Today is International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD), the day in which we remember that millions of workers are killed on the job around the world – usually because corners were being cut, or they were under pressure by their employers to get the job done. This year, IWMD is a day that has a special significance for all kinds of reasons. 

First, after last night’s Panorama programme, the lack of the most basic personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline staff has become a national scandal. The Covid-19 crisis has made ‘PPE’ – an abbreviation previously known only to health and safety or trade union hacks – a household term. Stories of the lack of PPE killing workers have been a daily feature of mainstream news coverage. 

Second, there have been a stream of wildcat strikes and walk outs organised by the most vulnerable workers. There have been numerous mass walkouts in fast food outlets, food packing plants, care homes and in high street chains like Marks and Spencer. Royal Mail workers in a number of sites, building workers on several large sites, refuse workers and delivery drivers, have all walked off the job over safety fears.

This is not unique of course, but the rate and level of wildcat strikes over safety, as so many things in this crisis, is unprecedented. One consequence is that we are beginning to realise that those groups of workers are on one hand the workers we most rely on (it is now possible to describe delivery drivers and warehouse packers as heroes in the same breath as NHS workers), and at the same time they are the least protected and most vulnerable to contagion. 

Third, we have been given a stark choice between a system of organising our economies in ways that make people vulnerable and an alternative system that places safety before profit. The Covid-19 crisis has forced politicians with even the most pro-market, neoliberal affiliations to admit that economic efficiency can no longer be put before human beings. Is this, then, a crisis that can break some of the national myths that surround safety at work? Can it shift a 40-year tide against workplace protection? 

There is a wilful complacency – one that is characteristically British – which allowed ministers to delay the lockdown when they could see what happened in Italy and Spain weeks earlier. The same complacency meant that we were told to simply buckle down, muddle through the PPE crisis and the shortages of tests and basic sanitation. The connotation, rarely discussed in the mainstream press, was that we were to ‘keep calm and carry on’ without the government having to really take control. Because we’re British and we can take it on the chin. 

Long before the coronavirus arrived, it had been commonplace for government ministers and regulators to claim that the UK has one of the most advanced systems of health and safety regulation in Europe. Yet, in truth, just like the comparative statistics being rolled out on coronavirus, such claims are notoriously difficult to substantiate and are often based on a selective use of evidence.

On the face of things, the idea that we have a relatively strong safety culture (or even, in a phrase loved by Cameron and Boris Johnson, that health and safety has ‘gone mad’) is supported by a long-term decline in the rate of work-related death. According to the statistics compiled by the Health and Safety Commission and Executive, occupational safety and health has been transformed for the better, with the HSE claiming an 84% reduction in the number of fatal injuries to employees since 1974. The reality is, however, more complicated. The official trend is impossible to substantiate, since a failure to adequately monitor incidents and exposures in UK workplaces means that it is very difficult to track trends accurately. 

The HSE claims that since “2000/01, the estimated rate of non-fatal injury to workers has fallen by around a half,” and that the number of annual workplace fatalities fell from a figure usually well in excess of 200 prior to 2008 to around 140, with the average for 2014-’19 being 142. Yet HSE headline statistics only count a very small proportion of those whose deaths are caused by working: they only account for workers who die instantly as a result of sudden injury. Academics and campaigners have used a revised methodology to include all deaths caused by working. They have come to a more comprehensive estimate of the total work-related deaths, concluding that at least 140 people die every day as a result of workplace incidents, injuries and exposures; or 50,000 per year.

As for non-fatal, immediate, physical injuries, the Hazards Campaign warns that because of under-reporting and under-recording it is impossible to calculate a worthwhile estimate. Moreover, a work-related illness often manifests itself long after the triggering events have occurred, and even when the harm caused is immediately obvious, under-reporting by employers is widespread. Often, as we have discovered from Covid-19 related deaths, unless someone dies immediately at work or in hospital, it is unlikely that a work-related death will actually be recorded as such. We therefore have no way of truly knowing whether such rates are in long-term decline or not.

There is some evidence to suggest that when set alongside our peers, the UK is winning the so-called race to the bottom. According to the OECD, UK employment protections are amongst the weakest in the developed world; only the US and Canada rank lower.

It is significant in this respect that successive UK governments have nurtured a labour market with low standards of employment regulation, encouraging people to work under conditions that heighten the risk of industrial injury and disease. Take, for example, the misclassification of workers as self-employed – a scam made famous by Uber but adopted decades earlier by the construction industry. Health and Safety Executive data indicates that workers who are defined as ‘self-employed’ are twice as likely to be killed at work as those employees on regular contracts. 

In recent years, these problems have been compounded by a documented crisis in UK health and safety enforcement. The annual total of proactive health and safety inspection in workplaces is a fraction of the annual total 20 years ago. The number of prosecutions for health and safety offences has more than halved in 20 years.

There is therefore evidence that the new economy is creating major problems that are masked by the way that labour is organised and regulated. Moreover, the protections against dangers at work have been adversely affected by more than a decade of austerity-driven cuts, compounding the withdrawal of state funding to health and safety supervision that was set in motion in the early 1980s. This failure in regulatory protection has been made worse by 40 years of legislative attacks on trade union freedoms that have adversely affected worker safety. 

If this is a story that many of the readers of Tribune were aware of, it is a story that is becoming known to many others, directly because of the fall-out of Covid-19: keeping workers safe is something that employers and government can either choose to do, or choose not to do. The current crisis has exposed a national disgrace that countless trade unionists having been shouting about for many years. 

Today our slogan is simple: remember the dead by fighting for the living.