Health & safety

Workers' organisation key to safety at sea

The causes of the tragic capsizing of the cruise liner Costa Concordia will hopefully soon be found. But seafarers and their unions around the world have been warning about the safety standards on board ships for years. By those accounts ships at greatest risk are those that sail under a "flag of convenience" (the practice of registering a merchant ship in a sovereign state different from that of the ship's owners). This avoids complying with the more stringent safety and training regulations imposed on ships registered in more economically developed countries. However as Andrew Linington of...

The greed for profit

The four workers killed at Gleison Colliery in the Swansea Valley worked at a small “drift” mine, one of very few left in Wales. It appears that blasting at the mine caused catastrophic flooding and a roof fall, trapping those working nearest the coal face. Most of us thought this kind of story was in the Britain of the past. It is not, and it is one of our jobs as socialists and trade unionists to remind people of the toll of injuries and death in workplaces today. 171 workers died in workplace accidents in the period from May 2010 to April 2011. The figure was up on the previous year . On...

France: bosses bully workers to death

It sounds so fantastically morbid you would be forgiven for thinking we have made it up. But the statistics show that job insecurity and bullying at work are leading increasing numbers of French workers to take their own lives. Twenty-four workers at France Telecom have killed themselves since the beginning of 2008. That’s a lot, but, as a recent article in the Economist shows it is in fact in line with the national average (14.6 suicides per 100,000 people). The Economist — which usually gives the bosses the benefit of the doubt —poses an important question: how is it that France, with its...

Snowed in and frozen out

The heavy snowfall at the beginning of February prevented many people from attending work. While a few employers did the decent thing and paid them anyway, many workers have found themselves losing pay or leave. The small minority included Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust and Croydon Council, which not only paid staff who could not attend, but gave staff who did make it to work an extra day’s leave entitlement to thank them! Union reps in other workplaces should demand that their employers do the same. Some other employers allowed staff to work from home, or at locations other than their normal...

Tube bosses’ attacks slowed but not stopped

Unions have slowed London Underground’s drive to casualise its workforce -but by avoiding mistakes, they could have stopped it. For the first time, TSSA was willing to join RMT in holding a strike ballot, and the unions were united in their demands and strategies. And RMT took the right step in calling an all-grades strike ballot. Members of the two unions voted 81% and 83% respectively for strikes; the Executives called a 72-hour strike. The pressure forced the employer to abandon “mobile supervision” of stations, to withdraw a new, weaker procedure for workers refusing to work on safety...

Defend Gyles Henry

London Underground has sacked a worker at London Bridge over an alleged incident with a customer. But the company’s only “evidence” against Gyles is the say-so of a different customer who admitted there was no violence involved, but speculated that there might have been! RMT is balloting members for industrial action. Vote Yes! More: www.workersliberty.org/tube.

Smoking ban: New Labour doesn’t care about workers' health!

By Sofie Buckland Sunday 1 July saw the introduction of the controversial “smoking ban”, outlawing smoking in “enclosed public spaces” (train station platforms as well as buildings, for example) and workplaces. As a smoker it’s a little irritating to no longer be able to enjoy a smoke with a pint, but there’s little justification socialists can give for not supporting a ban — passive smoking is really quite obviously harmful, whatever the tobacco company sponsored research might say, and workers shouldn’t be subject to it on the job. The “liberal” left view, characterised by Christopher...

The Best Cure For Sickness = Work!

Oh yes it is! At least according to a leaflet sponsored by TfL.

Medicine? Rest? Recovery? Pah - they're for wimps! A hard day's graft is what you sickly types need.

The leaflet encourages us to reject common 'myths' about ill-health including such fictions as: illness can be cured by medical...

Sign to Save Section 12

Please sign this petition against the government's attempts to weaken fire safety standards in underground railway stations.

As petition creator - RMT activist Kebba Jobe - explains, "Following the 1987 Kings Cross Fire which claimed the lives of 31 people the Fire Precautions (Sub Surface Railways...

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