An Afterword on European Union Policy and Practice

Laurent Vogel and David Walters

Chapter 5 in Workplace Health and Safety, 2009, pp 90-105 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract There are over one million health and safety representatives in the European Union (Menendez et al., 2008). They are the result of a long history of trade union support, campaigns and legislative actions at both national and EU levels. Despite this, there is considerable variation between member states in provision and practice; and systems for representation and consultation on health and safety are far from complete or comprehensive — as earlier chapters demonstrate. In this chapter we reflect on some of the issues that lie behind this variation. We first look at how workers’ safety representation has fitted into EU policy developments from the 1970s to the present time. We examine some of the features of national systems for health and safety representation, which demonstrate that a quite substantial part of the European workforce has no such representation at present. We conclude with some comments on the very serious gaps discernible both in EU preventive strategies and in research into the role of safety representatives in a worker-driven momentum for prevention of accidents and ill-health in the workplace.

Keywords: Member State; Trade Union; Work Council; European Social Survey; Social Dialogue (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25052-9_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230250529

DOI: 10.1057/9780230250529_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().