Covid Transmission and Killer Workplaces

Join the Hazards Campaign Thursday Talk (19th November 2020 6.00-7.30pm on Zoom) featuring speakers including trade union health and safety officers, reps and activists.

We will be discussing how we can end the lockdown using a Zero-Covid strategy and keep people safe at work in Covid-safe workplaces.

Book a place and receive the link to the meeting via  Eventbrite

We will also be launching the film ‘COVID Transmission and Killer Workplaces’.

For further information relevant to the speakers and subject:

Hazards Campaign News Releases

Hazards Campaign and Independent SAGE call for no workers to return to workplaces unless Covid safety plans are in place

The COVID-19 Safe Workplace Charter and briefing document on
ending work lockdowns in GB, Joint Independent Sage and Hazards Charter and document

A Better Way To Go: towards to a Zero COVID UK,   Independent Sage Zero-Covid Strategy

Zero Covid Campaign

Hazards Campaign details
website www.hazardscampaign.org.uk
twitter @hazardscampaign
facebook www.facebook.com/groups/123746101003963

If you need more information please email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk
07734 317 158

The Hazards Campaign is a UK-wide network of resource centres and campaigners. The Hazards Campaign supports those organising and campaigning for justice and safety at work.

If you would like to get more involved or make a donation to our organisation please email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk

Hazards Campaign Thursday Talk: Breast Cancer Awareness is not enough! [Thursday 29 October]

 October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and every year thousands of people don pink outfits and collect money for a variety of breast cancer charities. The session highlighted some of the preventable occupational and environmental risks to women and why they develop breast cancer. We had a line up of fantastic speakers including:

Jane McArthur – Work and Prevention SSHRC, University of Windsor, Canada

Helen Lynn – Alliance for Cancer prevention , Health and Environment Researcher

Jane Stewart – TUC General Council, Unite NEC and Chair Womens Committee, Unite Convener at Unilever Port sunlight

Video

A link to a recording of the event can be found here or viewed below:

A copy of Helen Lynn and Jane McArthur’s presentation can be found here.

Resources

Negotiators’ guide: Women’s health and safety at work, Unite

Cancer prevalence among flight attendants compared to the general population, NCBI

Study Examines Cancer Rates Among Flight Attendants, American Cancer Society

Breast Cancer Prevention Partners

Hazards Magazine Cancer resources and tools

Work cancer hazards A continually-updated, annotated bibliography of occupational cancer research produced by Hazards, the Alliance for Cancer Prevention and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

Fact sheet on COSHH and Stopping deadly exposure at work

Jane E. McArthur wins the 2019 Barbara Rosenblum
Cancer Dissertation Scholarship

Linking breast cancer and our environment, Helen Lynn

Breast cancer exposure among Windsor-Detroit border workers needs to be taken more seriously, says researcher, 23 June 2020, CBC News

Hazards Campaign – News Release 2^nd November, 2020

A Government void of reality and enforcers avoiding reality!

This week the national Hazards Campaign will endorse a call for action to force the Government to take a Zero-Covid strategy to suppress the virus to save lives and livelihoods (1).  Throughout the pandemic the Hazards Campaign has argued that unsafe workplaces are infecting workers who transmit it on to families and communities driving up the overall infection rates.  The Government and its authorities continue to focus on demonising individuals, ignoring the role of the workplace as a source of infection and transmission and failing to enforce health and safety law that should ensure employers in every setting are controlling the risks.  Government failure to protect workers has also failed to protect communities.

Janet Newsham of the Hazards Campaign will say that “any Covid circuit-breaker must be part of a Zero-Covid strategy which includes high numbers of people tested, a high percentage of those positive cases traced, contacted, and people supported financially to isolate.  Anything less would be an abdication of government responsibility and a waste of valuable time to get the virus under control .  A circuit break must also ensure that all essential workplaces remaining open are Covid-safe (2).

“On the 5^th November we are going into a second national lockdown that will fail to reduce the transmission rate significantly if it leaves many unsafe workplaces open without adequate enforcement of the controls of risks, and if it doesn’t rebuild  a publicly owned Test, Trace and Isolate  with support system integrated in local public health and the NHS.”

In the North of England many people have been in almost continual restrictions throughout the pandemic and since forced return to unsafe workplaces including schools and universities  the transmission rates have continued to rise.  Unless this lockdown makes significant changes, it will causes much hardship for little benefit.

As we move to a second national lock-down, we should reflect on why we have got here and ensure lessons are learned.

• Our first lock-down was too little, and came too late and (the second one is also too little, and far too late) (3)
• Non-essential workplace continued to work during first lock down and unsafe workplaces have continued to work throughout the pandemic (4)
• Testing was inadequate, not available for many people
• Tracing was privatised and did not function at a high level of contact tracing
• People couldn’t afford to isolate without financial assistance and employers of precarious contracted workers threatened workers from isolating or stopped wages and hours
• Self employed workers were not financially supported (note many construction workers are self-employed)
• Thousands of jobs have been lost due to Government mishandling, leaving people with huge debts and extreme anxiety
• The NHS has been starved of resources and staff because of Government policies and Brexit
• The HSE and LA enforcers. starved of resources and staff over ten years, haven’t been able to inspect or enforce health and safety law (5)
• The Govt has lost credibility and squandered trust  – mixed messaging, confusing tiers/lockdowns, allowing one rule for us and another more lenient rule for the elite  ‘Cummingsgate’ (6)
• Schools, colleges, universities opened up for face to face teaching against the advice of scientists and trade unions and transmission rose dramatically  as forewarned (7)
• Public Health England scapegoated and disbanded in the middle of the current crisis

The Government were advised by their own SAGE  scientific experts to lock-down on 21^st September instead they opted for local lockdowns with confusing rules that couldn’t possibly work. (8)

For the circuit break to succeed, it must be on the basis of:

Closure of all non-essential workplaces;

Schools, colleges and universities closed to face to face teaching but supported to provide on-line teaching; support for in-school provision for key workers and vulnerable and deprived children;

Rebuilding a locally based, publicly run,  high contact and efficient test, track and isolate system is in place, with speedy results available for anyone that needs a test, and people supported financially to isolate.  This must be integrated with public health, the NHS and occupational health and safety.

Workplaces remaining open must be Covid-safe and not endanger the workers, their families and communities. Anyone is potentially infectious whether they show symptoms or not so all risks of transmission of the virus by any route must be controlled and enforced in all essential workplaces. This must include transmission by airborne aerosols which requires good ventilation, filtration and mask and PPE wearing. (9)

Workplaces that are closed must prepare to reopen safely as above.

Workers who have to be in work, need access to safe public transport and workers on public transport need their employers to ensure their safety and health and that of their customers.  The same applies to health and social care, retail staff, teachers, transport workers, postal workers and others in essential work.

For a zero-covid strategy to work it has to be done in conjunction with Covid-Safe Workplaces.  PHE and the HSE and local authority enforcers must be resourced to be able to carry out their primary functions.  Outbreaks must be result in on-site testing centres to open up immediately, and occupational health enforcement officers must be on hand to determine transmission routes.

Janet will say “Government advice must improve and change to take account of updated risks on transmission.  It is pointless regurgitating hollow rhetoric about school children and young people needing education to justify unsafe schools remaining open, if it is exposing them to the virus which they take back to their families and communities.  What is going to harm a child more, a few weeks out of education or the death of their parents, siblings or grandparents, that they involuntarily infected?  If education is open it has to be safe and the risks of aerosol transmission must be controlled.”(9)

1. A Better Way To Go: towards to a Zero COVID UK – 7 July 2020 Independent SAGE
2. Hazards Campaign and Independent SAGE call for no workers to return to workplaces unless Covid safety plans are in place – 2 September 2020, Hazards Campaign and Independent SAGE
3. The Hazards Campaign calls for the government to adopt immediately a zero-Covid19 policy– 31 July 2020, Hazards Campaign
4. No going back to work unless workers say it is safe!– 7 May 2020, Hazards Campaign
5. Deadly failures have placed millions of workers at unnecessary coronavirus exposure risk – 8 April 2020, Hazards Campaign
6. The UK Government response is like a car skidding uncontrollably towards a brick wall – 23 September 2020, Hazards Campaign
7. ‘We’ll be policed all the way to the factory gates’ – 30 September 2020, Hazards Campaign
8. Summary of the effectiveness and harms of different non-pharmaceutical interventions, SAGE minutes 21 st Sept 2020
9. Is two metre physical distancing enough? Aerosol transmission and other emerging issues – 14 September 2020, Hazards Campaign

Further Information

• Hazards magazine coronavirus hub
• Abdication:  HSE has been missing in action throughout the Covid-19 crisis – Hazards 151, 2020
• Laid bare: The scandal of expendable workers before, during and after Covid – Hazards 151, 2020
• Covid19 in the UK and occupational health and safety. Predictable but not inevitable failures  what can we do now, Professor Andrew Watterson
• Exposed: Workers need health, pay and job protection from all job risks, Hazards 149, 2020
• Hazards Campaign: Briefings and statements on Covid-19

Hazards Campaign Twitter: @hazardscampaign
Facebook: We didn’t vote to die at work
email:  info@hazardscampaign.org.uk

For further information contact:
Janet Newsham
janet@gmhazards.org.uk
07734317158

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and every year thousands of people don pink outfits and collect money for a variety of breast cancer charities.  But this doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. This session will highlight some of the preventable occupational risks to breast cancer and what we should be doing in our workplaces and trade unions to challenge those risks.

Join the Hazards Campaign Thursday Talk on Thursday 29 October with speakers:

Jane McArthur – Work and Prevention SSHRC, University of Windsor, Canada

Helen Lynn – Alliance for Cancer prevention , Health and Environment Researcher

Jane Stewart – TUC General Council, Unite NEC and Chair Womens Committee, Unite Convener at Unilever Port sunlight

To book a place and receive the link to the meeting please go visit the Eventbrite page

Hazards Campaign

website www.hazardscampaign.org.uk
twitter @hazardscampaign
facebook www.facebook.com/groups/123746101003963

If you need more information please email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk
or 07734 317 158

The Hazards Campaign is a UK-wide network of resource centres and campaigners. The Hazards Campaign supports those organising and campaigning for justice and safety at work.

If you would like to get more involved or make a donation to our organisation please email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk

Thursday Zoom Talk – 15th October,  6.00-7.30pm

The Challenges of Long-Covid – How we recognise it, public health and occupational health consequences, legal and workplace challenges.

Join the latest Hazards Campaign Thursday Zoom Talk with speakers including: …..

• Clare Rayner – retired Clinician and involved with many long-covid groups
• Professor Raymond Agius – Covid as an Occupational Illness
• Phil Liptrott – Thompsons Solicitors
• Paul Holleran –  NW GMB Health and Safety Officer

We have plenty to discuss and lots to campaign about  – especially on what we need to be doing in the workplace to support workers.

To book a place and receive the link to the meeting please go to  Eventbrite

For further information relevant to the speakers and subject:

• Briefing on employer and employees responsibilities on returning to work in the cake of coranovirus (Covid-19). no.7 
• GMB Coronavirus hub
• SOM COVID-19 summary update
• Hazards Campaign and Independent SAGE call for no workers to return to workplaces unless Covid safety plans are in place
• Joint Independent Sage and Hazards Campaign Charter and document

website www.hazardscampaign.org.uk
twitter @hazardscampaign
facebook www.facebook.com/groups/123746101003963

If you need more information please email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk
or 07734 317 158

The Hazards Campaign is a UK-wide network of resource centres and campaigners. The Hazards Campaign supports those organising and campaigning for justice and safety at work.

If you would like to get more involved or make a donation to our organisation please email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk

Hazards Campaign news release, 30 September 2020

The Government has introduced new Covid-19 penalties aimed at individuals, which it blames for the increased transmission rates.

The National Hazards Campaign Chair Janet Newsham said “At a time when money should be spent preventing the spread of infections in schools, care homes, hospitals, meat processing plants, offices etc. the Government has chosen to set aside £60m for police and local authorities to enforce the new laws.  However, when workers are inside their factories, offices and other premises, there is little money being spent on enforcing safe control of the transmission risks and ensuring their health, safety and welfare.  Again, it seems like workers health is being regarded as different to public health. ”

At the 29 September 2020 zoom conference ‘Who is regulating the Regulators?’ Janet said that “Workplaces are not being inspected and many reports made to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) are being dealt with by phone calls to employers and with no physical inspection taking place.”

Employers are also failing in their legal duty to report work-related cases as a new report issued by Pirc found in the food sector (1).  There were just 47 notifications of Covid-19 workplace infections and no deaths were reported when the real number is at least 1,461 infections and 6 deaths in the food manufacturing sector.  But there are other sectors that are also suffering from spiralling infection rates including the health and social care sector, education and other high-risk employment.

A new report (2) by Professor Agius showed ‘many thousands’ of UK work-related cases and hundreds of deaths were being missed by the RIDDOR occupational accident and disease reporting system, backed up by a June warning from Hazards Magazine (3) of an ‘intelligence failure’ at the HSE, with the regulator ‘having little idea what was going on’.

Janet Newsham Hazards Campaign said “The Covid-safe charter that Independent Sage and Hazards Campaign produced (4) weeks ago, to ensure the safety and health of workers in all workplace settings has been ignored.   Rushing people back to unsafe workplaces at a time when transmission rates don’t even match the Governments own measurements for reopening society, never mind not following the science!  Instead they are blaming individuals rather than targeting the real culprits which are employers not controlling the risks.”

Within hours of opening schools, many were sending children back home to isolate.  Children were simply shooed back home and the stop, start education we feared began to happen.  Two weeks later, thousands of children and young people are back at home, staff infected, children infected, family members infected and the spiralling upwards of transmission rates, has hit our communities.  Their risks never controlled in their schools and education environments, which are of course also workplaces. (5)

The Governments demonising of young people at Universities is shameful.  Young people sent to live in shared flats with strangers from different communities (with different transmission rates) across the UK, where social distancing is impossible.  And the subsequent return of workers into non-essential workplaces was always going to be problematic on top of the workers who have continually worked throughout the pandemic.

The Hazards Campaign criticisms of the lack of enforcement and inadequate investigations into the cause of workplace clusters are public record. (6)   Public Health England (PHE), HSE and others have failed to ensure employers are controlling the risks for workers.  Leaving many infected, with long term ill health and some have sadly died. They have failed to investigate transmission risks, failed to enforce health and safety law and failed to hold employers to account for their negligence.  The TUC has recently polled workers (7) and have said that ‘many workplaces are still not taking adequate measures to protect employees from coronavirus’.

And this on the back of the chronic underfunding of the HSE and Local Authority (LA) enforcement bodies over decades, they are now facing the further threat and humiliation of privatisation of part of their roles.  A role that would place enforcement authority with compromised independence, and firmly in the hands of private sector.

Campaign Chair Janet Newsham continued: “If the transmission rates are to be reduced then we need health and safety law enforced and a Covid-19 safe workplace strategy in place, alongside a zero-Covid19 strategy that includes a high functioning and supportive test, track, trace, and isolate. If workplaces aren’t recognised as a source for transmission, then the UK transmission rates will continue to rise.  Policing of Covid-19 prevention, must not stop at the factory gates.”

1. Unreported deaths – A PIRC sector briefing: Food preparation, September 2020, Alice Martin, Pensions & Investment Research Consultants.
2. Covid-19: statutory means of scrutinizing workers’ deaths and disease, 21 September 2020, Occupational Medicine, R.M. Agius.
3. Abdication:  HSE has been missing in action throughout the Covid-19 crisis, Hazards 150, 2020.
4. The COVID-19 Safe Workplace Charter and briefing document on ending work lockdowns in GB, The Independent SAGE Report 10, 27 August 2020, The Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
5. Studies undermine Williamson’s ‘little evidence’ claim on school risks, 10 August 2020, Hazards Campaign.
6. We predicted an explosion in workplace Covid-19 outbreaks – two weeks later that’s exactly what we’ve got, 20 August 2020, Hazards Campaign
7. Many UK workplaces still not ‘Covid-Secure’, 16 September 2020, Risks 965, TUC.

Notes for Editors:
For more information, press only: W
Contact: Janet Newsham
Email: janet@gmhazards.org.uk

Tel: 07734317158 

www.hazardscampaign.org.uk

The Hazards Campaign is a UK-wide network of resource centres and campaigners. The Hazards Campaign supports those organising and campaigning for justice and safety at work.

The Hazards Campaign
c/o Greater Manchester Hazards Centre
Windrush Millennium Centre
70 Alexandra Road
Manchester,
M16 7WD
ENGLAND

website www.hazardscampaign.org.uk
twitter @hazardscampaign
facebook www.facebook.com/groups/123746101003963