Worker Representation on Health and Safety in the UK — Problems with the Preferred Model and Beyond

Trade unions have played a vital part in the way in which health and safety arrangements for worker representation have worked in the UK. Most importantly, the 1977 SRSC Regulations conferred certain rights exclusively on trade union representatives, including the right to call for the establishment of a joint health and safety committee. In British legal thinking this arrangement became established as a default position or, as we call it here, a ‘preferred model’; other arrangements for employees who were not in workplaces where unions were recognised thus required new arrangements to be introduced. Of course, it was not inevitable that such new provision had to rest on a non-trade union base, though this was to prove the case. For example, the rights of employees to be consulted on health and safety could have been extended to non-unionised workplaces through the auspices of trade unions that operated elsewhere, or low levels of union membership could have triggered representational rights in the absence of union recognition. Such options have not been on the political agenda in the UK, however. Meanwhile, as trade union membership has fallen, UK governments have been under pressure to comply with EU Directives. As a result of this, UK provision for health and safety consultation and representation has become complex.