Worker representation and psycho-social risks: a problematic relationship?
David Walters a, *
a
Cardiff University, Cardiff Work Environment Research Centre, 59 Park Place, ,
Cardiff CF10 3WT, Wales UK. Email: waltersd@Cardiff.ac.uk
*
Corresponding author: Tel: +0044 (0) 2920870013.
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Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between worker representation and the prevention
and control of psycho-social risks at work. It argues that to understand this relationship it
is helpful to position it within the labour relations context in which it occurs and which
helps explain the strengths and limitations of interventions involving worker
representation.
The paper opens with some important questions of definition with regard to psycho-social
risks and worker representation and consultation on health and safety. It goes on to
review the evidence for the success or otherwise of worker representation in health and
safety generally and discusses this evidence in relation to the control of psycho-social
risks specifically. It discusses the problems that the restructuring of work pose for the
sustainability of the pre-conditions for the effectiveness of the statutory model on which
worker representation on psycho-social risk is predicated. In so doing the paper notes that
many of the features of current restructuring of work that present problems for traditional
model of worker representation are the same ones that lead to the increased prevalence of
psycho-social risks at the workplace.
The paper identifies both barriers and opportunities presented by the changing world of
work for achieving an improved preventive scenario for psycho-social risks and discusses
the implications of these for current and future strategies of trade unions. It concludes
that in the present political and economic climate the state cannot be relied upon for
effective regulatory strategies on the psycho-social risks of work. In the absence, or much
reduced presence, of this support, some joined up thinking on the part of organised labour
is required. Interventions by health and safety representatives on psycho-social risks at
the workplace level need to be fully integrated in such thinking if they are to be effective.
Keywords:
Worker representation, psycho-social risks, health and safety
Introduction
This paper explores the relationship between worker representation and psycho-social
risks at work. Its aim is to examine the evidence for the role of health and safety
representatives in preventing or ameliorating what is widely accepted to be one of the
more significant health issues in modern working practices. To do this meaningfully
requires positioning the relationship within a broader framework of understanding,
concerning both the nature of psycho-social risks at work, how they arise and the factors
that appear to contribute to their increased significance; and an appreciation of the role of
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worker representation, its meaning and the contexts in which it is able to operate
effectively. This in turn means a further understanding of the labour relations involved,
and the pre-conditions necessary for effective representation and consultation. An
examination of these issues will inevitably lead to some contemplation of the impact of
changes that have taken place (and continue to take place) in the structure and
organisation of work, business orientation and the political economic and regulatory
frameworks within which they are located.
This approach allows the development of a clearer socio-economic understanding of the
strengths and limitations of interventions involving worker representation in dealing with
psycho-social risks at work, which allows better understanding of the likely effectiveness
of current and future strategies of both organised labour and the state to support this role.
To achieve these aims, the paper begins with some questions of definition with regard to
worker representation and consultation in health and safety, before briefly considering the
evidence for its impact and reviewing the pre-conditions necessary for its effectiveness. It
describes the nature of psycho-social risk at work and considers some of the features of
the changing world of work that contribute to its current profile. It also considers the
impact of features of change on the preconditions for the effectiveness of worker
representation in health and safety and their consequences. It identifies both the barriers
and opportunities presented by the changing world of work for achieving an improved
preventive scenario for psycho-social risks and it discusses the implications for present
and future strategies of trade unions and the state.
1. Worker representation and consultation: a question of definition?
It is important to be clear about what is meant by worker representation and
consultations. Difficulties arise because terms such as ‘consultation’ and ‘participation’
have come to cover a range of different practices, often with different expectations,
supports and constraints influencing their outcomes. Clarity in these respects is especially
important in the case of psycho-social risks, because of the relationship between their
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organisational causes and the strategies advocated to address them. Two important sets of
distinctions need to be made. Firstly, whether managers relate to workers on an
individual basis or whether they do so through their collective representatives; and
secondly, whether workers are passive recipients of information about the practice of
health and safety management or have some chance to influence the direction of the
outcomes of such engagement. Often, managerial strategies on psycho-social risk focus
on the individual and require little more than passive co-operation in their
implementation, while the approach of organised labour attempts to promote more
collective responses to organisational problems.
So it is with the second that we are concerned here and more specifically, with the form
of worker representation on health and safety, widely adopted in many countries, in
which statutory measures require arrangements to be made within workplaces for
representation and consultation of workers’ on health and safety. The essence of the
argument advanced in the paper is that while it has some specific features of its own,
worker representation on psycho-social risks mostly operates through these arrangements.
Representative participation: Collective representation of workers’ interests in health
and safety is made possible through formal arrangements, by statutory or voluntary
means. They generally provide for legal rights for worker representation through:
 Selection of representatives in health and safety by employees.
 Protection of representatives from victimisation or discrimination as a result of their
representative role.
 Paid time off to be allowed to carry out the function of safety representative.
 Paid time off to be trained in order to function as a safety representative.
 The right to receive adequate information from the employer on current and future
hazards to the health and safety of workers at the workplace.
 The right to inspect the workplace.
 The right to investigate complaints from workers on health and safety matters.
 The right to make representations to the employer on these matters.
 The right to be consulted over health and safety arrangements, including future plans.
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 The right to be consulted about the use of specialists in health and safety by the
employer.
 The right to accompany health and safety authority inspectors when they inspect the
workplace and to make complaints to them when necessary.
Consultation: The key term embracing activities identified in the legal rights of worker
health and safety representatives to undertake inspections, investigate complaints and to
receive training under legislation requirements in many countries, is ‘consultation’.
Provisions also often require employers to consult employees ‘in good time on matters
relating to their health and safety’. Such requirements carry an implication that
employers should provide adequate information, listen to what workers and their
representatives themselves have to say on health and safety issues and respond.
The significance of definition in relation to representation on psychosocial risks: How
we understand the nature of the processes involved in representation and consultation on
psycho-social risks is especially important because of the nature of the risk itself. Many
of the processes that create psycho-social risks are structural and organisational in origin.
In some senses they would seem especially appropriate subjects on which representation
of workers’ interests are important — regardless of whether such representation occurs
on managerialist or pluralist lines — and where ensuring the application of the legal
definition of consultation ‘in good time’ would also seem particularly significant.
However, this is far from always the case in practice.
There are several reasons for this. Psycho-social risks are not easy to link directly to
traditional understandings of what constitutes a risk to ‘health and safety’. Indeed they
are often the consequences of managerial decisions relating to staffing, to restructuring,
to changed production schedules or responses to buyer price and delivery demands, that
occur at locations quite remote from the situation in which the psycho-social risk is
experienced and the resulting harm suffered, as well as from the sphere of influence of
the health and safety representative.
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The nature of what is understood as appropriate and legitimate representation and
consultation in these matters may also be quite different from that accepted to be
necessary and legitimate for more traditional health and safety risks that occur as the
result of more immediate work environment decisions. Indeed, the nature of the risk itself
may be perceived as not being within the remit of the health and safety representative and
not as a ‘risk’ at all in that sense but as an industrial relations or work organisational
matter that falls within the bailiwick of the more general worker representative or, if it’s a
major issue, a matter for the intervention of an external union official, neither of which
may understand the health implications of the matter in question.
There are then, major differences in understandings between what is perceived to be
‘individual’ and what is ‘collective’ about psycho-social risks and appropriate actions to
prevent or ameliorate harm that might arise from them. These have implications for what
is considered ‘appropriate for representation’ and what is regarded as a matter for
individual action that in turn, may affect the extent of engagement of worker
representation with the issue. These matters, in turn, link to the balance between
representative and so called ‘direct’ participation, to which we will return later.
2. What works in worker representation and what supports it?
There are essentially two kinds of evidence for the effectiveness of workplace
representation and consultation in health and safety at work. We are primarily concerned
with one of them — the evidence of the success or otherwise of institutional
arrangements to effect workplace representation and consultation of workers on health
and safety matters. But it is clear that it is also impossible to ignore the role of organised
labour more generally in the representation of workers interests in health and safety and
this is particularly so when the organisational causes of psycho-social risks are borne in
mind. Because of the centrality of the structural and organisation changes associated with
psycho-social risk in modern work, its potential victims are as much in need of support
from representation from trades unions at this level as they are in need of support from
institutions for worker representation in health and safety at the workplace level. In this
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respect it is important to acknowledge the substantial claims trades unions can make for
their effectiveness. For example, older US studies on trade union involvement in
programmes to reduce or prevent occupational stress indicate that ‘labour unions have
undertaken a variety of activities to reduce or prevent the health hazards associated with
occupational stress’ (Landsbergis 2003, Landsbergis and Cahill, 1994).
More widely, efforts to redress workers’ health and safety directly through collective
action are an aspect of the institutional mechanisms of industrial relations in which trade
unions are actively engaged in most countries. Again this wider industrial relations
practice is obviously relevant to prevention and amelioration of psycho-social risks. For
example, a study by the European Foundation (2001) found that in several countries,
stress appeared as an issue in collective bargaining agreements (notably Belgium,
Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK) where the aim of the trade unions was
to achieve agreed provisions on stress prevention or to take indirect action on psychosocial risk factors by introducing provisions on relevant aspects of work organisation
(such as workload and intensity of work, breaks and rest areas).
The practice of representing workers’ interests through political lobbying for
improvements to health and safety regulation and its enforcement as well as for
improvements to other laws that affect health and safety is another aspect of trade union
engagement with psycho-social risk. Trade unions interest has focused on lobbying to
modify legislation, where a recurring demand has been to include stress or mental illness
in the list of recognised occupational illnesses, which would thus recognise the right of
the employees affected to sick leave and medical services — such as proposed in France,
Norway and Portugal, or to provide competent services to treat and prevent stress as
proposed in Austria (EF, 2001). In Norway, the Confederation of Trade Unions
(Landsorganisasjonen i Norge, LO) has sought reforms of legislation to include the
relationship between work organisation and psycho-social risks and to give safety
representatives powers to stop the work when the mental health of the workers was
endangered.
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More generally, the most significant developments in recent years have been in softer
approaches at both national and European levels, such as the HSE’s stress management
standards and the European framework agreement between unions and employers on
work related stress.1
However, our main concern is with evidence of the success or otherwise the various
forms of institutional arrangements to, more directly, effect representation and
consultation of workers on health and safety matters in workplaces. In most countries this
means evidence of the effectiveness of worker safety representatives and joint health and
safety committees.
Evidence for the effectiveness of workplace arrangements: To be clear from the outset,
beyond accounts of the individual interventions, there is little in the way of robust
research that has produced direct evidence of the effectiveness of worker representation
specifically in preventing or controlling psycho-social risks. There is however, a body of
evidence pointing to its effectiveness in addressing other workplace risks and their
management. What this wider evidence suggests is that the presence and process of
representation makes an effective contribution to prevention. The reasonable assumption
therefore is that such presence and process will have a similar effect when applied to
psycho-social risks.
Most research has concerned itself with evidence from a variety of proxy indicators of the
success of institutional arrangements. Several recently published reviews demonstrate
that the large majority of these studies indicate that participatory workplace arrangements
are associated with improved OHS management practices, which, in turn, might be
expected to lead to improved OHS performance (see for example, Walters 2006, Walters
and Nichols 2007).
1
See for example http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/ and
http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/news/2004/oct/stress_agreement_en.pdf
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Other studies attempt to establish a more direct relationship between the role of worker
representation and indicators of improved health and safety performance such as injury or
illness rates. Their results are not entirely in agreement concerning the beneficial effects
of representation. In the US, for example, Cooke and Gautschi (1981) found that joint
management-union safety programmes reduced days lost and that such plant-specific
arrangements were more effective than external regulation, though only amongst larger
companies, but another American study reported more or less the opposite (Kochan et al.,
1977: 72). Early research by Boden et al. (1984) also found that there was no general
discernable effect of joint health and safety committees on the level of hazard in the plant
(as judged by inspectors’ citations). While more recently, a study of US OHS
committees conducted in public sector workplaces in New Jersey found that ‘committees
with more involvement of non-management members, … are associated with fewer
reported and perhaps fewer actual illnesses and injuries’ (Eaton and Nocerino, 2000:
288-89). A range of Canadian studies lend support to these latter findings, Havlovic and
McShane (1997), Lewchuck et al. (1996), Shannon et al. (1996), Shannon et al. (1997)
and a later extensive review of the Canadian literature pointed to ‘a correlation between
unionisation and the effectiveness of the internal responsibility system’ (O’ Grady, 2000:
191).
Exceptionally in the UK, it has been possible to undertake multivariate regression
analyses of the relationship between various workplace employment relations structures
such as the presence of trades unions, safety representatives and safety committees and
incidence of injury and ill-health, by using data collected in the Workplace Industrial
Relations (later Workplace Employment Relations Surveys 1990 -2004). What can be
achieved with these methods is somewhat constrained by the range and quality of
available data and until recently, British studies using the WIRS/WERS data also failed
to establish a consistent, statistically significant relationship between trade union
representation and low industrial injuries (Davies and Elias, 2000: 28). Such lack of
consistency prompted Walters and Nichols (see Nichols et al., 2007; Walters and
Nichols, 2007: 30-40) to conduct a re-analysis of WIRS data as part of their larger study
to investigate the effectiveness of health and safety representatives (Walters et al., 2005),
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in which they sought to improve technically on previous multiple regression analyses.2
Their results indicate with a fair degree of robustness, that, as judged by manufacturing
injury rates, it is significantly better to have health and safety committees with at least
some members selected by trade unions than to have such committees with no members
selected by trade unions, and that the presence of health and safety representatives also
has a beneficial effect, which suggests overall that there is a mediated trade union effect
on safety.
But what makes worker representation effective? A strong correlation between the
nature and level of activities in which trade union safety representatives engaged and
their experience of training has been shown (Raulier and Walters, 1995; Walters, 1996;
Walters et al., 2001; Walters and Kirby, 2003). But there are other important supports for
their activities too. In early studies Walters (1987) and Walters and Gourlay (1990)
showed the importance of management commitment to participative arrangements for
health and safety in supporting the actions of safety representatives, as well as the role of
industrial relations factors such as trade union workplace organisation.
In their more recent study of arrangements for representation and consultation on health
and safety in the UK, as well as an extensive review of the international research
literature and the econometric modelling referred to in the previous section, Walters and
Nichols (2007) also undertook ten case studies to examine the detailed practices of
worker representation and the factors that supported and constrained them (see also
Nichols et al., 2007; Walters et al., 2005; Walters and Nichols, 2006). From this, they
were able to identify a set of preconditions necessary for effective worker representation
and consultation on health and safety. They included:
-
A legislative steer
2
Briefly, as compared to Reilly et al. (1995), they reduced the large number of regional and industry dummies to make
a more robust model; reduced the number of independent variables, some of which rested on fine and unclear
distinctions; used a Poisson count method instead of a Cox zero corrected method (which entailed adding a bit to the
many zero observations); and tested for endogeneity and interaction effects.
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-
Demonstrable senior management commitment to both OHS and a participative
approach and sufficient capacity to adopt and support participative OHS management
-
Competent management of hazard/risk evaluation and control by both managers and
representatives
-
Autonomous worker representation at the workplace and external trade union support
leading to informed and well-trained worker representatives
-
Consultation and communication between worker representatives and their
constituencies
Where combinations of these preconditions were found, worker representation and
consultation made a significant contribution to improved health and safety arrangements,
awareness and performance, thus confirming observations reported in earlier studies.
In cases where there were clearly representational and consultative practices taking place
on health and safety issues that were working to the satisfaction of the health and safety
representatives and workers, arrangements to facilitate consultation included:

properly constituted joint health and safety committees at site and departmental level

accountability of managers to the joint health and safety committee

engagement of health and safety representatives with the health and safety
practitioners from the safety health and environment departments,

dialogue with local area and line managers within the establishment and health and
safety representatives

the provision of facility time to undertake health and safety representative functions
such as joint health and safety inspections, investigations of workers complaints,
making representations to managers and so on,

involvement of health and safety representatives in risk assessment

involvement of health and safety representatives in reporting and monitoring on OHS

access to workers

access to training for health and safety representatives
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When psycho-social risks are involved, and appreciated as such, effective engagement of
health and safety representatives in their resolution takes place through one or more of
the above processes, as it does in relation to other risks, as illustrated in the next section.
3. How does worker representation address psycho-social risks?
In 2001 the European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions, stimulated by
survey findings indicating high levels of work-related stress in Europe undertook a study
on work-related stress and industrial relations in Europe (EF, 2001). It confirmed that
provision of information and advice, publications, training and campaigns were the main
actions by the trade unions in relation to supporting representation on workplace stress. It
found them to be an important means of training workers who have traditionally
concentrated on physical and chemical risks and it detected a common practice in the
introduction of specific modules on psycho-social risks in the training courses for safety
representatives.
Most cases of successful involvement of worker representation in the management of
psychosocial risks reported in the literature describe a model of prevention in which
health and safety representatives address psycho-social risks by including them in their
approach to risk assessment. A number of trades unions have published accounts of
successful interventions to address psycho-social risk. In 2002, a special issue of the
TUTB Newsletter devoted to trade union action on stress gave an indication of the range
of trade union involvement in stress prevention including quanitative and qualitative
surveys identifying stressful work, information dissemination, counselling services,
campaigns training activities and the development of guides and training materials of
psycho-social risks (Koukoulaki, 2002). At the same time the review noted that very few
trade unions took a holistic approach to stress prevention; most focused on psychological
harassment or workload in line with their national legislative provisions on prevention. In
a more recent symposium on workers’ participation in risk assessment organised by the
ETUI (2009) several examples were presented of trade union supported initiatives for
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psycho-social risk assessment developed by trade union researchers in Spain, and other
countries including the UK, Italy, Belgium and Germany.
There are signs in this more recent material that unions are beginning to address psychosocial risk more holistically. In the UK for instance, some trades unions, such as
Prospect, have produced material on organizational change and psycho-social risks which
presents numerous examples of how worker representatives and their trade unions have
tried to address the problem (Prospect, 2009).
While these examples provide a wealth of detailed anecdotal material to support the
thesis that worker representation can make a significant contribution to preventing or
ameliorating the psycho-social causes of harm to workers, they do not, in the main,
present robust evaluative research. They also tell us precious little about questions of the
sustainability of this form of involvement, what are the preconditions necessary to
achieve it, the parameters within which it is allowed to function or what is its place
within the realities of economic restructuring and business reorientation that dominate the
modern world of work. It is these wider issues that will ultimately determine the extent of
the role of worker representation in health and safety and its impact on improving work
environment — whatever the particular nature of the risk in question. It is therefore
important to examine the construction of worker representation within these contexts if
the potential represented by the cases of good practice are to be understood meaningfully.
4. The impact of restructuring
While research has demonstrated that trade union organisation provides an important
support for the effective worker representation on health and safety – both in terms of
controlling the effects of psycho-social risks and more generally — it is equally wellestablished that membership and influence of trades unions has declined apace with
change in the structure and organisation of work and the labour market. Aside from the
loss of membership caused by decline in the presence of industries in which trades unions
were strong and the parallel rise in employment in those in which they have a weaker
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presence and where they find it difficult to organise, other changes that characterise the
new economy pose major challenges for trade union organisation as well as for worker
representatives, that apply even in the situations in which unions have managed to either
retain or gain a foothold. The most significant of these changes include repeated rounds
of restructuring/downsizing by large private and public sector employers and their
consequent effects on work intensity via changes to staffing levels/workloads, multitasking, increased hours of work/presenteeism and unpaid overtime. There has been
decline in the proportion of the workforce in full-time permanent employment (especially
for males) and increased part-time, temporary, fixed term and leased (agency) work,
elaborate national/international supply chains and growing use of (multi-tiered)
subcontractors and agency workers as well as in the blurring of boundaries between work
and home life (Lewchuck et al., 2009). Outsourcing in the public sector usually results in
privatisation (although privatisation may occur independently of this) and increased use
of outsourcing/subcontracting and franchising (essentially a structured form of internal
subcontracting) has led to growth of self-employment, in micro businesses and in the
number of small business employers. Subcontracting/franchising as well as use of IT has
facilitated the growth (sometimes re-emergence) of home-based work, remote, transient
(such as short term call centres) and telework.
All these developments contribute in one way or another to limitations on access and
coverage for worker health and safety representatives. In all cases, the restructuring and
reorganisation of business and economic activities help to erode the legal nexus
represented by the contract of employment and its structures of employment relations,
including the arrangements for worker representation on health and safety. They also
mean that much of the externalisation of work activities has gone to smaller
organisations, which possess fewer arrangements for worker representation and less
adequate and sophisticated systems of risk management than their larger counterparts.
Problems also arise with regard to the co-ordination of the representation of workers’
interests in situations where sub-contractor and temporary staff work in physical
proximity to in-house personnel and inter-organisational contracting generally has a
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detrimental impact on conventional channels for the representation of the interests of
workers.
At the same time, they contribute to the rise in psycho-social risk factors. As Quinlan and
his colleagues have made clear in several of their reviews of published research, these
same features account for a rise in incidence of forms of ill-health arising from the
increased incidence of these risk factors in the ‘new economy’ (Quinlan, 2000; Quinlan et
al., 2001a, 2001b; Quinlan and Bohle, 2008). They include psycho-social risks and poor
health outcomes associated with work insecurity, intensification and flexibility and
evidence of a variety of adverse health and health related outcomes, including increased
incidence of cardiovascular disease, burnout and depression and fatigue (see for example,
Ferrie et al., 2002; Kivimaki et al., 2000; Wadsworth et al., 2006). Workplace factors that
have been associated with these poor health outcomes again include greater job
insecurity, poorer pay, lowered access to training, less control over working time, work
intensification and so on (see for example, Allan, 2002; Aronsson, 1999; Aronsson et al.,
2002; Benach et al., 2002).
In summary, then, as Quinlan and his colleagues argue (Quinlan et al., 2001a, 2001b),
there is a substantial and growing body of research which indicates that the effects of
changes in the nature of employment during the restructuring the economy are harmful to
the health and safety of workers involved, particularly in terms of the psycho-social risks
they create. They are further measurable in evidence of the way in which these changes
erode the presence and effectiveness of organisational arrangements to help prevent such
health outcomes, including the presence and effectiveness of worker representation on
health and safety.
A significant finding to emerge from the large majority of the cases Walters and Nichols
(2007) studied was that preconditions for the effectiveness of worker representation were
not found in their entirety in practice, and in most cases, representation and consultation
were restricted in delivering their potential beneficial effects. Walters and Nichols
considered these limitations in terms of the regulatory model on which systems for
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representing workers on health and safety in the UK and in most advanced economies are
based. They identified a number of concerns, mainly to do with ineffective state
regulation, weak trade union organisation and poor management organisation and support
in the restructured and fragmented organisational contexts, that are emblematic of the so
called ‘new economy’ which, they argued, contributed to the limited presence of the
preconditions for effectiveness.
In the UK for example, they describe a complex picture that is affected by the wider
influences on changes in patterns of representation and it is especially linked to the extent
of trade union presence. This is confirmed by data from the two most recent WER
surveys, which indicates that in 1998, 22 per cent of workplaces surveyed consulted over
health and safety by means of joint committees, 25 per cent consulted by means of
worker representatives and 47 per cent consulted directly (two per cent admitting to
having no arrangements). By 2004, the picture had changed with 20 per cent of
workplaces in this size range consulting by means of joint committees, 22 per cent by
means of worker representatives — and the majority, 57 per cent, consulting directly
(Kersley et al., 2006a: 204; Kersley et al., 2006 b: Table 7.4). These authors suggest that
‘the shift to direct consultation was due to compositional change in the population of
workplaces, not behavioural change in continuing establishments’ and comment further:
consultation through consultative channels – joint committees or freestanding worker representatives – has declined markedly, whereas direct
consultation over health and safety has become more prevalent. (2006a:
204)
This change is of special concern because as Nichols and Walters (2009) have noted in
the UK context:
the term ‘direct consultation’ is a rag bag. It includes not only
‘consultation directly with the workforce’ but management chains,
cascades and staff meetings and also the use of newsletters, notice boards
and email. The term ‘direct methods’ thus contains the possibility that
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what takes place may not, in any meaningful sense, be consultation at all
but just the more or less substantial one-way provision of information
from management to employees.
This as we have seen earlier, has a particular resonance in the case of psycho-social risk,
where many of the accepted strategies for addressing amelioration involve direct relations
between employers and individual workers, from which representative intervention is
removed.
In sum, research indicates that traditional approaches to achieving workers’ voice through
trade union supported health and safety representation are effective, but the presence of
the preconditions for their effectiveness is diminishing — as is the coverage of
representative arrangements generally. These are important observations, but are
particularly significant for worker representation on psycho-social risks for three reasons.
First, because they limit the effectiveness of worker representation to influence the
prevention of harm from such risks. Second, as we shall explore later, many of the factors
that have contributed to this declining influence are the same ones that contribute to the
rise in psycho-social risks and their effects at work. Third, because as we have also noted,
dealing with psycho-social risks at work and the potential harm they cause, is frequently
conceptualised in individualised rather than in collective terms. When this is borne in
mind in the context of the above analysis of the general shift from representational to
‘direct methods’ of consultation that the British data signifies, the substantial challenges
for collective approaches to controlling these risks become even more apparent.
5. The challenge for trade unions
Although psycho-social risks are difficult to conceptualise in traditional work
environment terms, worker health and safety representatives are no more disadvantaged
in this respect than any other work environment specialist. However, the wider structural
and organisational contexts involved act to disadvantage the practice of worker
representation in relation to psycho-social risks. Therefore, in order to understand both
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the potential and the limitations of the role of worker representation in the control of
psycho-social risk in any meaningful sense it is necessary to locate it within a wider
socio-economic and labour relations framework. Doing so reveals the nature of the
problem more clearly and several features are obvious.
First, there are issues of risk perception in which psycho-social risks are not understood
as risks of the work environment in the same ways as physical, chemical or biological
exposures. Second, there are structural and organisational reasons why the
individualisation of risk applies especially strongly in the case of psycho-social risks,
both in relation to established norms concerning risk perceptions and assessment and in
terms of control strategies. These make it difficult for worker representatives to address
them through collective actions. Third, since the root causes of much psycho-social risk
lies in management decisions that are taken centrally and remotely from where the
consequent psycho-social risk is experienced, the worker health and safety
representative’s capacity for engagement in prevention is further limited because they are
seldom consulted ‘in good time’ regarding such decisions. This is not only an issue for
the relations between managers and health and safety representatives but may also be a
source of disagreement on demarcation between health and safety representatives and
other worker/trade union representatives and full-time officials.
Strategies of organised labour to engage with the control or management of harm arising
from occupational exposure to psycho-social risks, need to account for these wider
contexts and in particular, to account for trends in the organisation of work and for
established perceptions of risk in which an individualisation of responsibility has
occurred in parallel with the marginalisation of collectivism. But there is little research
concerning how successful are such strategies.
There is clearly a link, for example, between trade union organising strategies to address
the processes of restructuring and those for representing the interests of workers who
experience the psycho-social risks that are its consequences. In 2008, the British TUC
published a guide to organising around health and safety. It set out to show how union
18
organisers, officers and health and safety representatives could use health and safety as a
tool in campaigns for union recognition as well as to be better organised in already
unionised workplaces:
Health and safety has not been an explicit element of our push for
organising. In 1998 we launched new unionism and the academy. OHS is
only coming on board now, which is in part because we are progressing in
how we approach organising and becoming more sophisticated –
branching out in different directions ….
Organising is no longer a bolt on. It is built into everything we do. ... Health and
safety and organising complement each other. Better organisation makes for
better OHS and vice versa. (quoted in Walters and Loudoun 2009)
Despite this very clear statement, field research undertaken in Walters and Loudoun’s
study (2009) indicated a mixed pattern of perceptions among regional trade union
officials concerning the link between health and safety and organising, with some way to
go before the role of the former was widely accepted in the organising agenda. One
reason for this is that the complexity of the issues involved in health and safety and
especially those involving psycho-social risks make it an issue that some union officials
feel ill-equipped to address:
Our organisers only receive minimal training education on health and
safety (maybe a couple of hours) and vice versa with safety reps on
organising so we have some problems with workplace reps thinking that
health and safety is all a bit technical for them – something they need a
specialist for. (Walters and Loudoun, 2009)
It seems evident that while a positive relationship between health and safety and trade
union organising is clearly set out in national level policy and training materials, practice
at regional and local levels is considerably more complex.
19
As Walters and Loudoun show, not all officials perceive a broader based understanding
of health and safety issues, embracing notions of psycho-social risk as particularly useful.
Some have little appetite for complex conceptualisations concerning psycho-social risk,
workers’ health, and underlying work organisational issues and doubt their usefulness for
building support for collective actions. However, others see such complexity as making
these issues more, rather than less useful ones to organise around, because they are
tangible consequences of managerial strategies about which workers are concerned —
especially in relation to psycho-social risks.
These paradoxes suggest that although progressive thinking about health and safety and
trade union organising is developing, it is still far from the case that these issues feature
centrally everywhere. Health and safety representatives are themselves sometimes
regarded as somewhat of a hindrance to organising – because they view such matters as
not a part of their role. The relevance of psycho-social health issues to organisers with
this view is at best peripheral, reactive and opportunistic, with little sign of its more
systematic inclusion on an organising agenda of the future. Here, in the best-case
scenarios, organisers use health and safety only when it involves simple, straightforward
technico-legal issues that they regard as ‘winnable’ or more inadvertently as
unacknowledged aspects of other issues with which they are more comfortable.
Walters and Loudoun’s interviews with trade union organisers also suggest a major
conceptual gulf between their attitudes towards health and safety representatives and the
literature that portrays these representatives as workplace activists that use work
environment issues as the material around which they forge a form of political identity
and action (see for example Hall et al., 2006).
These apparent contradictions in Walters and Loudoun’s findings are not particularly
surprising. At one level they are simply a refection of the heterogeneous nature of the
subject matter of occupational health and safety that is typified by psycho-social risks. On
another level, they are also quite a close approximation of findings reported in other
recent studies of the more general impact of organising strategies on trades union
officials. These studies identify inherent tensions in the concept of ‘organising’ that
influence its priorities and its effects on trade union renewal overall. More specifically,
20
researchers have pointed to the continuing dominance of interest in traditional trade union
concerns such as pay and conditions in organising approaches, with less emphasis on the
significance of new issues of which psycho-social risk is an aspect, such as work
organisation, restructuring and the consequent human resource management issues. They
further identify a conservatism within trade unions that has limited the impact of
organising in terms of its scale and the sectors in which it has been felt (Heery and
Simms, 2008). Moreover, there may also be a gender dimension to this recalcitrance
among trades unions to exploit the organising potential of psycho-social risk, since such
risks often affect women disproportionately, but there do not appear to be any research
studies exploring this issue.
Conclusions
There are underlying connections between psycho-social risks, health and safety and
other more ‘mainstream’ labour relations matters, as well as the potential for a more
systematic focus on these same issues in wider trade union approaches to the support of
workplace representation. An awareness of these matters is necessary to help address the
challenges to sustaining the trade union supported model of worker representation on
health and safety issues that has been the basis for effectiveness since its introduction in
the 1970s. But at the same time it is important to acknowledge the roots of the challenges
to this model and its role in such matters as the control of psycho-social risk, lie in a shift
in the balance of power between labour and capital in recent decades, which has resulted
in the breakdown of the post-war compromise and a parallel withdrawal of the state from
its regulation of employment matters in most advanced market economies.
The resulting political, economic and regulatory landscape in which representation on
psycho-social health and safety risks operates is entirely changed from that in place at the
time most of the existing measures on representation were introduced. Not least, in policy
terms, an individualisation of responsibility and marginalisation of collectivism has
occurred across a range of issues, including those concerning the health effects of
psycho-social risks. Current government and employer thinking on these issues in the UK
for example, presents remarkably unified conceptualisation of the health benefits of work
and a highly individualised approach to keeping workers in work through strategies that
make it more difficult for them to take time off on the grounds of ill-health and which
promote individualised approaches to addressing the physical, mental and emotional
21
consequences of coping with organisational demands imposed by employers. The
rhetoric accompanying this thinking focuses on influencing the actions of the victims of
these demands while largely ignoring their organisational causes. In such a scenario the
problems for forms of worker representation that have been weakened by the same
structural and organisational changes that create or exacerbate these risks are
considerable and they are further compounded by the indifference of the state.
Nevertheless, despite substantial obstacles, there is a growing awareness, among trades
unions, concerning the health consequences of the increased freedom of employers to
impose demands on labour, coupled with an increasing appreciation of the nature of these
health effects (stress and other ‘non-traditional’ occupational health effects) and their
causes, and there are some limited signs the of alignment of such awareness with wider
trade union organising.
Of course, on its own, this growth of awareness will be insufficient to guarantee the
effective engagement of worker representation in prevention or amelioration of psychosocial risks in the new economy. It will certainly not entirely solve the crisis facing
representation on health and safety, nor will it necessarily improve recruitment of trade
union members and trade union recognition, or access to representation for the large
proportion of the workforce employed in ‘hard to reach’ organising situations.
In the absence of robust research that takes full account of these wider dimensions of the
problem, perhaps the most that can be said with confidence is that pragmatically,
effective worker representation on psycho-social risk clearly necessitates consideration of
a range of complementary strategies to help it to relate to emerging work scenarios. This
implies the need to explore more productive alliances between worker health and safety
representatives, other workplace representatives and full-time trade union officials
involved in negotiating structural and organisational changes.
This brings us back to the central focus of this paper. It illustrates why addressing the
health consequences of modern work organisation and its implications for the quality of
workers’ lives requires some joined up thinking on the part of organised labour,
22
embracing its strategists, its full-time officials and lay representatives alike. Interventions
by health and safety representatives to address psycho-social risks at the workplace level
need to be part of this wider joined-up scenario if they are to have a significant or
sustainable future in prevention.
23
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