Local Agreements as an Instrument for Improvement of Management—Employee Collaboration on Occupational Health and Safety

Ole H. Sørensen, Peter Hasle and Steen E. Navrbjerg
Additional contact information
Ole H. Sørensen: National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Denmark
Peter Hasle: National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Denmark
Steen E. Navrbjerg: Employment Relations Research Centre, Copenhagen University

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2009, vol. 30, issue 4, 643-672

Abstract: Employee participation is crucial to safe and secure workplace environments. Health and safety regulation or voluntary agreements form two different approaches to this. In Denmark, a legislative change facilitates combining the two approaches. The new flexibility of approach enables the organization of health and safety to be tailored to the needs of the workplace based on a local agreement negotiated between management and local union representatives. This new approach is explored in this article. The study finds that the system has a positive impact on employee participation, improves collaborative relations, strengthens local commitment and there is a perceived increase in organizational efficiency and flexibility; all factors that have been shown to increase safety performance.

Keywords: codetermination; employee participation; health and safety work; industrial relations; partnership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X09343993 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:30:y:2009:i:4:p:643-672

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X09343993

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().