The manifesto warns that health and safety has been “ideologically demonised” as “pointless red tape” and instead calls for “real, enforceable employment and safety rights”.
The Hazards Campaign is a network of activists, trade unions safety representatives, including the Asbestos Victims Support Group, Construction Safety Campaign and Families Against Corporate Killers.
The new manifesto calls on the Government to end deregulation and develop a health and safety system based on prevention, precaution and participation of strong active unions.
It recommends a “fully-funded independent health and safety system” with strong laws, strict enforcement and empowering of trade unions and safety reps to ensure decent work and decent lives for all workers based on prevention, using the precautionary principle, and the empowerment and participation of workers to stop workplace harm.
“We are launching our manifesto for health and safety fit for workers, decent jobs and decent lives for all with three clear demands on the current and future governments,” said the campaign’s Janet Newsham.
“We want the purpose and mission of HSE to be one sole aim – to prevent injury, ill-health and death caused by work, no constraints of having to consider business interests, and to use its teeth to enforce that strictly and be effective and active in the new precarious 21st Century workplace,” she added.
“The HSE must be made a real champion of workers’ lives and health and the whole health and safety system a proactive, preventive, precautionary, workers’ participatory project with ambitious aims to make work safer and healthier.”
“We want workers to be given much greater control over the circumstances under which they work and rights from day one. Give workers and union safety reps more power to take action in the workplace by abolishing all anti-trade union legislation, enforcing the Safety Representatives and Safety Committee Regulations and extending and enhancing them with, for example, the right to stop the job.”
The full 2019 Hazards Campaign manifesto is available to read here.
I am absolutely against this. The whole campaign is a politicised socialist agenda with ulterior motives in the name of H&S, which has the capacity to further demonise H&S in the eyes of the public, rather than achieve the opposite. The balance must be struck between personal freedoms and individual responsibility and safety regulations where absolutely necessary.
Yeah but, no but, yes but, when “expediency, denial and omission rule OK” there is little hope for those suffering presenteeism without the individual employees joining the “Self-Preservation Society” and there has been little signs of that as, most continue disaffected, self-harming and just working to live.
Campaigns are really good especially for people who are regularly under asbestos exposure. The workers can be made aware of the hazardous nature of asbestos.