Tag: trades’ unions

  • 50 Years On: the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act

    50 Years On: the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act

    Safety poster, c.1979, courtesy British Safety Council, showing a judge pointing his finger at employers.
    Safety poster, c.1979, courtesy British Safety Council.

    Love it or hate it, you can’t escape it: the Health and Safety at Work Act has been an important part of UK working life (and wider) for 50 years.

    To mark its 50th anniversary, a day-long symposium was held in London on 25 November 2024: Health & Safety at Work Act – 50 years on: still fit for purpose?

    It was hosted by the Trade Union & Employment Forum of History & Policy, and brought together practitioners, trades unionists and academics – including the University of Portsmouth History team’s Dr Mike Esbester.  Mike’s research focuses on histories of safety, risk and accident prevention in modern Britain. Some of that has looked at the changing landscape of health and safety at work and beyond since 1960 – including the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. The change of law was much needed; in the 1960s and early 1970s, UK workplaces were still killing and injuring large number of people. Their impacts were felt beyond the factory walls, too, as workplace incidents affected more than ‘just’ employees.

    The principles underlying the Act had both radical and conservative elements. They extended the duty of care far beyond the boundaries of the workplace. At the same time, they modelled older ideas about who was able to prevent harm. Mike brought these tensions and contradictions out in his presentation to the symposium, which gave a long-term historical overview of the Act’s originals.  He’s explored some of these aspects in this piece for The Conversation. This piece, written for History & Policy at the 40th anniversary of the Act, is also still relevant today. All of this work draws upon Mike’s research, including the ‘Changing Legitimacy of Health and Safety at Work’ project, funded by the Institution of Occupational Safety & Health.

    The symposium brought together different approaches, from the historical to the present day, the philosophical to the practical. It wrestled with the question of how far the 1974 Act has kept pace with the world around it, and whether or not it might be time for a new means of approaching health and safety in the UK.

     

  • Accidental dismemberment on the railways

    Accidental dismemberment on the railways

    Our own Dr Mike Esbester is co-lead of the Railway Work, Life & Death project at the National Railway Museum.  This post from the project, written by co-lead Karen Baker, looks at the work of one of the project’s placement students, Connor Scott, who used the dataset to interrogate just how dangerous it was to work on the railways, with 23,000 accidents investigated by state inspectors between 1900 and 1939, including 504 deaths.

    The data show that shunting accidents were particularly common, and the blog details how this has led to new displays at the museum to illustrate this for visitors. Another display shows a prosthetic leg made by the railway companies for use by a worker who lost his leg in a shunting accident.  The fact that it was thought necessary to design a replacement leg, suggests there was a regular need: the dataset indicates 806 workers lost a body part(s) and 150 of these were shunters.

    Artificial Leg. Source: The Wellcome Collection.
    Artificial Leg. Source: The Wellcome Collection.

    The project also worked collaboratively with colleagues at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick who were able to digitise their trades’ union accident records and share them with the NRM volunteers.  These records show the human impact of accidents, the financial help received by wives and children from trades’ union funds, which provided an income when husbands/fathers were no longer able to work. This information will help contextualise and add human stories to objects in the collection, such as Laddie the Railway Collecting Dog, previously on display as an oddity, with no explanation of why he was important.

    LSWR Collecting Dog 'Laddie'. Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

    LSWR Collecting Dog ‘Laddie’. Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum 

    The University of Portsmouth is supporting a new PhD project looking at railway worker accidents and their wider impacts on those affected. The student will be drawing upon the RWLD dataset and the collections at the NRM and other institutions like the MRC.