Union Approach to Health and Safety: - United Steelworkers

Section 11(c) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act makes it illegal for employers to
discriminate against workers who report injuries, complain about job safety, or get
involved in other ways in occupational safety and health.
4. If workers think negative job changes will occur if they get involved in health
and safety activities, many of them will not get involved.
If taking the time to do a task safely is seen by workers as jeopardizing their jobs, then
safety will have a very low priority.
Example -- Protecting against trench cave-ins seen as jeopardizing jobs:
Workers for a municipal water company often dug trenches to put in or repair water
lines in a town. They knew that cave-ins, which could cause serious injury or death,
could be prevented by trench shoring and trench boxes. They also knew that the town
they worked for was very interested in cutting costs.
Management officials never stressed the importance of protecting against cave-ins.
However, they did stress the importance of doing work rapidly and they let it be
known that if work was not done in the fastest, least expensive way possible, the town
would privatize the work.
Private contractors rarely used trench shoring devices. In order to be “competitive,”
workers believed that they must not demand these protective devices nor the time to
install them when they dug and worked in trenches. If they did, they believed the
town would privatize their jobs and give the jobs to outside contractors.
In this case, in order to get workers involved in demanding protection against trench
cave-ins, workers needed to believe that such demands would not drive them out of a
job.
Since it is a violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act to work in
improperly shored (or unshored) trenches of a certain depth, one idea was to have all
workers call OSHA when they saw contractors working in unshored trenches. If
contractors felt that they needed to spend the time and money properly shoring
trenches, they would not be able to underbid town employees who demanded proper
protections.
5. Some workers do not get involved because they have never been asked or have
never been given a role that they think they can play.
Sometimes the way to start getting workers involved is by asking them to do something.
That “something” could be filling out a short union survey about the hazards, problems or
health and safety concerns on their jobs. It could be asking them to a meeting to help