Trade Union Strategies to Support Representation on Health and Safety in Australia and the UK: Integration or Isolation?

This chapter focuses on the role of trade unions in supporting worker participation in health and safety at work. It is centred on a study of support for worker representation in Australia and the UK as seen from the perspective of union officials and other key union actors. Drawing on wider research highlighting the importance of external trade union support for effective worker representation and consultation in health and safety, it reviews the development of the trade union role in representing workers on health and safety and its regulatory institutionalisation. Within this regulatory context it examines the traditional roles performed by unions to support health and safety representatives. It acknowledges the current crisis evident in the regulatory model; and in the light of this background it discusses the views of trade union full-time officers in Australia and the UK concerning the challenges unions face in continuing to support health and safety representatives at the present time. In particular it examines how they regard the implications for trades unions of recent changes to the structure of the labour market — which make many workers harder for unions to organise on health and safety matters. It further considers their reactions to changes in the nature of the issues embraced by workplace health and safety and the extent to which they understand the subject as part of labour relations or as something separate. The chapter explores the consequences of these understandings for union health and safety strategies in the context of wider aspects of trade union organising. Responses to all these issues are compared between the UK and Australia, and the implications of the findings for trade unions are discussed.