International health and safety standards after Brexit

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/instemplrighj.4.0.0085
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Pages: 85-117
• Author: Andrew Moretta,David Whyte,Rory O'Neill

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International health and safety standards after Brexit

International health and safety standards

after Brexit

Andrew Moretta and David Whyte

Preface

ILO rules

All is not well in Britain’s workplaces. The classic occupational diseases caused

by chemicals and dust refuse to die and are now being complemented by the

maladies of the 21st Century workplace – heart disease, suicide, and work-

related depression and despair.

This is neither speculation nor scaremongering. Asbestos deaths are at an all-

time high,1 silicosis ruins or ends thousands of lives each year2 and occupational

asthma afflicts unchecked new generations of wheezy workers. At the same

time work-related stress, anxiety, and depression are at a record high.3 This

old and new health-robbing double dose is no accident. UK workers are vul-

nerable by design, increasingly overloaded and under-protected at work.

The lines between work and home life have blurred too, as technology gives

employers a wireless route directly into our homes, day and night. Shiftwork,

linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and all round poorer health, is now

the ‘daily’ routine for many. The result is that UK working hours are among

the highest in Europe. Burnout is now a World Health Organisation (WHO)

recognised and classified ‘occupational phenomenon’.4 We are a generation

of working wounded, frequently too poor or too worried to go sick.

At a time when the UK has a record numbers of workers and workplaces to

police, the Health and Safety Executive – the UK’s safety regulator – is run-

ning on empty, barely visible at work and increasingly absent from the courts.

Andrew Moretta and David Whyte show that far from being protected, an

erosion of employment rights combined with a retreat from official over-

sight of workplace health and safety conditions have left more UK workers

vulnerable to abuse at work and lacking both support and an effective safety

net. It is, they observe, a time when the future of all labour rights in the UK

is ‘uncertain.’

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In a global economy, UK safety outcomes can be determined in the board-

rooms of multinational companies or fashioned to suit global trade lobby

groups. This means national standards must be only one part of a responsible

government’s essential regulatory armoury.

Consider this. The chemical industry is set to double in size by 2030, accord-

ing to the UN.5 It is an upward trend expected to continue for decades.

Companies and their uber-rich owners frequently have more economic

power than the majority of countries where they do business. The online

retailer Amazon, valued at about US$1 trillion, is worth more than the GDP of

90% of the world’s nations. The personal wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, at

about US$100 billion, would put him at number 65 in the list of richest coun-

tries if he was a nation and not the world’s richest shopkeeper.

It is a system that can elevate money over morality. The organisation govern-

ing world trade, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), does not have

protection of workers’ rights, welfare or the environment as part of its core

operational priorities. In fact, WTO has been used to challenge protective

legislation as a barrier to free trade.

There is, however, a well-established global body capable of checking labour

rights and safety abuses, and which is cited in international trade negotia-

tions. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN agency, celebrated

its centenary in 2019.

As Moretta and Whyte note, the UK was a driving force in the creation of the

ILO. However, this heralded and influential role has long since waned. As this

report reveals, the UK has ratified fewer than 1-in-5 of the ILO’s up-to-date

health and safety instruments, putting it below almost all European Union

and OECD nations and on a par with Libya, Mozambique, and Saudi Arabia.

The absentees from the list of UK ratifications are not irrelevant instru-

ments on esoteric or archaic issues. They include almost all of the safety

key Conventions, including the main occupational health and safety instru-

ment, Convention 155, and the Occupational Health Services Convention,

Convention 161. Other absentees, known by heart and by number by inter-

national trade union reps because they are cited so frequently, include

Conventions 162 (asbestos), 139 (occupational cancer), 170 (chemicals),

and 174 (major industrial accidents).

The need for global baseline safety standards has never been more acute.

Cost-cutting decisions made in the London boardroom of BP were major con-

tributory factors in the deaths of 15 contract workers in the Texas City refinery

International health and safety standards after Brexit

87

fire in 2005 and 11 in the 2011 Deepwater Horizon oil rig tragedy in the Gulf

of Mexico. As the gold price soars, companies including London-based Anglo

American are cashing in as some of their workforce in Southern Africa die in

poverty from dust-caused silicosis and tuberculosis.

When the UK fails to ratify ILO safety Conventions, it sends a signal worldwide

that safety beyond its immediate doorstep doesn’t matter, even though the

UK coffers and the country’s most prestigious companies benefit hugely from

income earned in other nations and produced by the labour of their nation-

als. In many countries, ILO Conventions are the de facto safety laws, agreed

globally and guaranteeing core rights and are, as Moretta and Whyte observe,

‘the thread which links all of the regional international rights regimes’.

If the UK thinks these ILO safety instruments are not worth ratifying, why

should a developing nation step up? Eschewing globally accepted controls

sends that clear and clearly dangerous message. It is a point not lost on the

European Commission which, as Moretta and Whyte point out, indicated in a

February 2020 draft negotiating mandate that any post-Brexit trade deal with

the UK should include adherence to ‘Conventions of the ILO’.

It is significant that unions and safety advocates are finding creative ways to

ensure decent and safe standards are observed internationally. Unions have,

for example negotiated binding labour safeguards in the procurement con-

tracts of multilateral development banks and World Bank projects, including

stringent occupational health and safety stipulations, sometimes including

explicit references to ILO Conventions.

The ILO model is also embraced in ‘Global Framework Agreements’ struck

between multinational companies and global unions. The agreement signed

in 2017 between the UK-based global online fashion retailer ASOS and the

global union federation IndustriALL, for example, requires both sides ‘to col-

laborate to ensure the application of International Labour Organisation

standards’6 throughout the ASOS supply chain. It makes explicit reference to

several ILO health and safety Conventions and recommendations.

If the UK wants to emulate the economic success of countries like Sweden,

Norway, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands it would do well to note the

observation in this publication that these countries are far more enthusiastic

ratifiers of ILO safety Conventions. You can’t have a first class economy if you

choose to play by third rate rules.

But we shouldn’t have to argue a business case. We shouldn’t have to put a

case against a system where the law allows workers to be used, abused then