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Introduction

Working hard

Workers today do not need to be told that work is getting harder - in every sense. The trend in manufacturing towards techniques of "lean production" - just-in-time working, constant improvement, total quality management and so forth - is just the sharpest end in an overall process of intensification of labour through which industry, not just in Britain but worldwide, is trying to revive flagging profits. And it does not stop at the borders of private production. The public sector, too, since the emergence of the philosophy of "market forces", has become influenced by the same rationale which has seen work increasingly contracted-out to the private sector and, even where this has been avoided, subjected to the same pressures of reduced workforces and "flexible" working practices.

These trends in employment - and the unemployment, part-time working, temporary working and general casualisation of the workforce that go along with them - are not usually seen as health and safety issues. Rightly, they are looked on as undermining the basic right of the worker to secure, reasonably-paid, rewarding and dignified labour, i.e. fundamentally affecting the terms and conditions of work. The changes in the nature of work and the labour market examined in this handbook do all that and more. But beyond that, as we show here, they also have far-reaching effects on health and safety.

Health and safety is not just about hazardous substances like chemicals and asbestos, or dangerous working conditions like those too often found in industries like construction. It is also about the organisation of work - the way jobs are designed, the amount of control workers have over them, the speed of work and the length of time spent doing it. It is about pressure put on workers to produce so that they cut corners - and a lack of job security which forces workers to accept unsafe procedures because if they do not, someone else will. It is about the "Twenty-Four Hour Society" which forces workers into shifts and exhausting working patterns designed for robots rather than human beings (Moore-Ede 1993). The end result of these practices is the condition known as stress.

Labour market changes

Of course, for most people work has never been a soft option. But over the years of fighting for workers' rights, a body of law was established which at least gave some protection from the worst excesses of the "bad old days". The Factories Acts, for example, laid the foundations of the safety legislation later brought together and expanded under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work (HSW) Act. Wages Councils were set up to provide a minimum wage for those in the most exploited industries.

More recently, particularly in the years after the second world war, welfare provision such as the National Health Service and social security was matched in the world of work by laws like the Redundancy Payments Act, Employment Protection Act and Trade Union and Labour Rights Act, all passed in the 1960s and early 1970s. These gave workers rights like maternity provision, unfair dismissal protection and standardised payment for job loss.

It was not paradise, just a reasonable basis for workers to have a chance to organise effectively around their interests at work. However, the period since the late 1970s has seen a sharp decline in this trend towards redressing the balance at work - not only in Britain but across the "advanced" industrial world - as governments have swung away from state provision and towards the unleashing of "market forces". This has not just meant the clawing back of much of the legal protection mentioned here - an issue we come back to under the heading of "Deregulation" - it has also gone alongside massive changes in the whole nature of work and of the labour market which, taken together, seem to be forcing workers across Europe back to what the GMB has called "the reincarnation of 19th-century working conditions" (GMB 1993).

From "core" to "periphery"

Over the last ten to fifteen years, the limited stability and acceptance of worker rights gained during the post-war "boom" have been ruthlessly undermined as employers have moved to a profit-driven assault on job security, pay and working conditions. Increasingly, the pattern has moved from what has been called "core" employment - stable, full-time, permanent jobs which workers can reasonably assume will continue with the same employer - to a "periphery" of part-time, temporary, casualised workers ready to move around the labour market at the bidding of the employer.

All these changed types of employment - termed by the European Community "non-standard" or "atypical" - have been on the increase in the last couple of decades. A recent Labour Research Department pamphlet shows that part-time working has increased from 18.2 per cent of all UK employees in June 1971 to 25.6 per cent in June 1991, with the growth particularly high in sectors like retailing (Labour Research Department 1992). In other areas of service work, like banking, employees have been forced to switch to part-time hours when they would have preferred to work full-time. And even traditional manufacturing work like car assembly has seen the increased introduction of workers on fixed term contracts, along with "outsourcing" of many areas of work previously carried out in-plant.

So what? you may say. Part-time or temporary working may not be good news for my pay or conditions, but it does not affect my health. But if you said that, you would be wrong. The move to an increasingly casualised workforce has three main implications for health and safety: loss of organisation at work. "Peripheral" workers are not, on the whole, unionised workers. And health and safety, as we see later on, depends crucially on effective organisation where it most matters - in the workplace. a general culture where safety, if considered at all, has a price on its head. Sir John Cullen, Chair of the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) said in 1989, after the Piper Alpha, Kings Cross and Zeebrugge ferry disasters: "the enterprise culture, the opening up of markets, and the need to survive competition place businesses under unprecedented pressure which means that increasing numbers of people - the public as well as employees - are potentially at risk." direct impact on the workers involved in terms of stress. Job insecurity, lack of control over work - even more common in "peripheral" forms of employment - and the low pay which goes along this have all been shown to contribute massively to the health and safety issue of the 1990s - stress at work.

Casual work is not easy work. Homeworking, for example, one of Britain's growing industries means long hours of intensive labour, often in unsafe conditions, at exploitative rates of pay. A recent report estimates that over a million workers, 90 per cent of them women, do paid work at home (National Group on Homeworking 1990).

It seems that the strongest motive for the move to part-time employment, side by side with the obvious saving in labour costs, is flexibility. A number of studies have shown that, particularly in the retail sector, employers are pacing their employment patterns to closely follow peaks and troughs in demand. The most common example is in the large chain stores, where part-time workers are employed on a morning and afternoon shift basis, overlapping at lunchtime when the shops are at their busiest. About a third of all retail staff are now estimated to be part-time.

Large hotel chains often gauge their demand for worker hours on the basis of seasonal factors and the time of the week. But these new patterns can also be found in the public sector, where local authorities, for example, employ between them over 800,000 part-time workers. A representative from the Local Government Management Board, which oversees the councils' terms and conditions, argued that: "We need part-timers. You need catering staff at lunch-time in schools, not all day."

This kind of approach has by now resulted in a number of cases of employers directly reducing the hours of their own workforces from full- to part-time, a trend again most common in the retail sector. At Burton's clothes shops, for example, a reorganisation of work in early 1993 led to the shedding of 2,000 full-time jobs and their replacement with about 3,000 part-time posts. Other big retailers, such as BHS and the Allied Maples Group, have now taken similar steps, followed most recently by the Sock Shop, which in January 1994 announced its decision to switch its 400 staff from full-time to 20-hour, three-day part-time contracts.

Privatisation

Homeworking is one of the most extreme forms of casualised work. But through the economies of Britain and Europe the trend towards this kind of peripheral, deregulated employment has been made worse by another kind of pressure - privatisation.

During the postwar years of relative growth and stability, governments were in the forefront of setting acceptable standards for industry and employment. Council workers, for example, have traditionally enjoyed much higher levels of health and safety control, particularly in construction, than those in the private sector. But now even this basic level of acceptance of the need for regulation has come under increasing threat from the privatisation, contracting-out and deregulation of vast swathes of the public sector leading to a deterioration in health and safety standards for workers.

British Gas, British Airways, British Telecom, Girobank, Rolls-Royce, the water authorities, the electricity industry and many others have come under the auctioneer's hammer during the 1980s and 1990s - with consequent massive pressure on jobs, pay and working conditions. Shortly after British Telecom was privatised in 1984, a damning report was issued in which BT was condemned for "barely adequate" and "deteriorating" safety standards since privatisation (Health and Safety at Work July 1987). The report showed how pressure of work, fears about job security and poor management practices had led to shortcuts and the abandonment of safety rules strictly adhered to before privatisation.

The same record is threatened in industries being "groomed for privatisation" like British Rail. A 1993 Health and Safety Commission report on British Rail privatisation has already warned of the "clear safety implications arising from government proposals for privatising the railways" - for example, through an influx of new managers who "may have limited experience of railway safety" (Hazards 1993). As one former BR senior operations manager put it, "A fragmented railway is a less safe railway".

Competitive tendering and contracting out

But, although the privatisation programme continues apace, industries do not have to be sold off wholesale for workers to experience the privatisation of their jobs with all the ensuing attacks on working conditions. Since the mid-1980s, the government has enacted a policy of compulsory competitive tendering which has pushed huge sectors of local authority and health service workers into competing with - if not being directly taken over by - the private sector.

The contracting-out process in the public sector has most recently been extended to the Civil Service, where "market testing" of the various government departments has put workers under increasing pressure. The kind of intensified working practices civil service workers are subjected to in an atmosphere of intensified competition was illustrated by the case of keyboard operator Kathleen Harris, who recently won a landmark compensation case for repetitive strain injury (RSI). Before her enforced retirement from a London tax office in summer 1993, Mrs Harris was expected to average four key strokes a second and worked a seven-and-a-half-hour day with no breaks apart from half an hour for lunch. The permanent injuries to her arm were said to be due as much to the bad working environment as to the speed of work - while her union, the IRSF, pointed out that a "growing army" of RSI sufferers, mainly low-paid women workers, is being created by the management tendency to "crack whips" in an attempt to improve productivity (Independent 20 January 1994).

Deregulation

Privatisation of jobs does not end with competitive tendering. Large areas of the public sector are also being "deregulated" or privatised in other back-door ways. London Underground (LUL), for example, while still nominally in the public sector, recently contracted out some of its track work - with fatal results. Three London Underground workers and one contractor were killed in an accident at Chorleywood in May 1990 after railway line work was done by non LUL workers for the first time.

The same pattern is echoed in the bus industry, where deregulation has led not only to slashed pay rates for bus workers but also dangerously long working hours - highlighted by the TGWU in their leaflet Is Your Driver Safe? - and massively increased driver stress. Quotes from drivers in a GLC video, made shortly after One-Person Operation (OPO) of buses was introduced, included:

"I literally used to shake like a leaf at the end of the day. OPO driving will kill someone before much longer" (ex-OPO driver) and: "Sometimes he says he needs to explode to offload the pressure. He gets this gripping feeling in his stomach" (OPO driver's wife).

In addition to deregulation in selected industries, the Health and Safety Commission is in the process of reviewing all health and safety laws with the intention of "lifting the burden of red tape" from industry. It plans to reduce the volume of health and safety law by as much as 40 per cent over a period of time (Health and Safety Commission 1994).

"Flexibility" equals "intensity" of labour

The re-organisation of employment, along lines of "freedom", labour-market deregulation and so on, has not been good news for workers. Just as basic pay and conditions have been abandoned to market forces, so has any humane concern for workers' lives and health. But, under the intense competitive pressures of today's industry, even workers in the so-called "core" sector - those with full-time and at least nominally permanent jobs - are far from immune to intensified working processes which increasingly threaten their physical and mental well-being.

Perhaps the best-known of these processes comes under the umbrella of what is ironically known as "lean production", an idea explained below.

"Eight-hour aerobics"

Earlier in this introduction, we spoke about the way in which employers are now pushing workers in and out of the labour force, into part-time, temporary and contract work, in order to suit their own need for flexible production. As one report put it, "Flexibility has become a buzz word for management...and has been referred to as 'the key concept of the 1980s'" (Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems 1986). A distinction has been made, however, between the numerical flexibility of the labour force represented in the kind of labour market changes discussed above, and what has been called functional flexibility - management-ordained changes in the organisation of work itself. Clearly, this kind of flexibility will affect even full-time workers in apparently secure jobs.

"Functional" flexibility usually contains some or all of the following elements:

abolition of clear divisions of labour or demarcation introduction of multi-skilling often without adequate training changes in pay and grading structures changes in training from a "trade" to a "task" basis extension of work from direct to indirect (e.g. line workers to carry out janitor functions).

An attempt at functional flexibility led to an industrial dispute at the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux in Spring 1994 after skilled printers were asked to take on porterage tasks for which no training had been offered. At the time of writing, the dispute was still unresolved.

Many of these management strategies foreshadowed the more complete, worked-out management techniques now being introduced under the umbrella term of "lean production". ("Japanisation" is a term which has also been used for these techniques, but can be seen as suspect because it suggests that Japanese people, not just managers, are responsible!). "Lean production" takes the principles involved in both "numerical" and "functional" flexibility further and faster - with drastic consequences for workers.

Included in this package of new management techniques are:

"just-in-time" production. This means stocks are kept to their lowest possible level, eliminating the "cushioning" provided by the traditional "just-in-case" stock buffer system. While this makes sense in engineering terms, in practice it means weak spots in the production process have to be immediately dealt with by the workers involved, putting them under intensified pressure. "constant improvement" (Japanese term - kaizen) stems from and is linked with just-in-time in that the smallest number of workers possible is assigned to each job, under very strict, "lean" methods of production. As soon as it is shown that a job can be done with this number, pressure is put on to speed up work and reduce the numbers - hence constant improvement. teamworking. This is perhaps the best known of the new techniques - and the one that seems most attractive. Instead of stringing workers out along a traditional assembly line, they're reorganised into "teams" to carry out specific group tasks, each with a "team leader". Unfortunately, instead of involving workers creatively in planning and controlling their own work organisation, "the tendency is in the opposite direction - to specify every move a worker makes in far greater detail than ever before...Workers who are brought onto the team are expected to follow detailed procedures that have been worked over and over to eliminate free time and which specify how each motion is to be carried out" (Labor Notes 1988). In fact the whole rationale of "teams" is not to give workers greater input, but to undermine the strength of union organisation in the workplace by promoting the myth that worker and management interests are all of a piece. "Team leaders" are substituted for shop stewards, and the whole "team concept" ideology promotes the notion of common goals which do not need any independent worker representation. quality circles. This is another well-known "Japanese" management approach which had workers lining up and doing early-morning exercises, then getting together into discussion groups (time unpaid) to produce ideas for improving quality. In fact quality circles have now been dropped by a lot of British firms, but the idea keeps popping up with new Japanese "inward investment" companies. "Total Quality Management" (TQM). This is perhaps one of the most loaded of these management approaches in terms of its brainwashing potential - and jargon! The idea is that every organisation is "in pursuit of excellence" (the title of an early management "guru" book on these lines) and that the "customer" comes first. Fellow-workers are also termed customers and the idea is to put their needs before yours - in other words hurry production up the line!

The implications for health and safety of this kind of intense pressure are clear. An ex-supervisor at a Nissan plant recalls, "We hired exceptionally good people, people we thought we could keep for the rest of their working lives. I ran into one of them at the pharmacy the other day. He looked like he was dead. He's lost 30 pounds, he's had a shoulder operation, and now he's taking medication for his hand. He said to me, 'I think they've got us on a four- or five-year cycle. They'll wear us out and then hire new blood.' I think he may be right."

Service work is not safe either

Of course, in talking about these new techniques for squeezing an ever-increasing amount of "hard labour" out of workers, the emphasis has mainly been on manufacturing. But, as we all know, the trend in production generally - one also reflected in the shift to part-time, temporary, casual kinds of employment as described above - is a shift away from manufacturing towards the service sector.

On the surface, this looks like good news on the health and safety front. The 1993 Health and Safety Commission Annual Report showed the number of deaths at work for 1992-3 as the lowest on record, for the third year running - and this decrease is widely attributed to the decline in heavy manufacturing industry (Health and Safety Commission 1993). What the figures do not emphasise, though, is the correspondingly greater rise in accidents and injuries to service workers. The 1991-2 Health and Safety Commission Report on Health and Safety in Service Industries provides a damning indictment of the situation in this sector with phrases like: "During the past six years the rate of over-3-day injuries has risen substantially in all main industries of the local authority sector [ie retail, hotel and catering, and leisure and recreation - industries which now come under local authority supervision on health and safety]. This appears to reflect worsening performance rather than better reporting of injuries." The report adds that "work in retail, wholesale and hotel industries has over four-fifths of the accident rate in manufacturing as a whole."

Horrific examples of fatalities and injuries given in the report for this sector include a number of cases where "rushing" and pressure of work had contributed to the accident. For example, a woman working in a warehouse was killed when boxes of goods weighing five tonnes collapsed on to her - the warehouse manager knew the boxes had not been stacked properly, but had not had time to rectify the problem.