Health & safety

Training in hit-and-miss mode

Training on the railway was always a hit and miss affair. “Basic track safety” and “lookout duties” were given a high priority, but then you were left to almost beg for the more technical courses which were needed to progress up the promotion ladder. In my early days on the track, promotion was quite hard to come by as it was basically “dead men’s shoes”. People had to literally die before any vacancies came up and the attitude from management was why bother, we’ll give you the training when the need arises. Not being a careerist myself, I started at the bottom and retired at the bottom, but...

Twists and turns on workplace safety

After the privatisation of rail was announced in 1993, the whole attitude to Health and Safety started to change as the costs of failing to meet legal requirements were astronomical. But as long as your management had something in place and you had signed for it, the buck fell on your shoulders. Working outside of what was considered safe became a number one crime, if spotted by the management health and safety rep. There was no thought given as to how this might affect your ability to do your job. This led to much talk of “health and safety gone mad”. Take one example: working at heights. No...

Diary of a trackworker: A long and winding road

To continue my reminiscences of decades as a railway trackworker, the development of Health and Safety law on the railway has been a bit of a double-edged sword. It has generally been to the benefit of workers. Legislation has enabled us to stop the more egregious practices. But it has also made us a bit lazy, with workers looking to legislation rather than taking direct action and sometimes being fobbed off despite being in the right. In the early days of my job there were no health and safety reps as such. The job was usually done by one of the staff reps as a secondary role. The supervisor...

Sheffield bar workers demand safe transport

Bar workers in Sheffield are getting organised. A local campaign aims to achieve paid transport home after the end of our shifts. Recently Sheffield Council passed policy that stipulates as a condition of new licences that employers must provide transport home for workers at the end of their shifts. Currently, workers in hospitality find ourselves paying up to two hours pay for taxis, or waking home at night across the city. Sheffield is the low pay capital of Britain, according to researchers from Sheffield Hallam and other universities. It is not right that workers face an additional penalty...

How to avoid getting hit by a train

When I joined the railway, decades ago, I was repeatedly told that it was the second most dangerous job in the UK after saturation deep sea diving. Actually it was the second most fatal job. Trains are pretty one sided. Surviving being struck by a train is less likely than surviving cutting your thumb. Happily for me, in my entire railway career I’ve never been directly involved with a “death on the line”, but I have had a few near misses. Some because of the shit attitude of management, some because of my own, and other workers’, bad working practices. Union activity has made a difference...

Hundreds killed in India train crash

The official death toll from the rail crash in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on 2 June is 288, with 803 injured. We send condolences and solidarity to the victims and their loved ones. We send our solidarity to India’s rail workers and their unions, engaged in a long struggle against the understaffing, cuts and privatisation that form the background to this disaster. India has a long history of devastating rail collisions; this is far from the first one that has seen hundreds killed. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Two days after the Odisha crash a four-lane suspension bridge in the...

Cancer vs wet wipes

E collars me at change of watch as I’m coming off duty. After a job last tour, he says, he followed the new post-fire decontamination procedure, bagging up his fire gear, hosing and wiping down his breathing apparatus (BA) set and cleaning his helmet. He wiped down the exterior and soaked the fabric interior in soapy water, scrubbing and rinsing as best he could. “The next day, my lid still smelled a bit smoky but we don’t keep spares so I stuck it on the fire engine. I put it on at a shout, and when I took it off there was a black line of soot around my head.” The policy tells you to wash it...

PCS: learning the lessons

Our re-ballot to renew our industrial action mandate in the national civil service dispute closes on 9 May. We’ll know the result on 10 May. I know there’ll be a huge majority for continuing action, but I think it’ll be close in terms of meeting the turnout threshold. If we do miss thresholds, I think we’ll be duty bound to re-ballot as soon as possible. There’s no question of bailing out of the dispute. If we renew the mandate, we have to intensify our action. We need to learn the lessons of the first six months of the dispute, where solid selective action was punctuated with very sporadic...

How the NHS failed on Covid control

In November 2022 the government’s Industrial Injury Advisory Panel found that there is a “large body of consistent supporting evidence” that health and social care workers “have been exposed to significantly increased risk” of infection, illness and death due to Covid-19. Nobody has counted, but it is thought that over 1,500 NHS and social care staff died of Covid-19. Many of these lives might have been saved by simple infection control measures. NHS’s Covid safety measures were and still remain astonishingly inadequate. Although some individuals won safety improvements in their work areas and...

Eleven rail cars of hazmat crash

On 3 February, a freight train derailed near the town of East Palestine, Ohio. The crash upended and set ablaze 50 of the train’s 150+ cars. Despite the Norfolk Southern freight train trailing a mass of over 18,000 tonnes and having a total length of 1.8 miles, miraculously no one was killed in the crash itself. Instead, the damage has been paid by locals’ health and the surrounding environment: eleven of those cars were loaded with hazardous, carcinogenic chemicals. Firefighters were unable to tackle the fire in the immediate aftermath given the outpouring of toxic gas. Days later, local...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.