"A union recognition campaign at local bus company Mitcham Belle led to a tip off from inside the depot that health and safety concerns of staff were being ignored. RMT drivers blew the whistle and Battersea and Wandsworth TUC swung into action."
says Geoff Martin"We had already taken the decision that wherever possible we would try and get our own roving health and safety inspectors into workplaces that didn't recognise unions and to use this tool as part of the organising campaign.
Of course, with no legal right to access, it's not always that easy and at one site, Worlds End Waste, where a guy had been crushed to death, our roving inspectors were given short shrift.
But at 5am one morning, armed with a clipboard and kitted out with steels and hi-viz, we went into Mitcham Belle, told the manger who we were and what we were doing and off we went.
Our dawn safety audit was written up into a formal report and was fired off to the HSE. They responded swiftly and within a matter of days they had carried out a statutory visit, backed up most of our points of concern and had issued improvement notices.
Not surprisingly, the staff were cock a hoop and part of the fallout is that Mitcham Belle have sold out to a company that recognises unions.
Apart from anything else we have proved that roving health and safety inspectors can work and can provide positive leads for the HSE to follow up. The current absence of a law giving statutory rights to roving union safety reps simply means that companies that refuse to recognise unions can effectively exempt themselves from health and safety law. That's a nonsense and we need to do more to force the issue."