An Afterword on European Union Policy and Practice

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.