward. Subsequently, there were
managerial changes, whereby the main protagonists in the dispute either left
the company or were no longer directly responsible for the “rationalization”
programme that was being implemented.

Rebuilding the JSSC

Following the dispute, the JSSC began the process of rebuilding itself, around
the traditional issues of wages and conditions of employment. On this occasion,
the senior leadership, the new convenor (AEU) and deputy convenor (GMB)
pursued a much more cautious policy than the previous incumbent. They
worked more closely with management, accepting the managerial agenda. This
was opportune for management and particularly the personnel department,
which found itself in a changing corporate world, following the acquisition of
the factory by Construction Company.
After the 1988 strike, the JSSC entered a period of division and muted
recrimination, which the new convenor and deputy convenor attempted to
overcome. They did this by turning again to the steward base of the JSSC and
encouraged the stewards to play an active part in the JSSC as well as developing
their relations with members in a mutually reinforcing way. As part of this, the
senior convenor encouraged stewards to attend union education courses as a
way of rekindling a sense of collective union consciousness, on industrial
relations as well as health and safety. For a time, this resulted in a partial revival
of the JSSC as an active union forum, receiving weekly section reports and
encouraging a collective awareness, by focusing on these concerns and
grievances.
However, the demoralization and divisions among the workforce arising from
the dispute a year earlier made it difficult for section stewards to re-lay the
foundation for united and participative action, times, and payments, let alone
health and safety. As indicated in fieldnotes at the time (1989):
[The TGWU steward] was told that management wanted to revise the times for the … track.
The management view was that the times were too lax. The management proposal is to take
£9.26 off the wages and to push the output up an extra 16 units a week. In addition the
company proposes re-timing the existing 15 person gang. The following day a notice went up
that there were five vacancies on the section. Management informed [the steward] that when
 the vacancies are filled the track will be re-timed again with the 20 person gang. The The question of
management have not been happy with the times on this track for a good six months. [The
steward] said that up till last week whenever it was raised the convenor had been able to delay health and
it but that he could not do this anymore. safety at work
The steward went on to say that this issue had raised a number of problems and
he was unable to respond effectively to this management initiative, although it
was to the detriment of the section. In discussion he attributed the 57
unwillingness of his section to protest to the divisions between his members
following the 1988 strike and the reservations some of the non-strikers on his
section had of him as a steward.
During this period, steward action over individual cases and grievances was
important in both affirming the union presence for the membership and as an
occasion when the collective character of the union was expressed. In one
incident, a TGWU steward learned that a “lad” had been given extra hours of
overtime by the “foreman” on a Wednesday evening. It then transpired that the
same “lad” had been offered overtime on Thursday evening and Friday evening
while nobody else had been asked if they were prepared to do overtime. On
Thursday the steward shouted at the “foreman” and superintendent about this
and the superintendent promised that the “lad” would not do anymore overtime
beyond Thursday that week. On Friday the steward learned that the “lad” had
been offered further overtime. He saw the superintendent who said it would not
happen again but then the steward heard that the “foreman” had said that he
would show the steward who ran the shop and that the “lad” would be offered
work on Saturday. The steward complained again and the offer of overtime to
the “lad” was stopped.
The problem the stewards faced during this period, and increasingly in the
1990s, was how to develop an awareness of the problems and difficulties that
might ensue with the introduction of new work procedures and practices. After
all this was a period when the past managerial autonomy at the factory was
being qualified and the factory management embarked on a policy of
restructuring work and employment relations within the factory. The problem
for stewards was to defend the controls that workers had over their jobs, at a
time when new procedures were aimed at minimizing worker discretion and
measuring output in rigorous ways. This is illustrated with the introduction of
new work measurement techniques in 1988 and 1989:
Two [AEU] stewards said that the introduction of [new work measurement procedures] had
made it more difficult to get good times. New fiddles had to be worked out. [One steward]
illustrated this by saying that when an operation was considered the worker had to make sure
that an act that would normally involve one action should involve two, and so on. In addition,
there was a problem that when they were given good times not all the workers made sure that
they looked busy, by keeping a bit of work back or having a machine set up so that if
supervision appeared the worker could turn their attention to it. If people sit around they were
bound to be caught sooner or later.

It was through such concern and activity that the stewards attempted to defend
a certain degree of worker autonomy in the face of encroaching uniformity and
stricter job requirements.
Employee The beginnings of partnership
Relations With the rebuilding of the JSSC and the steward presence in the factory, there
18,2 was a shift in the approach followed by the JSSC in its relations with the
management at the factory. Increasingly, the senior leadership of the JSSC
began to work with management and pursue a policy of pragmatic
accommodation (Jones and Rose, 1986) rather than emphasize the oppositional
58 and participative base of the sections, as had been the case prior to the early
1990s. This approach was developed in the context of the changes that had
taken place in the ownership of the factory and the end of relatively
autonomous managerial practices at the factory. In addition, by this time the
personnel department was in the process of acquiring a more prominent set of
responsibilities, not only for the factory but also for the other factories in the
subsidiary company.
The senior staff of the personnel department, particularly the personnel
manager and the employee relations officer, initiated a policy of by-passing the
factory senior union leadership, and dealt directly with the full-time officials of
the three major unions, and especially the GMB. In the course of the 1988 strike,
the personnel department opened up direct contact with the regional union
officials of the three major shopfloor unions, TGWU, AEU and GMB, as part of
an approach to isolate the strike leadership. The other side of this was that the
newly elected convenor and deputy were less assured in their leadership of the
JSSC and acquiesced to a more regular and active involvement by the full-time
officials, who in turn saw this as an opportunity to play a more active
interventionist role in a major factory in the area.
Nonetheless, partly because of the positive effects of the majority of the JSSC
attending union education courses, the stewards recovered some of the earlier
enthusiasm for taking up issues on behalf of their section memberships and
developing a more prominent union profile. It became more likely that stewards
took up industrial injury claims, facilitated the use of union services, such as
legal services and union sick pay and thereby developed an image of
“constructive” unionism, when compared with the events from 1986 to 1988[15].
In this situation the union lost some of its past impetus and reverted to a
sectionally-based form of organization which became its defence and a central
union leadership, which was prepared to work within a management-
determined framework.
Nonetheless, senior staff in the personnel department were apprehensive
about this development, seeing a more active steward base as a potential threat
to the stability of the relationship with the union in the 1990s. The personnel
department staff were also uneasy about an over-reliance on regional officials,
seeing a danger in a possible future Labour government which might have the
effect of stimulating a more active approach to bargaining. In these
circumstances, they began to promote what they defined as “integrative
bargaining”, based on a reorganization of the work procedures (cell production
and team working). This was coupled with a major technological upgrade in the
foundry to reduce staffing levels and to promote a shift in union power away
from the foundry workforce towards what the management saw as a more The question of
“positive” membership elsewhere, particularly in assembly. health and
The outcome by 1994 was that the personnel department was able to take the safety at work
initiative in determining the parameters of industrial relations at the factory. As
a corollary of this, the JSSC became a shell of its former self, still providing an
opportunity for the stewards to maintain and develop their sectional base, but
where the senior union leadership in effect although unwillingly, became a 59
conduit for the personnel department. This was a complicated situation which
paradoxically pointed to the continued importance of the legislation on health
and safety at work. While the senior union leadership was drawn into co-
operation with the personnel department, particularly over the restructuring
that was taking place between the different sites in the group, they nonetheless
recognized that their long-term future as members of an active union rested on
continued presence of a sectional form of organization. In this latter respect, the
plant stewards were still able to look to the health and safety legislation to
legitimate the sectional representation, as well as to the traditions of sectional
unionism in the factory. Thus, there were two aspects to the shell-like
appearance of the union in the 1990s: first, a “partnership” involving staff from
the personnel department and the senior union leadership was sought by the
company and reluctantly agreed by the union and, second, the active and
participative base of the JSSC was maintained and nurtured via the sectional
stewards, acting as health and safety representatives and workplace stewards.
The outcome was a form of unionism which was contradictory, but which had
the potential to renew itself yet again, given propitious circumstances and
active leadership.
The difficulties faced by the unions in reconstructing an active and
participative form of unionism were compounded by the more assertive stances
taken by the personnel department and the restructuring of the subsidiary
company. The personnel department ambition for the unions in the factory was
summed up:
…the union must become more of a “policing” function, acting as a guardian of the new
culture and therefore instinctively being part of it, rather than a critical bystander promoting
a division between the company and the employee (internal document n.d.).

Crucial to this was the “partnership“ between the unions and the personnel
department. The problem was that the senior union leadership remained
sceptical of these moves, although they felt powerless to oppose them openly,
not least because whenever steps were taken to counteract these trends, the
senior staff of the personnel department drew in the regional officials, very
much removed from the day-to-day concerns of the factory, to reinforce the
company position and approach. Thus as the factory as a production unit
became more firmly integrated into the subsidiary Heating Company, so too the
JSSC lost its autonomy within the wider union movement and the senior union
leaders found themselves co-opted into a programme of reorganization, over
which they had less and less control, or even influence.
Employee The staff union
Relations For the non-manual union, ASTMS, a different pattern of development was
18,2 evident. This union had long been characterized by leadership dominance with
little membership participation. In part, the class position of the non-manual
workers as both management and workers meant that they had an uncertain
attitude towards the union (Carter, 1986). This was reflected in the relatively low
60 membership of the union in the early 1970s, of about 50 per cent of eligible staff.
Nonetheless, the union was led by a then young male technologist who worked
in the research area, where the core of the membership was employed. In 1975
the union was involved in a short strike over a management proposal on
redundancy selection. Following this, over half the then membership resigned
encouraged by a view from management that the secretary had “manipulated
the Strike to his own personal benefit” (internal document, n.d.).
Even so, the union maintained a relatively active profile up to the mid-1980s,
principally because of the commitment of the senior steward. He pursued issues
on behalf of his membership in the plant and he was active in wider union
circles beyond the factory. In addition, he gave the union a high profile on health
and safety, not only because of his union involvement but also because of his job
in technical services where he was a major participant in developing the
asbestos substitution programme in the 1970s. As a trade union leader, he
worked openly with the convenor and deputy convenor of the JSSC developing
complementary approaches, particularly on health and safety questions.
The difficulty that this union leader faced in broadening the membership of
the union, and involving a range of members as representatives, was that he
was not based at the main factory. He worked on the nearby site where technical
services was principally located. This had the consequence that while there was
a core of active members, drawn from technical services at the second site, there
was much more uneven involvement among the supervisory staff at the main
factory. These supervisory staff were much more susceptible to “persuasion”
from senior management about the inadvisability of playing active roles within
the union. They were also sceptical about union leadership from the technical
sections of the union reflecting, in part, historical divisions within the union.
The result was a formal representative structure on the main site, without the
substantive involvement that was required to maintain and develop a long-term
union presence among these workers.
However, in the early 1980s the then senior steward began to withdraw from
active leadership of the union, partly because of a senior management policy to
promote him to more senior grades and thereby compromise his leadership.
While he attempted to maintain his earlier levels of involvement, this became
more difficult so he reluctantly took a decision to play a less active role in the
union. For a time the momentum of the union was maintained, first with a set of
leaders drawn from technical services and then with an attempt to build a
leadership core at the main factory in the late 1980s. The technical services
leadership collapsed in 1985 when it argued for a ban on overtime work over the
introduction of a merit-based method for awarding salary increases but failed to
gain a large majority in support. The result was that the ban was not The question of
recognized by many union members and eventually it collapsed amid feelings health and
of bitterness and betrayal by different sections of the membership, resulting in safety at work
a further 50 per cent resigning their membership of the union. Following this,
and with the shift of the leadership to the main factory, there was a partial
revival of interest by the membership but this collapsed in the aftermath of the
1988 dispute involving shopfloor workers. The divisions engendered during 61
this dispute also divided the staff, over the principle of union solidarity, and
signalled the end of staff union activity in the factory, although approximately
30 staff remained in formal membership.

Summary
This then is a union history where the process of union renewal has been a
persistent theme, so that the periods of centralization and relative inactivity
were countered by attempts to re-stimulate more participative forms of
sectional unionism (Fairbrother, 1995; Hyman, 1989). In the 1970s the shopfloor
union leadership developed a broadly based and participative union
organization. This form of organization was built against the background of
relatively quiescent union organization in the 1960s. However, over time
leadership was concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who had
led the union for a number of years and no longer saw the need for widespread
steward involvement in union affairs, despite the structures and practices that
could have allowed this to continue. In the succession that followed the
resignation of the long-standing convenor, the company moved to exploit the
situation and withdrew the co-operation that had characterized its relations
with the union in an earlier period. Nonetheless, despite these obstacles recent
union history at this factory is testimony to the continued impetus to build and
rebuild an active union presence at the factory, particularly during the 1986 and
1988 period.
Most recently, in the 1990s, following the acquisition of the factory by
Construction Company and the establishment of a subsidiary Heating
Company, the factory management embarked on a policy of co-optation. The
lead in this was taken by the personnel department which since the mid-1980s
had been pursuing a policy of plant-level agreements, minimizing reference to
area or industry agreements. Building on the defeat of the union in the bitter
four week strike in 1988, the personnel department fostered a more collabor-
ative relationship with the senior union leadership, resulting in a de facto
partnership arrangement, with the personnel department effectively setting the
terms of the relationship. However, the senior union leadership was not wholly
committed to this form of co-operation and retained a scepticism about the
personnel department approach. The personnel department, in response to the
factory senior union leadership increasingly bypassed the local leadership and
dealt directly with relevant full-time union officials in the area, although not
without qualification.
Employee The enduring feature of shopfloor unionism in the factory was that
Relations individual stewards representing sections remained a presence within the union
18,2 structure, in part continuing to sustain the day-to-day quality of union
organization and action. However, there was a down-side to this pattern of
organization in that it rested on an important degree of exclusivity, involving
the prolonged marginalization of such as women workers and clerical staff.
62 While sectionalism remained a persistent feature of the JSSC structure, the
union form of organization during the 1990s was one that was in harmony with
the logic of a degree of self-regulation at a sectional level and corporatism at a
factory level. While the senior leadership was drawn increasingly into a co-
optive relationship with the personnel department, the stewards continued to
take up grievances and represent the concerns of their memberships. The
problem was that stewards no longer had the support of a vibrant and active
JSSC in developing a sense of collective trade union concern in the factory or to
encourage and provide a structure for their activity.
 6. Organizing for health and The question of
health and
safety at work safety at work
The unions have long organized specifically to deal with health and safety. In the
mid-1970s, in anticipation of the SRSC regulations, the unions established two
systems of representation. In the case of shopfloor unions, stewards were 63
expected to act as health and safety representatives. This was on the assumption
that stewards should have a concern with health and safety questions and that
these could be best dealt with in the context of the established negotiating
procedures. In contrast, ASTMS decided to elect designated health and safety
representatives who were not necessarily union representatives or stewards. The
argument, reflecting national union debates at the time, was that health and
safety was best dealt with by dedicated representatives who were likely to have
a special interest in these matters and who would develop a health and safety
expertise over time.

Activism on health and safety

In the 1970s the unions at the plant developed a reputation in the local area for
innovation on health and safety matters. They developed programmes on
health and safety issues and attempted to encourage a health and safety
consciousness by sending representatives on trade union health and safety
courses. This was illustrated most obviously by the negotiated introduction of
an asbestos substitution programme. At the time, this involved the TGWU
senior steward, who was also the deputy convenor of the plant, and the ASTMS
senior steward, working together and utilizing their technical skills as well as
their positions as union leaders. Alongside this programme the health and
safety representatives, and particularly the TGWU senior steward, played an
active role on the safety committee, raising issues and deepening a concern
with health and safety.
The central forum for addressing health and safety questions and for
developing union policy was the JSSC. It was common for stewards to raise
such issues at the weekly steward meeting and for the committee to discuss
ways of dealing with them. A study of the 1979 minutes and fieldnotes of the
steward committee revealed frequent reference to health and safety items.
Stewards, in the course of making sectional reports, referred to such matters as
the cleanliness of areas, systems of work which were creating problems for
workers, safety policy, access and egress, health and safety information, safety
equipment, and the general condition of the factory. These items were raised
along with pay and other related negotiations that were being dealt with at the
same time. There was an intermingling of the range of concerns dealt with by
the committee, although the item most frequently referred to at these meetings
was pay and related issues.
But the base of the union activity on health and safety was the sectional
steward, taking up these issues along with the routine of issues addressed by
Employee the stewards. As safety representatives, the stewards utilized their legal right to
Relations undertake inspections to broaden the remit of their activity and indeed to
18,2 strengthen their position as stewards. Workplace inspections are permitted
under the SRSC regulations and during the 1970s were carried out at regular
intervals, usually every six months or more frequently. The impetus for this
came from the union courses on health and safety attended by the stewards, the
64 encouragement from the deputy convenor who specialized in health and safety,
and the profile given these concerns by the JSSC.
The practice of establishing inspections as a regular and routine procedure
by the stewards resulted in a high profile for health and safety in the factory
among union members in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, health and
safety was often defined in narrow terms, as a technical problem (asbestos
substitution) or as a grievance (housekeeping) rather than as a preventive
concern. In addition, the formal inspections usually involved the steward, first-
line supervision and the safety officer. In part, this was a problem because the
safety officer placed a limited value on inspections by stewards. He had a
cynical view of the stewards that they would look for “trouble” as part of their
general approach towards trade unionism.
In this context the stewards attempted to place their health and safety
activity firmly within the framework of their role as stewards. As with many
other problems at the factory the workforce was only able to gain a positive
managerial response where they were able to exercise some leverage over the
work process. In the absence of such leverage management could be
unresponsive. As one young steward (GMB) representing the press shop section
at the second production site in 1979 noted:
I should say it’s terrible at the moment, the health and safety part of it...the majority of
accidents are in the press shop for the simple reason that health and safety is really ignored in
there … I’ve personal experience I …was walking around and I just happened to catch me coat
and the whole lot of stillages just fell down and just missed me … I mentioned this to
management, well five, six times and well they [the stillages] are still there…they are just not
interested. I brought the safety officer down a few times and personally I don’t think he’s too
interested either. He always makes an excuse having to wait to see [the site manager] or “I
shall see you in an hour’s time” or “come down when I feel like it”.

The steward had been in post for less than a year and although he was making
headway in encouraging his 48 members to see these sorts of problems as
warranting a collective response, this was a slow process. The problem was that
as a steward he was very much on his own, since the union convenor was much
less active at this site than the main site.
A less negative response occurred in the maintenance section at the main site,
involving an equally young steward (AEU), a maintenance fitter who worked in
the foundry. He described the working conditions in the following way:
I have never worked in a factory with such bad conditions as this place, extraction and stuff
like that, terrible, mainly it’s the filth though. Clearly it is…terrible.

He, nonetheless, was willing to raise problems with management:

 Because we have this building work [by outside contractors] going on, there was a lad… The question of
coming through the main factory building on a dumper truck. Jesus he was doing about 30
mile an hour…If somebody had stepped out of a gangway or something it would have killed health and
them. And I thought it was a bit stupid and I went and saw the management about it and safety at work
consequently he has been stopped. I saw … the senior foreman. I would have seen… the shift
foreman but every time you go and see him…it’s “Oh yeah I’ll stop him” and nothing is carried
out. I went to see the [senior foreman] and he said “Oh well, if you see him tell him to slow
down”. I said “It isn’t good enough”, I said “He’s going to turn around to me and tell me to f . . . 65
off or something” … I said “You go and see him”. So he did. He went and saw him.

Others had more positive views of management, who. they saw as particularly
responsive to the requests of stewards. As an older steward (AEU), representing
the pattern shop said:
Management are good, you know they’ve been good…they let us put our ideas to them,
and…things are going for the first time for 20 years in favour of the workers…

This was a period when stewards had few inhibitions in calling on the safety
officer if they were unsuccessful with the line management. Most often, health
and safety issues were raised directly with line management, reflecting the way
that stewards defined health and safety as a part of the regular and routine
activity that took place at the factory. In this respect, health and safety was
located within the bargaining framework. When an initial query or complaint
was unsuccessful it was common for the stewards to refer it to either the safety
officer or the deputy convenor of the JSSC. It was also routine for the stewards
to report such incidents to the JSSC as part of the report of occurrences on the
sections during the previous week. In this variety of ways health and safety was
thus embedded in the day-to-day activity of the shopfloor stewards.
One of the difficulties faced by the stewards was to persuade members to
reject the ethos of acceptance of hazards and dangers in the factory. The
dimensions of this problem were illustrated by the young AEU steward (above)
who said he had difficulty persuading his members that the conditions at the
factory could be improved:
…they all seem to accept it…This is the main thing that you get back like, it’s a
foundry…what do you do? It’s like in the winter it’s bloody freezing cold…“Oh it’s a foundry,
what do you do?” “Get bloody heaters in, that’s what you do”, that’s what I say. They don’t,
they just seem to accept it.

Similar sentiments were also expressed by an older labourers’ steward (TGWU)

who said:
The working conditions are bad…I think they [the workers] accept, they accept that anyway.
There’s a lot of things that can be improved…

While these stewards found it difficult to persuade their members to

acknowledge dangers and hazards, and to act, it was even more difficult for the
ASTMS safety representatives, partly because of the factory culture that the
real hazards and dangers were to be found on the shopfloor and partly because
the union did not represent sizeable numbers of staff. Further, they were safety
representatives who were not an integral part of the steward representative
Employee structure in the union. They tended to be isolated and often unsure what they
Relations could and should do about health and safety.
18,2 The problem faced by the ASTMS safety representatives were illustrated in
one incident about heating (in a heating factory!). Low temperatures in offices
was an ongoing problem. As the union representative said:
We have great difficulty because we don’t have sufficient majority working in the area to bring
66 pressure to bear on the management. They are aware of the problem.

While individual staff union members played an active part in developing a

comprehensive approach to health and safety in the factory, particularly in the
asbestos substitution programme, but also in other areas where the technical
expertize of staff could be utilized, they were much less effective and prominent
when representing their immediate membership. They had neither membership
support for them as workplace representatives, nor did they have a forum
equivalent to the JSSC which provided the opportunity to develop a collective
approach to the diverse situations and occurrences in the factory.
The emphasis so far has been on the way in which the stewards assessed
their activity as safety representatives and how they responded to the problems
they confronted. Another aspect of this is that members raised questions about
dangers and hazards at work with their safety representatives and these
representatives then followed up these issues. On these occasions the idea that
safety representatives were delegates began to fall apart. There were occasions
when the representatives ended up telling their members they were well off or
they should comply with the rules of the factory before bringing complaints to
the representative. One aspect of this tension was brought out in relation to the
asbestos substitution programme which, after all, was welcomed by nearly
everybody in the factory and had received a high profile. At one JSSC meeting
in 1979 the deputy convenor, who had led the programme on behalf of the JSSC,
reported that he had called a meeting following complaints about the use of
glass fibre rope rather than asbestos rope. This was at a period in which both
materials were being used and the workers on the section complained to the
deputy convenor that the glass rope caused a skin irritation. The deputy
convenor in response agreed to call a meeting to discuss the problem and he
also arranged for the company supplying the glass rope to come into the factory
to discuss its use. When this was reported to the JSSC by the deputy convenor,
another steward, who worked on the section that used the asbestos and glass
ropes said that the problem was that the glass rope irritated the skin. The
deputy convenor’s response was sharp and to the point: “Anyway it is better to
have a tickle than to die of cancer”. Given the amount of time and effort the
deputy convenor had spent on this programme, he was in no mood to tolerate
implied criticism about what they had done by way of replacing the use of
asbestos in the factory.
At times the stewards, as safety representatives, had to be cajoled and
exhorted to carry out inspections and to refer items to the JSSC. Again in 1979,
at a JSSC meeting the conveyor reported to the committee that a safety
committee was scheduled for three weeks’ time and that all stewards should The question of
carry out inspections and draw up written reports so that the safety problems health and
they faced on their sections could be addressed. At the next meeting nobody safety at work
had produced a list, although two of the stewards talked generally about some
of the items they remembered were problems on their sections. The convenor
took the committee to task and forcefully reminded them of the importance of
the inspections and of logging-in the results to the safety committee, so that 67
they were in the public domain. At the JSSC meeting the following week, two of
the stewards handed in lists, covering four items on one list and ten on the other.
The convenor responded by saying that all these items would be submitted to
the safety committee and then asked why others had not done their reports. It
then transpired that supervisors had prevented the stewards from doing the
inspections. This was then discussed at the meeting and the convenor reminded
the stewards that they had a “right” to carry out inspections. Following this a
number of the stewards presented verbal reports to the meeting and two later
gave the convenor written reports for the safety committee meeting, where they
were presented and then followed up as part of the committee agenda.
During the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the focus and thrust of health and
safety activity came from the shopfloor unions, and particularly from members
of the JSSC. This forum served to focus and provide an opportunity to define
health and safety matters as collective rather than individual. It was here that
the leading stewards attempted to develop a broad and innovative approach to
health and safety at the factory. It was via the JSSC that the senior convenor
promoted steward and safety representative education, the consequence of
which was to reinforce and stimulate a collective approach to both particular
problems and the more elusive conditions and circumstances of engineering
factory production.

Unionism in stasis
The general pattern of trade union involvement with health and safety
questions remained static during the 1980s. While there were no major
reorganizations in health and safety representation, this form of representation
was not sufficient to maintain the high profile of the late 1970s. For the
shopfloor unions, the uncertainties experienced by the JSSC and each union,
particularly during the struggles over union leadership in the mid-1980s,
resulted in a less obvious concern with health and safety matters. In the case of
ASTMS, there was a gradual withdrawal from active involvement and concern
with union matters generally, and health and safety at work in particular.
The practical decline in interest in health and safety was noted by one
informant who commented that in 1986 and 1987 the stewards devoted very
little time to health and safety. Instead, their time was taken up with the
introduction of a complicated and contentious job evaluation scheme which
preceded the 1988 strike. As the informant noted there were two serious injuries
in the factory during a ten-week period, resulting in a broken leg and the loss of
fingers, but the JSSC and individual unions were unable to respond in effective
Employee ways, either in dealing with the particular incidents or developing a more
Relations general preventive approach to injuries. In discussion about this period,
18,2 workplace stewards admitted that union activity on health and safety had
fallen away as the union activists became preoccupied with management
initiatives on work organization and pay systems.
In further reflection on this period, stewards spoke of their own personal lack
68 of knowledge of health and safety issues and procedures. No longer were
stewards attending union courses on industrial relations or health and safety
and this became evident in what they said about health and safety and their
lack of knowledge about legal regulation and procedure. Increasingly the
stewards were forced back to the principles of sectional representation as the
basis for union organization. In this respect, they continued to raise problems
brought to them by members but this very much relied on members not only
being aggrieved about some practice or incident but also being prepared to take
their complaints to their steward. At the time, there was a reluctance by most
stewards to play an active part as workplace representatives because of the
divisions among the committee and because many felt vulnerable as the
management began to exploit the opportunities raised by these developments.
In this respect, it was not surprising that activity over hazards and dangers fell
into abeyance and, where something was done, it was generally at the behest of
the safety officer, rather than as a union initiative.
In the mid-1980s, health and safety did not receive much attention from the
section stewards, in part because there was considerable dispute in the factory
about job evaluation, resulting in increased discipline of workers by
supervision. Increasingly stewards found themselves caught up in discipline
cases, representing their members to management. A s a result the stewards
tended to ignore health and safety questions, and members did not raise these
items with them. This was despite continued problems at the factory
exemplified by the two serious injuries referred to above. Nonetheless, following
these injuries one of the stewards, as safety representative, took a complete
written record of the incidents and on the advice of a trade union educator
contacted the health and safety inspectorate and asked them to visit to follow
up these accidents. The problem was that the JSSC at this stage no longer
functioned in the supportive way that had been the case in the late 1970s and it
was necessary to call in the inspectorate to force the management to address the
problems that had precipitated the injuries in the first place.
This assessment of the union organization was complemented by an
increasingly bleak view of the safety officer and the part he played in health and
safety administration. He was seen by the stewards as unapproachable and a
person who did not respond in a positive way to requests or appeals from the
stewards. The other side of this was that during the 1980s the safety officer
developed an approach which located the focus of health and safety with
operational supervision and not in terms of a relationship between the
workplace stewards and himself. Inadvertently this reversed the earlier
relationship where, because of the activism of the JSSC and the consequent
confidence expressed by the stewards, the safety officer and management took The question of
note of the union concerns, albeit reluctantly. health and
safety at work
Renewed activism and co-option
Following the renewed union leadership in 1986, there was a short period of
intense activity as the new young leaders attempted to rebuild the union
organization. There was a partial return to the health and safety activism of the 69
1970s, built around the sectional steward structure of the JSSC. The senior
convenor encouraged stewards to address the routines of health and safety
concerns, reporting to the JSSC and pressing first-line supervision and the
safety officer. This, however, was relatively short-lived as the JSSC became
embroiled in the lead-up to the 1988 dispute.
With the election of a new and more cautious union leadership after the 1988
dispute, attention again turned to health and safety in the factory. This time
there was little attempt to make it a major plank of the JSSC’s portfolio of
activity. Rather, a dual approach was developed whereby the stewards were
encouraged to represent their memberships on health and safety questions
directly with the operational supervisors, and the senior leadership worked
more closely with the safety officer via the safety committee.
For the stewards this was a frustrating development. In formal terms, the
procedure they followed was that they raised items of concern with their first-
line supervision, who in turn referred them to the safety officer. For most
stewards this seemed to be the end of the matter. To illustrate, in 1989, in
discussion with stewards from the assembly and fabrication areas, they said
that there were problems with crowded gangways which were only cleaned and
painted when the health and safety inspectors were expected, for example, to
check the installation of the new equipment. There was very little they were
able to accomplish in the absence of such external inducements. They felt they
did not have the sort of backing their predecessors had in the late 1970s and
early 1980s to protest successfully about these arrangements. These stewards
were also disaffected with the way in which the safety officer approached his
job, which they regarded as minimalist in form and content. They saw little
evidence of an active engagement with health and safety from the safety officer;
in their view, he only seemed to be concerned with patching up problems, for
example providing ear plugs in noisy areas, which were uncomfortable and
“ineffective”.
Where stewards did take up health and safety problems, this was done in a
routine way, in the context of sectional union organization. This is illustrated in
a case where the union membership faced problems involving noise and
dangerous construction work arising from the presence of contractors during a
regular shift. The contractors commenced work before the end of the shift,
thereby creating problems for the shift workers. When this happened the
steward (GMB) responded, as indicated:
The steward went and saw the supervisor to ask him to stop the contractors. When…[the
supervisor]…said he could not, the section clocked off until the noise stopped. After an hour
Employee and a half [when the noise stopped] they returned to work…[The steward] said that they had
a “bit of a set to” with the superintendent about the noise.
Relations
18,2 In discussion, the stewards were quite clear that such incidents should not
occur and that if management organized the work in a “rational” way then such
incidents would not happen. Equally, the stewards saw union organization as
the only effective way of resolving these types of problems and for them this
70 was as sectional representatives.
As noted above, during the late 1980s the patterns of work and employment
were reorganized in ways that enabled management to utilize the workforce in
more flexible ways than had been the case in the past. These developments
were viewed sceptically by the shopfloor stewards, particularly where they
involved the movement of workers in terms of production requirements. This
was expressed in the following terms:
The … stewards said they were wary of flexibility for two reasons. First it had important
health and safety implications because workers were being moved on to jobs for which they
may have a competence but with which they were unfamiliar. They may be working with old
machinery that it is necessary to get to know or with unfamiliar colleagues or areas of work.
They stressed that it takes time to get into a routine of work and until then there can be health
and safety problems. Second, the stewards noted that workers when moved to a different
section are shown how the job is done rather than trained in the job with the appropriate pay
allowances, etc., for learning the job.

While the JSSC was not successful in countering these developments, the
stewards were nonetheless aware of the problems and dangers that such
practices involved.
The negative consequences of a sectional approach to health and safety
practice became apparent in the use of protective clothing and a relatively
mobile workforce. It was the case that the required clothing was not always
readily available or not seen as necessary by workers who were temporarily
assigned to work in such areas, as illustrated by the following:
One of the senior stewards had been moved into the foundry for a short while. He was not
wearing fireproof overalls and had been working with linseed oil some of which had spilt onto
his overalls. A spark ignited the overalls, burning him badly.

In a context where workers were increasingly moved around the factory to

different jobs, at relatively short notice, such incidents were likely to occur
occasionally.
Thus, during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the limits of a sectionalism
which was not located centrally within a JSSC that developed a widely based
collective ethos became apparent. There was relatively little attempt to lay the
foundation for a more active approach to health and safety at the JSSC meetings
during this period. On the contrary, stewards were encouraged to address
hazards and dangers at work but as sectional stewards, not as members of a
JSSC. The result was an inadvertent fragmentation of involvement and concern
with health and safety issues, from section to section. Further, separation began
to emerge between the stewards and the senior union leadership, reflected in the The question of
changing role of the safety committee in the administration of health and safety. health and
While the stewards attempted to address health and safety concerns on their safety at work
sections, the senior union leadership increasingly became party to the overall
administration of health and safety in the factory. In the context of the
restructuring that took place in the early 1990s and the qualification of
production autonomy, the safety committee increasingly responded in a reactive 71
way to the problems that were raised. With a sharp increase in the injury rate
early in 1992, the safety officer, at his own suggestion, was mandated to research
ways of drawing this to the attention of workers, reaffirming the responsibility
of operators to act with caution and care. More generally, health and safety
practice was placed in a company-wide context and procedures developed
elsewhere were imported into the factory, such as the accident prevention teams,
set up in 1993. In this respect, health and safety activity in the factory became a
secondary part of a much broader patterning of relations between management
and the main union committee, and where the agenda of concerns was set by
management, particularly the personnel department, and not the union.
With the move towards a managerial approach to health and safety by the
factory management, and the election of a cautious leadership of the JSSC, there
was an increased emphasis that the safety committee was the appropriate and
sole forum for these matters. The senior union leadership saw this as a way of
providing the union with a voice in the administration of health and safety, as
well as a forum for raising grievances. This resulted in a routinization in the
consideration of health and safety which served to reinforce management
control over these questions.
The point about the increased involvement of the senior union leadership on
the safety committee and with the personnel department is that it was linked
into a separation that began to develop between this leadership and the safety
representatives over health and safety matters. In the past, one of the strengths
of the union organization in the plant was the integration of concerns via the
JSSC, between the two levels of leadership. It was not uncommon for a member
to raise a question with a steward or for a steward to note some health and
safety problem on the section and to report this to the JSSC. Such report may be
for information, as the steward may have dealt with the issue already or to seek
guidance from committee members about how best to proceed. Similarly, the
senior leadership had a practice of reporting back and discussing decisions and
policies that had been made at a factory management level. These exchanges
were two-way and provided the ligaments for developing a collective approach
to health and safety.
The problem in the 1990s was that the two-way aspect of these exchanges
tended to be less common. It was more often the case that the stewards would
report but that little would follow on from this and similarly for the senior union
leaders. This minimization of discussion and debate about health and safety
was not so much that there was a lack of concern about these issues or that
either level of leadership was intent on limiting debate and discussion, but was
Employee more that both sets of leaderships were somewhat beleaguered as they tried to
Relations grapple with health and safety, pay arrangements, persistent restructuring and
18,2 reorganization of the workplace and the worries that the establishment might
be closed down. In this context, it was difficult to recover the earlier enthusiasm
and commitment to debate at the JSSC, and as a result, the concern with health
and safety no longer had the high profile that it had in an earlier period.
72
Summary
The key feature of shopfloor unionism in the plant was that it was grounded in a
long history and practice of sectional organization and as a consequence stewards
came to take up health and safety issues as a routine and regular occurrence.
There was an awareness of the problems and difficulties faced by workers in the
plant. The problem was to develop an approach that recognized the immediate
and pressing problem and at the same time addressed the long-term and less
obvious issues that arose in the course of work and employment. In contrast, the
staff union, while it remained in existence was without such an organization and
was reliant on the activity and enthusiasm of a number of members often acting
as individuals rather than as representatives of a section of the workforce.
After a period of quite intense concern with health and safety, by the stewards
as section representatives, the JSSC as the major union forum, and individual
interest and involvement in health and safety questions by key union leaders, the
union approach became less certain and more uneven. However, the JSSC was
pivotal to a factory-wide engagement with health and safety questions, so that
when the senior leadership began to lose the sharp focus of the earlier period in
the 1980s there was a corresponding diminution in the attention given to health
and safety questions. Even when a new leadership re-established itself in the late
1980s and underwrote the importance of health and safety it was difficult for the
stewards to extend their concerns beyond the section. Complementing this, the
senior leadership became increasingly drawn into a dependent “partnership”
relation with the personnel department where restructuring and reorganization
was at the forefront of concern
 7. Unions and health and safety at work The question of
health and
This account of unions and health and safety in an engineering factory has safety at work
pointed to the complex inter-relationship between law, managerial practice and
union activity. In the context of contested relations at the point of production,
health and safety was subject to competing ways of interpreting what
constituted danger and hazard and how it could be dealt with at the place of 73
work. Both management and union leaderships at the factory looked to legal
regulation to reinforce and buttress their position in the factory, although on
balance the unions had more to gain than management. In fact, management at
the factory pursued a policy of exclusion and structured involvement, whereas
union leaderships attempted to utilize these regulations to open up
opportunities for worker representation. The problem for the union
membership was that they were gradually pushed on to the defensive during
the 1980s, from which they never fully recovered. The result was a guided
“partnership” over health and safety at work, with management setting the
terms of the agenda, for conduct and settlement.

Law, management and unionism

The enactment and implementation of HASAWA in 1974, and the subsequent
regulations relating to safety representation, procedures and standards, were a
major innovation in the way that health and safety at work was dealt with in the
UK. Taken together, they provided the basis for a renewed impetus from
management and trade unions in addressing health and safety. In many
workplaces, managers and their union counterparts began to review their
health and safety procedures and practices and to introduce changes. There
was no exception to this pattern of development at Heating Factory.

The Law
The legal reforms of the 1970s in Britain created a framework for legal
regulation, emphasizing procedures, part of which involved laying the
foundation for a self-regulating system, underpinned by legal standards. In
this, the focus was on the duties and obligations of management in the
provision of a healthy and safe working environment, as far as was “reasonably
practicable”. In addition, the legislation also placed responsibilities on workers
to conduct themselves in safe and healthy ways, for their own sake and others.
The outcome was that the procedures for dealing with health and safety at
work received a fillip as managements reviewed their arrangements and
workers, via their unions, sought to enforce what many saw as new and
distinctive rights. Rules of conduct were laid down, procedures for addressing
health and safety at work were established and formalized and, where it was
felt appropriate, these arrangements were institutionalized, via joint
consultative committees and the like. The premiss was that a framework for the
self-regulation of health and safety around an ethic of “partnership” would be
put in place, in most if not all workplaces.
Employee With the passage of HASAWA and related regulations, the scene was set for
Relations a reconsideration of the ways in which health and safety was dealt with by
workplace managements throughout the country. While for some, particularly
18,2 in those sectors previously not covered by health and safety legislation, such as
sections of the public sector, this resulted in the establishment of new
procedures and methods of conduct, in other sectors, such as manufacturing,
74 (including Heating Factory) established arrangements were reconsidered and
“improvements” introduced. In large part this was a pragmatic response to the
formal requirements evident under the legislation, rather than a renewed
commitment to providing healthy and safe working conditions.
At the same time, many unions sought to develop approaches to health and
safety which retained a recognition of the importance of relatively independent
and localized forms of worker representation. In this, unions sought to utilize, if
not exploit, what many saw as a set of opportunities for union representation
and rights for workers. At Heating Factory, the shopfloor unions encouraged
safety representation as an integral feature of workplace steward structures,
based on a sectional form of representation and a joint shop stewards
committee. In this respect, the ensuing difficulties faced by the JSSC had a direct
effect on worker involvement in the procedures and practices of administering
health and safety at the factory.
This points to the way in which legal regulation was dealt with increasingly
as a set of procedural concerns within a cluster of contested power relations.
While the legislation was premissed on an assumption of “partnership” in the
approach to health and safety at work, attempting to place this outside the
framework of traditional and conventional industrial relations, in practice this
was not so easy. A much more mundane struggle took place between workers
and managers, which determined how and in what way legal regulation was
invoked so as to address the problem of health and safety at work.

The management
At a factory or workplace level, these reforms heralded a somewhat
contradictory set of developments. In the case of many managements,
particularly in the larger manufacturing establishments, the procedures for
addressing health and safety were reviewed, safety representatives recognized,
facilities and time off for these representatives provided, safety information
disseminated, risk assessment procedures introduced, the approach for
minimizing and dealing with accidents re-examined, as well as appointing
safety officers and establishing safety committees. Taken together, this
provided the foundation for management seeking to establish managerially-
based approaches for the administration of health and safety.
At Heating Factory, health and safety organization and action was seen
initially by management as an adjunct to the general activity of a factory
concerned with production and output. In the 1980s, this approach was replaced
with a managerialist view of health and safety at work, whereby the parameters
of health and safety were set by management, incorporating the senior union
leadership and leaving the safety representatives very much on the outside of
the formal organization and activity on health and safety. This involved the
continual affirmation of line management as delineators of health and safety The question of
activity. In practice, this meant reaching a balance between formal legal health and
standards and enforcement procedures, financial and production demands, and
ethical concerns with the hazards and dangers in the factory. safety at work
While this approach by management was not calculated to diminish the
concern with health and safety at the factory, it was one where the parameters
were set by a conception of the factory as a production unit operating within a 75
set of financial constraints set by the market and, increasingly, the broader
strategy of a multi-divisional corporation. As the personnel department was re-
positioned to become the central body dealing with industrial relations then so
too was health and safety incorporated within this framework as one of the
aspects to be dealt with by the personnel department staff. In this, the safety
officer was the key figure, mapping out an approach to health and safety which
rested on a managerial approach to this and other aspects of management-
worker relations at the factory. Increasingly, the emphasis was on managerial
control at the section level and union leadership co-optation at a factory level.

The unions
The legislative changes in the 1970s laid the foundation for a renewed approach
to health and safety at work premissed on self-regulation and active workforce
involvement. As Dawson et al. (1988) argued, a critical condition for effective
action on health and safety was union organization, built around the
“responsible” steward both representing members and pursuing integrative
and distributive bargaining. Their argument was that unionization, and a
particular form of union organization, was a critical, although not sufficient,
condition for workers to address the question of health and safety at work.
Further, there is substantive evidence available from the WIRS surveys which
also confirms a correlation between union organization and presence and health
and safety representation, suggesting the relation pointed to by Dawson and
colleagues (see also Reilly et al., 1995 and, for an extensive and systematic
analysis of WIRS on health and safety, (Nichols 1996, ch. 7).
The problem with the Dawson et al.-type argument is that it remains unclear
what constitutes the conditions for such union organization and action. It could
be argued that at a general level, the history of health and safety organization
and activity at Heating Factory confirms the picture presented by Dawson and
her colleagues. Here the unions played an active and supportive role developing
programmes for improving health and safety at the factory, especially in the
1970s and the early 1980s, but also via the stewards during the subsequent
period. In addition, the senior union leadership had long worked with
management at the factory, on the safety committee, and was prepared to
address health and safety questions in its negotiations with management.
The unions at the factory based their organization and operation around a
long-standing concern with health and safety at work. Activity over the
dangers and hazards that members faced in their sections provided a base for
the unions that made up the JSSC, providing an ongoing standard of concern
about the conditions of work and employment at the factory. Together with pay
and related arrangements, this was the well-spring for union activity at the
Employee factory, during the times when the JSSC was establishing itself and exerting a
Relations presence within the factory, as well as those times when the JSSC had a less
prominent presence. This points to the fluctuations in union organization and
18,2 operation over health and safety at work, indicating the ways in which such
activity depends on the patterning of relations between unions and
management, the alternations in the prosperity and position of the company
76 within the market and, even more importantly, within the shifting managerial
strategies and policies of the company.
The overall pattern of union activity over health and safety was one which
was contingent on the form of union organization at different periods
throughout the history of the plant. In the initial period when the JSSC was
being established as a forum for discussion and debate about union policies
and practice in the late 1970s, health and safety was a central concern,
receiving considerable attention. This was a period when the sectional base of
the steward organization provided an opportunity to develop a collective base
for union activity in the plant. The JSSC was a forum for a subtle interaction of
concerns involving the sectional stewards and a JSSC leadership which had the
ambition of defining these concerns in collective ways. This made for initiative
from the senior leadership in the context of discussion and debate about
sectional experience and activity. The result was that health and safety, along
with other issues, received a prominence that was only tentatively rebuilt
during the 1980s when the JSSC initially broke up and then re-established
itself.
By the end of the 1980s in the context of corporate reorganization and a shift
in the approach by management towards employee relations, the union
approach was one that could be characterized as “pragmatic accommodation”
but which in fact was a dual strategy of cautious and accommodative senior
leadership and a sectional steward base which still attempted to pursue the
concerns of their membership. The problem was that as the co-optation of the
senior leadership proceeded there was a corresponding fragmentation and
isolation among stewards who could no longer look to the JSSC as an active
forum for articulating their collective concerns. Nonetheless, it was still the case
that the structure of relations was such that union renewal also remained a
possibility, as indicated by the upheavals of the mid-1980s.

The basis of active unionism

There appears to be no ready and immediate answer to the question of how to
achieve and provide for health and safety at work. However, what is clear from
the study is that for workers, union organization is critical. Where workers
organize as union members there is the possibility that they can begin to
elaborate a union approach to health and safety. But in order to do this, it is
necessary to overcome the uncertainties and scepticisms that many workers
have about dealing with dangers and hazards at work.

Fatalism, habituation, and consciousness

An enduring theme in the literature about unions and health and safety is that
where unions are recognized, usually at the larger workplaces, then there is a
greater likelihood that a joint approach to dealing with health and safety will be The question of
evident (Dawson et al., 1988; Millward et al., 1992). Related to this, there is health and
persuasive evidence that workers, irrespective of occupation and job, are
concerned with health and safety at work (Waddington and Whitson, 1996). safety at work
This tends to support the view that for many workers there is persistent worry
and concern about health and safety. The question is, what can they do about it?
It became clear during the course of the study that workers at Heating 77
Factory expressed what seemed like a fatalistic acceptance of their conditions
and circumstances at work. There was a view that working at the factory was
dangerous and hazardous, stressful and demanding. In the context of a
relatively hazardous workplace there appeared to be an acceptance of hazards
by most workers at the factory, staff and shopfloor, commented on by stewards
from time to time, expressed by some stewards themselves at different times in
the history of the plant, and certainly referred to by the safety officers and other
sections of management. But this is only one side of the picture; it was also the
case that throughout the history of the study these workers and their stewards
recognized the problems of health and safety at work. They were aware of the
problems of overcrowding, the dangers of chemicals, the possible long-term
effects of working with VDUs, the hazards of noise and working with asbestos.
These problems were discussed and were acknowledged by the workforce
through their unions. This awareness, however, did not necessarily or always
translate into any ready expectation that this factory could be made into a safe
working environment.
In general, workers at this factory, and in many similar workplaces
throughout the country, have always worked in an environment which was
persistently hazardous and dangerous. It was an engineering factory and
accidents occur frequently in such factories. These types of factory and
workplace are noisy, dirty and dusty. People work with metal and chemicals in
such places. They are busy places and they are stressful. Offices are frequently
untidy and cluttered. For many people, it would appear that this is how it is and
this is how it “always” has been. But, there have also been improvements. The
stewards frequently observed how the factory was a safer place than it was in,
say, the 1940s and 1950s. Many workers had worked at the factory a long time
and remembered how the foundry was much more hazardous in the past. The
factory was now much more mechanized. It was cleaner. Employees talked
about the hazards at work in ways that they would not have done in the past.
They knew that noise might lead to partial deafness if there was long-term
exposure. It was known that asbestos was not a benign material and steps had
been taken to protect against its dangerous properties.
This combination of an acceptance of a hazardous environment coupled with
the common-sense recognition of improvement over time meant that many
workers, and their representatives, developed what appeared to be a view of
health and safety problems at work as “normal”. However, this is a deceptive
way of accounting for the persistence of health and safety issues, as part of an
ongoing and seemingly endless set of problems at places like Heating Factory.
It suggests that workers almost pragmatically accepted the dangers and
hazards of work about which, at the end of the day, there was little that could be
Employee done. But it misses an important dimension about the contested nature of health
Relations and safety at work, the way there is fluctuation in concern and awareness of
these issues, and the way in which a trade union consciousness about dangers
18,2 and hazards is expressed.
What is crucial in the way in which health and safety is dealt with is the ebb
and flow in the relations of power between workers and management. Over the
78 whole historical period, as noted in the first chapter, there was a critical shift
from a corporatist movement in the 1970s, when organized labour had an
influence in the polity, to the liberal market period of the 1980s and 1990s. In the
earlier period, health and safety at work was a focus of union attention,
exemplified by the history of Heating Factory, whereas in the 1980s many union
groups were caught up in a struggle for survival, although the institutional
arrangements relating to health and safety in the workplace were by and large
maintained. In this latter period, the emphasis at Heating Factory shifted more
towards self-regulation within an explicit managerialist approach to health and
safety.
But, within this overall trajectory, there was also an ebb and flow in the
relations between workers and management in the factory, with periodic
upsurges in union activity and a continued presence on the shopfloor via a
sectional form of steward organization. The pattern of unionism was not so
much that of secular decline, as implied in many commentaries on the fate of
unions during this period (McIlroy, 1995, p. 158-163), but that of a series of
struggles about the form of unionism and the prospects of union renewal. In the
mid-1980s and towards the end of the 1980s, and still remaining a possibility in
the mid-1990s, the workers and their leaders in this factory rebuilt their union
organization, on the strength and persistence of sectionalism. These were not
once-and-forever struggles, but part of the complicated and changing fortunes
of wage labour in factories and workplaces such as this one throughout the
country during this period, when workers found themselves in situations where
the social conditions and relations in which they were bound made some things
possible and not others.
The point of emphasizing the ebb and flow of the balance of power in the
factory is to draw attention to the importance of collective organization and
active participation in the union over issues such as health and safety at work.
The question of health and safety at work is not a problem of discourse and the
workers’ inability to frame the right demands so as to face the problems they
face. If this were the case then the problem of dangers and hazards would be
resolved by a little education and gentle persuasion and a more health and
safety-conscious operational management, as implied by the approach of the
second safety officer at Heating Factory. On the contrary the apparent
acceptance of hazards and dangers by the workforce fluctuated and was
conditional on perceived possibilities as part of the fluctuating material
circumstances of work and employment. At Heating Factory, the workforce had
a conditional “acceptance” of hazards and dangers, depending on the perceived
and immediate ability to mobilize successfully in relation to these attributes of
work organization and practice. Such a prospect depended, in turn, on the basis
of collective organization and the consciousness of workers and their leaders
that there was a point to challenging prevailing practice as well as the relations The question of
in which they found themselves. health and
The argument is that the apparent “fatalism” of the workforce at times
during this history is to be explained by the specific circumstances of time and safety at work
place and not by a set of individual attributes of a disaggregated workforce,
acting in instrumental and self-conscious ways. At Heating Factory, as part of
the fluctuations in relations between the company and the unions, or 79
management and workers, there had been improvements in addressing dangers
and hazards, reflected according to one set of criteria by the decline in the injury
rate in the 1990s. This points to a dual consciousness about health and safety
relations: on the one hand, workers “knew” that they were relatively powerless
at work yet, on the other hand, there was also the awareness that there had been
some change and progress and that there could be more. There had been
periods and moments of success which were talked about and remembered.
Hence what appeared to be a fatalism about dangers and hazards was, rather,
the uncertainty about how to articulate and express these concerns in ways that
went beyond the individual and instead became the focus of collective
expressions. In a situation in the 1990s where the union form of organization
appeared to be one predicated on a division between the stewards, as workplace
representatives, and the senior leadership, taking initiatives in relation to the
workforce as a whole, without the intimacy of relations in the late 1970s, there
was no obvious way to move beyond the limitations of the present.
The implication of the argument is that the ways of addressing danger and
hazard were very much part of the active intervention of sections of the union
membership who had the confidence to raise and address these issues. This
occurred in the 1970s when unions nationally had confidence about their
influence within the polity, when workers’ rights had been enshrined in
legislation, albeit in diluted ways, but as a result of the balance between labour
and capital at this time. This was a period when unions, as the collective
expression of workers’ concerns, were able to assert a presence in many
workplaces, and Heating Factory was no exception. Subsequently, the balance
of power shifted towards management, very much the consequence of active
state intervention, and unions lost some of the influence and presence they had
previously enjoyed. This shift in the balance of power did not mean the end of
union organization and activity within workplaces; rather it signified a changed
set of conditions and circumstances in which workers sought to defend
themselves.
Thus, the circumstances and conditions in which these workers were
employed was itself contradictory and uncertain. At different times during this
history workers and their leaderships saw possibilities of acting collectively
and defending themselves, while at other times this prospect seemed less
feasible. This was part of the flow and flux of the material circumstances in
which workers found themselves, where there was doubt about the long-term
future of the factory, where redundancies were spoken of, where the law seemed
less helpful, where the settlement of compensation cases for injury seemed
remote and drawn out and where the union leaderships did not seem
accountable to the membership. At other times the union seemed more
Employee immediate, more relevant and no longer “external”, but the collective expression
Relations of the workforce.
There were occasions during the 1980s when workers as a collectivity were
18,2 able to express clear and public aspirations that they did not accept their
current condition and, as part of this, that dangers and hazards were not
necessarily a condition of work. Workers and their leaders expressed a trade
80 union consciousness about health and safety at work, via union education
representatives, a more active recourse from members for assistance from local
union leaders, and a reliance on local leaderships to address the immediate
concerns of the workforce. Often it was difficult to extend such concerns beyond
the section and to the whole workforce, as was the case in the 1970s. The 1980s
and 1990s were and remain difficult times when workers were, and are, caught
in worrying and troubling situations, where there was not a unity of
understanding, and where union leaderships were also less confident and
certain as to how they should address the problems they faced in the workplace.
After all, many of the decisions that affected the workplace were taken in remote
corporate boardrooms in relation to concerns which did not seem immediately
relevant to Heating Factory. In other words, such conditions and relations are
always historically and culturally relative so that the uncertainties and doubts
of one period may be transformed into a more confident approach to the
problem of waged labour in another period.
This indicates that workers and their representatives had an awareness of
hazards and dangers at work but they also accepted them as a condition of
work and employment in this type of factory. For union representatives and the
JSSC leadership, the difficulty was to step beyond this contradictory
consciousness and to begin to confront these conditions of work and
employment. This, in turn, raises questions about how to play a part in the
factory as trade unionists, how to influence managers with differently-framed
agendas, and how to utilize legal regulations and requirements for the benefit of
all and not the few.

The question of union organization

The organizational form of trade unionism in manufacturing factories and
related workplaces may inhibit or encourage union members and their
representatives to address health and safety issues. Many of the unions in this
sector have long traditions of workplace-based forms of organization, around
workplace stewards and other lay activists (Goodman and Whittingham, 1969;
Terry and Edwards, 1988). This form of unionism has been seen by many as a
source of union strength and democracy, as workers combine to establish the
basis of job control and active membership representation in negotiations and
bargaining over work-related issues, including health and safety (e.g. Terry,
1988).
But, in order to become involved and active over health and safety, members
need to have an awareness of what constitutes danger or ill-health. Such an
awareness is usually obtained from training and educational programmes, in
the main provided for safety representatives. Thus, the awareness that many
have today of asbestos and hazardous chemicals derives from the teaching
programmes that have been very much part of the union agenda over the last The question of
two decades (Cornell, 1986). This has become a feature of workplace steward health and
practice, that worker delegates speak on behalf of and work with members in
developing an awareness and familiarity of issues and problems at work. It is safety at work
not that people are unaware, but whether or not people define and interpret
issues in ways that allow a possible solution or manner of addressing issues as
projects that can be resolved. 81
The case study illustrates the way in which health and safety issues are
subject to continual revision and re-assessment. They are born out of the
practices and procedures of work and employment and as such take on a
particular force depending on the relations within which they are embedded.
For example, it has long been known that asbestos is a dangerous substance to
work with, particularly when few precautions are taken to isolate the worker
from the dust fibres that are so dangerous. Yet in this factory while there was
recognition of these hazards it was also decided by the designers of the
equipment manufactured here and by local management that it should continue
to be used, although to be phased out over time. For workers, this had serious
consequences; they were exposed to danger. The reason, of course, why they
and not the managers or designers worked with these materials, was that they
were waged labourers. Even with the substitute products, further complications
were caused, of a different but nonetheless dangerous order. Workers because of
the relationships in which they are embedded as workers face changing
circumstances and arrangements which mean that health and safety at work is
in the process of continually being redefined anew.
In the context of change and flux – about what constitutes a problem,
changing procedures, and the way in which work is carried out – there is a
requirement to look anew at what is taking place. The means of doing this is via
collective organization and activity. It is extremely unlikely that such questions
can be dealt with individually, with workers pursuing their individual and
immediate concerns in a rational, albeit instrumental way. At most, such an
approach allows for calculated and individual solutions to what are problems
located in the relationships that define work and employment in the modern
workplace. It depends on an awareness by the individual and a rational
response by someone who has power and authority to respond in ways that
deal with the problem. Instead, if the problem is defined as a feature of the
collective circumstance of work and employment then it is generalized and
potentially subject to a collective rather than an individualized solution.

Is corporatism an answer?
The discussion so far has focused on the workplace, at the level of the
establishment, and the way in which health and safety can be dealt with at this
level. While there is a truism in stating that health and safety can be dealt with
only at a workplace level, since this is where workers experience and face up to
danger and hazard, it is also the case that there are common problems faced by
workers within industrial sectors and between sectors. It is this feature of
health and safety that has prompted unions to look to the state for respite and
possible solutions to dangers and hazards at work. In part, this aspect of the
Employee question was recognized in HASAWA, via the tripartite arrangements that were
Relations included in the legislation, as well as the monitoring activity of the HSE. More
recently, attention has turned to the European Union with the increased
18,2 impetus for health and safety legislation in Britain coming from that direction.
In turn, this prompts the question for unions: are there steps that could be taken
by reforming governments in Britain, which would address the persistence of
82 danger and hazard at work in more positive ways than has been the case to
date?
One possible approach would be for unions to embrace more forcefully the
corporatist answer to the dilemma of dealing with health and safety at work.
This could take the form of a more systematic and all-embracing commitment
to formal workers’ representation and the operation of joint consultative
workplace committees. Such a solution could be encouraged by a reformist
social democratic government committed to the ideals of “social partnership” in
the workplace. In this scenario, the current arrangements would be
strengthened through formal requirements, not only to establish the basis for
comprehensive and representative committees but also with these committees
being given the authority to investigate, monitor, report and develop strategies
to resolve health and safety problems. In addition, a more extensive health and
safety representative system could be put in place, with a wider range of duties
and responsibilities.
Such a step in the context of health and safety may be very attractive to a
social democratic government, keen to address the question of “social
partnership” on a set of issues which receives broad rhetorical support. The
conditions for such a development are threefold. First, this requires a
government which has developed an approach to state regulation based on the
principles of “social partnership”. This assumes that the conditions for parity of
power between workers and management can be established. However, the
problem is that such parity is expressed generally as a notion of democracy
indicated by the nominal participation of all, rather than the exclusive
representation of workers as trade union members. Second, it calls for a union
movement which is prepared to embrace the principles of “social partnership”
and forego the discretion that non-involvement in such agreements implies. For
unions, these principles have been a major stumbling block for the
establishment of such arrangements in the UK, as exemplified by the tortuous
debate about industrial democracy in the UK in the 1970s (Coates and Topham,
1986; pp. 53-61). Third, it necessitates a management, which succumbs to state
requirements for “social partnership” and thereby formally concedes some
degree of discretion over managerial decision making and by implication the
allocation of resources within the enterprise.
One of the uncertainties in this type of development is whether unions are
organized and operate in such a way that they are able to participate in
“partnership” arrangements as independent and autonomous organizations. If
this condition is not met then it is possible that, with a state-orchestrated
“partnership”, unions might become enthusiastic partners in the corporatist
relationship. In these circumstances unions, both nationally and locally, could
become involved not only in the monitoring but also in the control of health and
safety at work. One rationale for union involvement in such arrangements is the The question of
ethical principle of organized worker involvement in health and safety issues; health and
another is a view that only via union representation can workers have a say in
the control of the dangers and hazards they face at work. Yet, a third rationale safety at work
is that only through participation in the national institutions and arrangements
for dealing with health and safety can workers, via their unions, begin to
influence the patterns and trends of danger and hazard at work. The danger in 83
this process is that union representatives, often unwittingly, may find
themselves part of the process of controlling workers. Such a possibility is
especially so where the explanation for injury and ill-health is cast in terms of
the individual and not the organization and structure of work, and employment
relations (Nichols, 1996). In situations where a managerialist approach to health
and safety prevails, unions could become the conduits for management in
organizing health and safety at work. While this is not an inevitable
development, it remains a possibility in the context of “partnership“, where a
corporatist framework is accepted, both at a national and at a local level.
The dangers of a “partnership” where unions are disadvantaged from the
beginning are illustrated amply by the history of health and safety legislation
in the UK and its implementation. While such arrangements may open up
opportunities for unions to exploit the permeability of their relationship with
management, they rest on a set of premisses which make this a flawed
trajectory. The problem is that unless there is a process of renewal and
persistent accountability there is the danger of individual incorporation or a
routinization of procedure which is formalistic in the extreme. It is this
formalism which has come to characterize many of the health and safety
committees in manufacturing industry. They were never integrated fully into
the decision-making process and participants could at best monitor rather than
control what was happening on their behalf and in their name. It is for this
reason that the steps towards “social partnership” heralded by the
formalization and regulation of health and safety signal much but yield little.

The future for unions

The weakness of the social democratic perspective points to the importance of
union organization and activity, and to the development of a collective
consciousness and practice. Such a consciousness can only emerge in those
forms of trade unionism where there is active debate and discussion between
participating members. The importance of union organization and activity is
that it is only when unions comprise and operate as participative organizations
that there can be debate and discussion about the dangers and hazards at work.
While such organization does not mean that there will be debate and discussion
about such items, it is a precondition for workers to be able to become active
participants in the process of questioning the way in which work is organized,
the techniques followed, the materials used, and the systems of work. In a world
where there is an imbalance of power between labour and capital, workers must
be in a position to raise the concerns and questions they face and confront.
Otherwise, workers are organizationally silent and impotent in the face of the
problems they face and experience, whether on the shopfloor or in the office or
Employee elsewhere. Thus, one condition for the development of a trade union
Relations consciousness able and prepared to address dangers and hazards at work is a
particular form of trade unionism. It is in this respect that workers as union
18,2 members should be in a position to raise issues within a framework which
allows individual concerns to be translated into collective responses.
However, to participate and engage fully in debate and discussion about
84 health and safety, both within a union framework and in bargaining or
negotiations with management, it is necessary for workers to acquire an
awareness and an understanding of dangers and hazards at work. There are
examples where practices go unchallenged, materials are used, and work
systems are maintained on the basis of ignorance of the implications of
following such practices or using such dangerous substances. It is also the case
that the voice of labour can often appear unknowing and uncertain, especially
when health and safety is defined in technical, expert terms. In such
circumstances education provides the opportunity to reflect, review, develop
perspectives of what is at issue, and learn how to take up questions of health
and safety at work, what can be done about dangers and hazards, and how they
can be overcome. Education is about developing a consciousness of health and
safety within the framework of participative and engaged unions. Through
education it becomes possible to locate health and safety in the context of
collective organization and activity by workers as trade unionists.
With these conditions met, the ways in which trade unionists as unionists can
participate in the institutional arrangements set up to deal with health and
safety at work can be considered, debated and implemented. Too often, the
assumption is made that participation, even sceptically and with caution, is the
precursor to incorporation and mindless enthusiasm for the prerogatives of
management. This judgement overlooks union procedures of accountability and
control which, when well developed, allowed union members to gain much from
the experiments of industrial democracy. The corollary of this proposition is
that such members, acting within a participative framework and educated, are
in positions to develop their understandings of hazards and dangers, both the
immediate and the less obvious. To realize this prospect depends on the ability
of trade union members, as union members, to develop a trade union
consciousness premissed on debate, discussion, education and learning. In such
circumstances, there is then the promise of a continuing process of involvement
and activity over health and safety at work, at all levels of union engagement
and organization
 Notes The question of
1. These regulations include: Reporting Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences
health and
Regulations 1985; Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 1989; Management safety at work
of Health at Work Regulations 1992 (supplementing HASAWA); and Workplace Health,
Safety and Welfare Regulations 1992 (revoking and replacing many obligations in the
Factories Act 1961 and Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963).
85
2. There is a corresponding set of tensions for management, reflected in the structural
ambiguity of situation (first-line supervision and specialist staff) as well as the varied ways
that managerial goals and ideologies are expressed, ranging from partnership and
accommodation to control and exclusion.
3. The study is a report of a 15 year research project dating from 1979. Three principal sources
of data were used. First, I conducted interviews over the period with a range of personnel
including the two factory safety offices and others from personnel; the maintenance manager;
four convenors, two staff senior representatives and three deputy convenors during the
period; complementing this I interviewed all stewards (37) in the factory in 1979, followed by
a further round of interviews and discussion in 1986 and then 1989. Second, I taught on three
ten-day TUC/WEA industrial relations courses from 1987 to 1989, attended by stewards from
the factory. In addition, in 1987, I conducted in-depth interviews with two teachers on ten-day
courses, attended by stewards from the factory. This provided an extensive source of
information and argument about health and safety matters at the factory. Third, documents
have been collected throughout this period, relating to this factory as well as the companis
that owned it.
4. The ASTMS merged with the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section in 1988 to
form the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF) and in 1992 the AEU and the
EETPU merged to form the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU). From
the mid-1980s ASTMS/MSF existed in name only at the factory, playing no active part in
negotiations and other union activity.
5. As the first stage in developing an account of the ways in which workers are able to address
questions of health and safety at work, those hazards and dangers identified by both manual
and non-manual workers are described. This process of self-selection and definition is
complemented by observation over the period of study.
6. Following Nichols (1996), the term “injury” rather than “accident” is used to describe
incidents which occur at workplaces, resulting in cuts, bruises, burns, fractures and other
such occurrences.
7. The only exceptions to the male character of the workforce here were the few technical
support staff who were female. However, even in this respect it was unusual to see women in
the area, apart from those who walked through the foundry on their way to somewhere else.
For these women this was something of a gauntlet as the young men in the area transferred
the hardships of manual labour into a gendered outlook where they saw themselves as “real”
men with the right to harass women with wolf-whistles and cat-calls.
8. The safety officer had problems obtaining agreement from first-line supervision to release
operators for this training programme. According to the safety officer the supervision
prevented attendance by claiming that production demands did not permit release. If
sessions did not recruit for three weeks in succession, the safety officer then went and spoke
to supervisors. By the end of 1978, 665 employees had been on the course, just under half the
workforce.
Employee 9. An improvement notice requires that employers take certain actions or make specific
improvements, within a given time. They apply where a law or regulation has been broken
Relations and is likely to be broken again. Employers are given a minimum of 21 days to make the
18,2 improvements.
10. In 1990 the Health and Safety Commission observed: “The European Community has now to
be regarded as the principal engine of health and safety law affecting the UK, not just in
worker safety but also in major hazards and most environmental matters” (Health and Safety
86 Commission, 1990, p. viii).
11. Significantly, the official company information bulletin for 1995, reporting injury rates and
health and safety procedures, made no mention of the unions. Emphasis was placed both on
the incidence of injury and on the cost, estimated to be the equivalent of 177 heating units,
simply to pay for the first-aid, injuries and lost time injuries, excluding sick pay or insurance
costs and major injury costs and damage. What does this extraordinary, although perhaps
not surprising, way of presenting injury as a monetary value amount to? It is the embodiment
of value and a recognition that the problem for the company with injury is not so much the
moral and ethical question as the gap between the monetary valuation of the product and
body value. Still, even at this level, the valuation is imperfect since this monetary assessment
did not even include “product or property damage and many other ‘hidden’ costs such as
productivity, legal or major incidents” (!).
12. The senior convenor had an arrangement whereby he took the time he needed to carry out his
activities as senior convenor, so there were times when he worked on the section. In addition,
it was expected by decision of the JSSC that all the senior union leaders should continue to
represent their sections as stewards.
13. A one-day briefing was presented on three separate occasions by a union-sympathetic ex-
work study officer and was attended by all shopfloor stewards.
14. The convenor’s leadership of the strike was described unofficially by a manager: “It [the
strike] was led by one of the younger, more politically motivated, individuals with very little
experience of leading the union. He managed to generate a lot of bravado which led the
workforce into a general strike from a series of one day protest stoppages. It ended with the
union coming back to work without any gains at all, in effect in “defeat”, because a lot of
employees began to return to work as they became disillusioned with the strike committee.
The individual who had led the strike resigned as union convenor and subsequently left the
company” (internal document, n.d.).
15. This was interpreted by management as: “This is the so called New Realism, with more
emphasis aimed at preventive problem avoidance rather than punitive industrial action after
disagreements” (internal document, n.d.).
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