Securing UK Workplace Health and Safety Protections After Brexit: A Comprehensive Readjustment to Ensure Compliance with International Norms

By the best estimates around 140 people die day every day as result of injuries sustained at work or as a result of illnesses contracted as a direct result of work. That is 50,000 people a year. Millions live with work related injuries and illnesses both mental and physical while many, as yet unaware that they have been exposed to damaging substances at work, will develop debilitating symptoms as a result.

The project will set out how the UK can comply with international law as it applies to health and safety at work after we leave the EU. It does so by asking the following research questions:

How can post-Brexit occupational safety and health regulation (including the management of working time) best address the high levels of work related injury, illness and death in the UK?

How can post-Brexit occupational safety and health regulation promote competitiveness and efficiency in UK businesses? At the same time how can we stop unscrupulous employers from burdening the benefits system, NHS and taxpayers with the victims of their inadequate OSH policies and evading the real financial repercussions of their failures?

How can post-Brexit occupational safety and health regulation halt and reverse what has long been a misguided workplace protection 'race to the bottom' in pursuit of short-term profit lobbied for by misguided employers and delivered by their representatives in government?

The project seeks to explore how existing and proposed protections can effectively be 'entrenched' by a programme of ratification of International Labour Organisation OSH and working time Conventions and by revising the UK's relationship with the Council of Europe's European Social Charter so that future governments will be unable to easily undermine or withdraw them. It has long been understood and accepted that expenditure on OSH protection is an investment which, as well as mitigating the incalculable human cost, repays itself many times over in the long term; it benefits employers and the state as well as workers. Nevertheless, those who in the wake of Brexit seek to turn the UK into Europe's 'off-shore sweatshop' promote the idea that OSH protection is 'red tape' which stifles productivity and profitability. They deliberately confuse the absurd actions of over cautious businesses and public authorities with occupational health and safety measures - and they have been very successful in embedding the myth of 'health and safety gone mad' into the national consciousness. Yet OSH is a deadly serious matter, literally a matter of life and death. It is about stopping employers from poisoning their workforces with toxic fumes; about stopping road haulage firms from obliging their drivers to work 15 hour days or 82 hour weeks (as many still blatantly do); about simple measures and procedures which prevent workers falling from a height, from being crushed by machinery or struck by moving vehicles. It is about monitoring workers in order to assess whether their health is being damaged by toxic substances, by musculoskeletal conditions induced by the demands of the workplace - or by work induced stress. It is about paying workers adequate sick pay so they can afford not to come into work when ill. It is about ensuring adequate precautions are taken by means of an effective system of inspection, warnings, prosecutions and the imposition of dissuasive penalties, as well as through advice and education.

OSH is most emphatically not about stopping people from drinking hot coffee in case they scald themselves or any of the myriad absurd supposed 'health and safety' stories which appear regularly in the press. Nor is it about creating a 'Nanny State' or pandering to 'Snowflakes.' It is about stopping employers from killing and disabling their workers and about emulating the OSH standards productivity levels and associated with the most successful economies such as Germany and the Scandinavian nations. That is the aim of this fellowship.