Hazards Campaign

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The Hazards Campaign is a UK national network established in 1988 to campaign for improved workplace health, safety and welfare, and a reduction in the incidence of work-related injury, ill-health and death. It brings together Hazards Centres, Occupational Health Projects, trade unions, health and safety groups, specific campaigns and individual health and safety activists. Specific campaign groups include the Construction Safety Campaign, the Centre for Corporate Accountability (CCA), the UK WorkStress Network, Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK), asbestos victims' support groups, and RSI Action.

The campaign works by: sharing information and skills; campaigning on specific issues; acting as a national voice; issuing press releases; holding conferences; establishing national initiatives, including Workers Memorial Day; lobbying MPs, MEPs and statutory bodies like the Health & Safety Commission and the Health & Safety Executive, and organising demonstrations and protests.

The Campaign is a worker-oriented organisation, and promotes trade union organisation in workplaces, increased worker involvement and participation in decision-making, and a radial perspective on the issues. It currently (2006) promotes and supports a number of emerging safety representative networks in different parts of the UK. It meets about four or five times a year; these meetings are open to anyone sharing the aims of the campaign. Its highest profile event is the annual Hazards Conference, the largest regular rank-and-file event in Europe, which attracts around 600 delegates every year.

In the past it was seen by the state as an essentially irrelevant organisation with nothing to contribute, and by many in the trade unions as an ultra-leftist organisation intent on causing trouble.^{[citation needed]} For a number of British trade unions, it was a proscribed organisation.^{[citation needed]} In practice, Campaign organisations supported safety reps and union workplace organisation with information and organisational advice about safety and health problems at work. The Campaign has been a key actor in helping to resolve problems and secure improvements in workplace safety standards.

In recent years with significant changes in the leadership of a number of major British trade unions, and the developing challenges to the Blairite New Labour faction in the Labour Party, the Campaign has earned a growing respect for its work, and formal trade union support has been much more forthcoming. One measure of the influence of the Campaign was the Health & Safety Executive's decision to issue a consultation document on safety representatives functions in 1999, which included questions on key Campaign issues such as the right to stop the job, to issue Provisional Improvement Notices, roving trade-union-appointed safety reps with access rights to all workplaces, and for better protection from victimisation by employers. Despite a hugely positive response to these questions,^{[citation needed]} they were ignored by the policy makers.^{[citation needed]}