This year’s Annual General Meeting of Blackburn and District Trades Union Council showed that the structural problems which threatened the organisation’s survival in 2022 are far from resolved.
There is insufficient active Branch participation. We rely too heavily on retired members to fulfil administrative positions. Once again, questions have been raised as to whether we have a future.
Paul Morley (UNITE), our Secretary for 2023-24 was unable to continue in the role, so Ian Gallagher (PCS) agreed to “hold the fort” as Secretary at least until a decision had been made on the way forward. It was agreed to defer this until after the impending General Election, so that local Branches would then have a clearer view of the context.
Bob Welham (GMB) continues to serve as President and Pater Dales (UNISON) as Treasurer. The Vice-Presidents for 2024-25 will be John Murphy (UCU) and Vikki Dugdale (UNISON). We thank Paul Morley (UNITE) and John Southwell (CWU) for their service over the previous year as Secretary and Vice-President respectively.
In addition to the material on the Royal Mail, covered in a previous post, the Trades Council has responded to a Government consultation on re-introducing fees in the Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal system.
The level of fees proposed is considerably less than that ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court in 2017, and it would be within most Unions’ ability to stump up when supporting members.
There is, nevertheless, a plausible case for believing that re-introduction of fees will still have a chilling effect, particular on those worst off and with little support structure. Our response presents this argument.
48 organisations and campaigners including the TUC, Citizens Advice, Maternity Action, Women’s Budget Group, Liberty, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Fawcett Society have sent the government a joint letter urging it to drop the plan. Hopefully we will have added to this campaign.
The week after the AGM we held our public meeting in the Library on “Decent Work” – we will publish a separate report on this.
Shortly after that we held our annual commemoration event for International Workers Memorial day, at the Memorial Tree at Sudell Cross. We were pleased to be joined this year by Janet Newsham of the Manchester Hazards Centre.
According to the Health and Safety Executive, 135 workers were killed in work-related accidents in 2022/23, while 561,000 workers sustained a self-reported non-fatal injury in the workplace during the same period. These statistics are not comprehensive. They do not, for instance, cover work-related suicides. 1.8 million workers reported they were suffering from work-related ill health in 2022/23, with approximately half of the cases down to stress, depression or anxiety.
According to Hazards magazine in 2023 the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has seen its base budget drop by over 40 per cent since 2010, before you even consider the impact of inflation.
HSE’s ‘all inspectors’ count fell from 1,651 in 2010 to 974 in 2023, mirroring the funding cut. Inspections and investigations have become vanishingly rare, with the figures from HSE’s 2022/23 annual report indicating the average workplace enforced by HSE might expect a visit less than once every 50 years.
For the last two years, TUC has had its influence with the HSE reduced. For the first time in HSE’s near 50-year history there has been no TUC representative serving on the HSE board, and the total union presence has been reduced from three to two seats on the 11-member body. The available detail on HSE business has been severely curtailed.
In April 2023, HSE inspectors’ union, Prospect, warned that almost 400 ‘mandatory’ inspections were cancelled last year because of insufficient resources
Internationally the United Nations Global Compact estimate for work-related deaths is staggering. It believes 2.78 million workers die from occupational accidents and work-related diseases each year, while an additional 374 million workers suffer from non-fatal occupational accidents. This means 7,500 people die from unsafe and unhealthy working conditions every single day.