Precarious times

Specific measures are needed to provide greater security for precarious workers, says the Council of Trade Unions.

Peter Conway, secretary NZCTU, told the Safeguard conference, that precarious employment was associated with a measurable deterioration in OHS.

Conway said the last decade had seen a growth in shiftwork, night work, self-employment, part-time jobs, multiple jobs, home work and casual and temporary employment (increasingly though labour hire companies). At the same time there had been an increase in working hours and intensity of work for some sections of the workplace.

Precarious employment was often associated with economic pressures or changes to payment and reward systems that endangered health, he said. These included competitive tendering and consequent corner-cutting by subcontractors, the outsourcing of dangerous tasks, payment by results and low pay, work intensification and overload, long hours of work and the limited resources that small businesses could devote to OHS.

Precarious employment could also be associated with dangerous forms of work disorganisation such as the difficulty of ensuring adequate training of temporary or labour hire workers. This was especially the case where the workforce was young and inexperienced or where there was a high level of labour turnover, Conway said.

Outsourcing and labour hire contracting meant the introduction of strangers to the workplace, disrupting the informal flows of safety knowledge and communication. There was an increased complexity and ambiguity in rules and procedures

Conway said company downsizing could result in a loss of knowledge and increased multi-tasking which increased risks if workers were not suitably retrained.

He said precarious workers were often in a weak position to raise or complain about OHS issues, particularly in a non-union environment. He noted that the OHS regulatory framework was designed and implemented to predominantly deal with permanent employees in large workplaces.

Conway included in the impacts of precarious employment the widespread weakening of employee participation, and a lessening of employee knowledge and awareness of H&S issues, the weakening of union representation and bargaining on such issues, and an increased unwillingness of workers to report workplace problems.

Conway also raised the CTU’s concern about the extent of active workplace interventions by the DoL, saying the number of pro-active interventions had nearly halved from around 12,000 in 2003, to 7000 in 2007.

The CTU was also concerned about what it saw as a leaning towards self-regulation.

Conway said that international research showed that enforcement was a significant motivator for organisations. A UK study said that evidence strongly suggested that the HSE could have a significantly greater impact by increasing its inspection and enforcement activity. Inspections coupled with penalties for OHS breaches resulted in significant reductions in injury rates, he said.

This story appeared in Safeguard Update newsletter of 12 July 2010.

For more stories visit the news story archive.

To get all the news every fortnight – subscribe now!