Title: Securing UK Workplace Health and Safety Protections After Brexit: A Comprehensive Readjustment to Ensure Compliance with International Norms
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: The project will propose and disseminate a set of occupational health and safety and working time protection policy proposals grounded in research undertaken for my PhD dissertation and taken further in my collaboration with Professor David Whyte in our Institute of Employment Rights publication, 'International Health and Safety Standards After Brexit.' With this this preliminary work now complete I intend to explore fully the post Brexit dilemmas facing UK policy makers. Project 'deliverables' are organised around five sets of outputs: 1) An 80 page guide to law reform that will identify key areas in which the UK government currently falls short of compliance with international OSH and working time norms, identify and address any potential barriers to the ratification of the relevant transnational instruments and set out the case for reform of the domestic regime. The intention is to produce a guide to 'positioning' the UK so that it is able to lead the world in these spheres - to re-open the window of opportunity to secure the working conditions conducive to enhancing productivity that opened in the wake of the Robens Report of 1972 and was closed following the election of the first Thatcher administration in 1979. The Guide will provide a systematic and detailed guide to the legislative reform required to: - enhance the role and purpose of OSH representation (including modified forms of safety committees and related fora). - enhance the role and purpose of OSH consultation and negotiation. - enhance the role and purpose of OSH regulation inspection and enforcement. - update the duties placed on employees and employers to ensure government compliance with ILO, Council of Europe and UN standards following Brexit. The Guide will be published as a policy briefing in association with the Institute of Employment Rights (IER) and used to lobby UK government and opposition parties. While some limited fresh research building on our previous work, and on the work for the IER of Phil James and David Walters, will be undertaken we will primarily be 'concretising' and expanding upon existing proposals in the Institute for Employment Rights Manifesto for Labour Law (of which Prof. Whyte and I are contributing authors) that has been adopted by the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress and considerably influenced the policies of the SNP, Green Party and Plaid Cymru. The proposed research thus builds on an evidence base that currently exists to provide a usable set of policy proposals. 2) Three articles summarising the research, to be published in Policy and Practice in Health and Safety (the journal of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health); International Union Rights (the journal of the International Centre of Trade Union Rights) and the Industrial Law Journal ( the journal of the Industrial Law Society). I also hope to be able to publish a series of more accessible accounts of this work in national wide-circulation outlets. 3) A seminar in the Palace of Westminster. This will bring together cross-party Parliamentarians from the Institute of Employment Rights network to discuss the project proposals and plan a private members bill to be laid before the House of Commons. A 5 page summary of output 1) will be disseminated as a policy briefing at this event, and sent to the main UK political parties and OHS specialist organisations. 4) A three page article for Hazards Magazine. 5) Four papers summarising the findings of this research to be presented at two IER health and safety conferences in Liverpool and London; at the ILO's 6th Regulating for Decent Work Conference in Geneva on 'Work and Well Being in the 21st Century' in July 2021; and the 2021 Hazards Conference, Keele University, August 2021. This dissemination strategy will be used to consolidate existing policy proposals and to maximise their reach into policy networks (see Impact Plan and User Engagement).

Lay abstract: By the best estimates around 140 people die day every day as result of injuries sustained at work or as a result of illnesses contracted as a direct result of work. That is 50,000 people a year. Millions live with work related injuries and illnesses both mental and physical while many, as yet unaware that they have been exposed to damaging substances at work, will develop debilitating symptoms as a result. The project will set out how the UK can comply with international law as it applies to health and safety at work after we leave the EU. It does so by asking the following research questions: How can post-Brexit occupational safety and health regulation (including the management of working time) best address the high levels of work related injury, illness and death in the UK? How can post-Brexit occupational safety and health regulation promote competitiveness and efficiency in UK businesses? At the same time how can we stop unscrupulous employers from burdening the benefits system, NHS and taxpayers with the victims of their inadequate OSH policies and evading the real financial repercussions of their failures? How can post-Brexit occupational safety and health regulation halt and reverse what has long been a misguided workplace protection 'race to the bottom' in pursuit of short-term profit lobbied for by misguided employers and delivered by their representatives in government? The project seeks to explore how existing and proposed protections can effectively be 'entrenched' by a programme of ratification of International Labour Organisation OSH and working time Conventions and by revising the UK's relationship with the Council of Europe's European Social Charter so that future governments will be unable to easily undermine or withdraw them. It has long been understood and accepted that expenditure on OSH protection is an investment which, as well as mitigating the incalculable human cost, repays itself many times over in the long term; it benefits employers and the state as well as workers. Nevertheless, those who in the wake of Brexit seek to turn the UK into Europe's 'off-shore sweatshop' promote the idea that OSH protection is 'red tape' which stifles productivity and profitability. They deliberately confuse the absurd actions of over cautious businesses and public authorities with occupational health and safety measures - and they have been very successful in embedding the myth of 'health and safety gone mad' into the national consciousness. Yet OSH is a deadly serious matter, literally a matter of life and death. It is about stopping employers from poisoning their workforces with toxic fumes; about stopping road haulage firms from obliging their drivers to work 15 hour days or 82 hour weeks (as many still blatantly do); about simple measures and procedures which prevent workers falling from a height, from being crushed by machinery or struck by moving vehicles. It is about monitoring workers in order to assess whether their health is being damaged by toxic substances, by musculoskeletal conditions induced by the demands of the workplace - or by work induced stress. It is about paying workers adequate sick pay so they can afford not to come into work when ill. It is about ensuring adequate precautions are taken by means of an effective system of inspection, warnings, prosecutions and the imposition of dissuasive penalties, as well as through advice and education. OSH is most emphatically not about stopping people from drinking hot coffee in case they scald themselves or any of the myriad absurd supposed 'health and safety' stories which appear regularly in the press. Nor is it about creating a 'Nanny State' or pandering to 'Snowflakes.' It is about stopping employers from killing and disabling their workers and about emulating the OSH standards productivity levels and associated with the most successful economies such as Germany and the Scandinavian nations. That is the aim of this fellowship.

Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES;3.2 INTERVENTIONS TO ALTER PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE