27 July 2011

Health and Safety Department moves into working conditions

The European Trade Union Institute’s (ETUI) Health and Safety at Work Department is to bring its research and expertise to bear on the huge area of working conditions. It’s a natural development for what started out as the Trade Union Technical Bureau (TUTB), turned into the ETUI Health and Safety Department in 2005, and has now become the Working Conditions, Health and Safety Department.

"We have consistently argued right since the TUTB was founded in 1989 that workplace health and safety was not just a technical thing unrelated to changes in working conditions and the labour market", explains Department Director Laurent Vogel.
Broadening the Department’s remit also reflects the changing, more service-oriented world of work, and workers’ new aspirations, especially for the quality of work life. The new focus should also enable the ETUI to better meet the demands of European unions dealing with emerging workplace psychosocial risks (like stress, harassment, and so on).
"Sticking strictly to ‘health and safety’ issues restricted the scope of what we could do to a limited number of industry federations. Branching out into working conditions should enable us to run projects with a bigger number of federations", says Laurent Vogel.
No sooner said than done, apparently, as a brochure on to firefighting is being readied with the European Federation of Public Service Unions.